40 years ago, “Masters of the Universe” dominated boys’ lives with a cartoon show and a bevy of toys that featured a jacked-up hero who was much more than he seemed.n the beginning were the letters. The little plastic multicolored ones with the magnets fitted into their backs. I filled beach buckets and grocery bags with them. I hoarded and guarded them like gems.
I’d never seen bodies like He-Man’s in real life, though I had seen them on TV before. Like when the Creature Double Feature would fill entire afternoons with mythologically inspired peplum epics from the 1960s.
There, a cross-mythological force of Star Wars troops and stray G.I. Joes combined and clashed, the front lines advancing behind rows of wheezing Stomper trucks fueled by struggling AA batteries. Day after day, they’d storm and swarm each other’s playsets in a hail of mouthed explosions and little death screams, all in the name of intergalactic justice, the killing of villains and time.
For his prototypical trio of He-Men, Sweet amped up the body of a Big Jim doll by gluing it into a fighting stance inspired by the hulking heroes in Frazetta’s illustrations and heaping on additional clay, thickening his already stacked proportions and expanding his form into a distinctly Herculean one.
“When you were a boy, you were a ‘small man,’” he said. “Kids were not coddled. That had a great bearing on my originating He-Man. Where I grew up in Akron, Ohio, with the rubber factories, there were thousands of guys there who were factory laborers, and they were tough guys. And I saw a lot of tough stuff happen. And I’ll tell you another thing. I’ve always been slender. And when I saw or got into tough situations happening, there were many times I wished I was a He-Man.
With this, a flood of iridescent energy would course through Adam’s body, Cringer would transform into the far more ferocious Battle Cat, and Adam would burst out of his work-from-home outfit into full regalia as He-Man, the Most Powerful Man in the Universe, a.k.a. Adam in drag.asters of the Universe” was an opening salvo in a larger-scale siege on American living rooms during the Christmas of 1983.
Having already stormed a good portion of American households as an action figure, He-Man now took to the TV screen to spread awareness to the remaining masses, including my brothers and me. Around the same time, Hasbro relaunched its long-standing G.I. Joe brand with the more compact 3.75-inch figures my brothers collected, and also released a companion cartoon, “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero” — which remains a favorite of meme-crafters to this day.
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