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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Great article! Thank you!
I used to collect and love “ToyFare,” but it started to be too hard to get it in 2006 (I’d moved overseas in 2000), so I had to drop it, and I missed out on the rest of the run, and missed a lot of advance warning on stuff before I started finding dedicated collectors’ news sites in 2010.
I didn’t find out about MOTU Classics until I saw He-Man and Beast Man show up on BBTS and realised they were a continuation from the SDCC King Grayskull, and by that time, the Statue Grayskull variants had all been bought up. Amazing line, though, and I only have a handful of pieces to get to get to an achievably complete run (not counting the Blue Ghost Grayskull and Silver She-Ra, of course).