Moving quickly on to the topic at hand: Masters of the Universe. After years of apparently not giving a crap about their Big Brand of the 80s, going so far as to - essentially - hand off the entire universe to Super7, this year Mattel have MOTU merch pouring out of their factories and two cartoons heading to Netflix.
But no film. Never a film. The film is cursed.
This week, a couple of images were released regarding their new toons/action figure lines this year. We'll take a look at those in a second. First, let's quickly go over the state of MOTU on toyshelves at the moment...
There are currently three lines out at the moment. There's the Mega Construx line (the building blocks line), the Minis (the - mostly - blind-bag line of small figures), and Origins (the 5.5 inch line of updated 80s figures).
As far as I can tell, all three of these lines are doing well. Origins, in particular, is having a - to use a technical term - shitload of product released in a very short time. So much product, in fact, that you wonder if soon they're going to... But that's getting ahead of myself.
On to the images...
There's been a lot of confusion about the new Netflix cartoons, so I'll clarify: two cartoons are arriving on Netflix. One is the fan-targeted Kevin Smith continuation of the Filmation cartoon, and the other is the one in the image above, which is targeted at kids.
My quick scan of the internet reveals that the design of this show hasn't gone down particularly well; however, I quite like it. I'm not a fan of Battlecat's front leg weapons as they seem rather out of place design-wise, but other than that... It looks to draw upon the early 2000s designs, which isn't a bad thing; I think the designs will appeal to kids and - most importantly - it looks very 'toyetic'. I'm quite excited by how the inevitable toys turn out as they look like they'll be a lot of fun to mess around with.
Now onto the Masterverse toyline, which is based on the Kevin Smith 'Revelations' series. This one I'm not so sure about. The cartoon itself, I'm hoping will be great, but these collector-targeted figures just don't appeal to me. Apart from He-Man's awful head (though, in my opinion, He-Man's head has looked terrible on every He-Man toy other than the original 80s figure), they all look fine. But that's it: fine. Nothing really exciting here, nothing to make me immediately throw out my Classics figures and replace them with these.
I know many people were hoping the Masterverse line would be a continuation of the Classics line that ran as an online only collector's line for a decade, that started with Mattel and then moved to Super7. Clearly that isn't the case, and since Super7 are still releasing toys in that style for other brands (ThunderCats etc) I wonder if they somehow own the rights to the style. Or maybe simply wanted figures more closely resembling what will be in the cartoon.
I wonder what will happen to Masterverse once Revelation wraps up. I'm not sure if this has officially been announced, but I can only see this cartoon being a single season (Kevin Smith isn't going to stick with it forever!), meaning character selection is going to be limited. Will Mattel start releasing other characters in this anime-like style?
The question I'm left with is this: what happens to Origins? Come the Autumn - as it stands - they will be 3 action figure toylines on shop shelves: Origins, Masterverse and the children's line (as well as Mega Construx and Minis). That seems like far too many and casual customers are going to be very confused (people are already confused about having 2 cartoons!).
My prediction: Origins is, and always has been, a 'filler' line. It was designed to get the MOTU name back out there and reserve a place on shop shelves before the new lines launched. Mattel have been pumping out Origins toys like crazy over the past few months and at that rate it won't be long before they run out of characters to update.
Whatever happens, we're back to a Golden Age of Masters of the Universe. Quite why Mattel suddenly has interest in the brand again, I have no idea (the loss of DC, maybe?), but they're throwing everything they have at making it a success and I wish them the best of luck.
...whether I buy any of it is a different matter.
