THE COLLECTOR

My parents can tell the beginning of this story better than I can, mostly because I was barely out of diapers when it happened. According to them, I first saw He-Man on television and immediately stopped whatever toddler nonsense I had been doing. I just stared at the screen. They probably appreciated the sudden silence. I was apparently hooked.

The moment that really sealed it, though, happened at the home of some family friends. Their son had what seemed like every Masters of the Universe figure ever made. This wasn’t a handful of toys scattered across the floor. To me, it was Eternia. He had the heroes, the villains, the weapons, the creatures, all of it. I wanted to inspect every last piece. That was it for me.

I was also young enough that She-Ra never felt like a later addition. She was simply part of the world from the beginning. He-Man and She-Ra went together because, obviously, they did. Mattel and Filmation, now DreamWorks, have spent years making that relationship legally complicated. Five-year-old me would not have cared, and forty-something me still finds the whole thing frustrating.

I never really grew out of any of it. When The New Adventures of He-Man sent He-Man into space, I followed him there. When Cartoon Network introduced a new series in 2002, I was watching. The toys from that era were incredible too. The Four Horsemen gave them the kind of detail I could only have imagined when I was little.

Then came Masters of the Universe Classics, which was when things got a little ridiculous in the best possible way. Suddenly, characters who had never received toys were appearing in plastic. The line pulled from vintage concepts, cartoons, comics and nearly every odd corner of the franchise. We even got Sea Hawk. A Sea Hawk action figure probably shouldn’t have felt like a major event in my adult life, but it did.

These days, Origins and Masterverse are keeping the shelves full and my list of things to buy longer than it has any right to be. I’ve stopped pretending that I’m anywhere near finished. Every time I think the collection has reached a reasonable stopping point, Mattel announces something else.

For me, Masters of the Universe has never been a childhood interest that I rediscovered later. It was there when I was tiny, and it stayed. The cartoons changed. The toys changed. I got older. Somehow, hearing “By the Power of Grayskull” still works on me exactly the way it always has.

A Good journey... indeed!