by Adam McCombs

Believe it or not, it’s been 14 years since the debut of the Masters of the Universe Classics line. Does that make MOTU Classics a “vintage” line? Maybe not quite, but we’re getting there. There’s a scary thought!

I thought it would be fun to post a scan of an article from ToyFare heralding the coming of the MOTU Classics line. It includes commentary from both Mattel (Scott Neitlich, Jim Murphey) and the mega-talented sculptors of that line, the Four Horsemen (Chris Dahlberg, Eric “Cornboy” Mayse, Jim Preziosi and Eric Treadaway). Of note in this article are the very nice hand-painted prototypes of Skeletor, Beast Man and He-Man. It’s nice that just about everything that they’d hope they’d actually get to in Classics was something that actually got made for the line.

Curiously, in the image below the He-Man figure on the left is not original vintage, but rather the 2000 Commemorative release of the toy (photo itself mirror-flipped). This is evident from the “squished” features on his head sculpt.

One nice thing about the old ToyFare magazine was their sense of humor. There’s a great parody Men’s Warehouse ad below:

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