ToyFare #134: Return of the Masters (Oct 2008)
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).