Since I've been revisiting He-Man and the Masters of the Universe recently (see here and here), I've been trying to collect my thoughts on the franchise.
One of my memories as a kid is that near the end of the original franchise, the toys associated with the franchise became more and more diverse, in kind of a weird way. I mean, the toy franchise started out fairly normal--you have a bunch of people who are good, and a bunch of people who are bad. But near the end, you had toys that were animals who could turn into rocks.
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| Image from here: https://toyzinger.com/en/blog/meteorbs/ |
As you can see above, there were 10 of them. 5 good ones, that were on the side of He-Man and friends, and 5 bad ones, that were on the side of Skeletor.
As a kid, I remember seeing these in the toy shop, and thinking to myself, "Wow, it's been a while since I watched the He-Man cartoon. I guess the story has expanded a lot since I last saw it. Now they've added these meteor rock animals into the story. I wonder what kind of stories they are telling about them."
Being naive, I had no idea as a kid that the toyline was driving the story rather than the other way around. I assumed that the writers of the TV show had created these Meteoroids for the purposing of expanding the story, and that the toys just came afterwards. (In fact, by the time these toys came out, the He-Man show had already stopped making new episodes, and was in reruns, but I didn't even realize that. I just assumed that new episodes must still be coming out, even though I personally had stopped watching.)
I never actually saw these Meterorbs portrayed in any of the Masters of the Universe media, but as a kid I trusted that they must be part of the story somehow, and for many years after, in my mind they were emblematic of the endless creativity of this series, and how it kept expanding its story outward in new directions.
As an adult, however, it's easy enough to research this stuff on the Internet, and discover that the Meteorbs never appeared on the He-Man TV show. Two of them apparently appeared in one episode of the She-Ra show. (Even though the packaging material on the toys clearly advertised them as allies of either He-Man or Skeletor.)
And in fact, a little bit of further research shows that they were not originally Masters of the Universe toys at all, but were originally a Japanese toyline of transforming eggs from Bandai called Tamagoras, and Mattel just repackaged them as Masters of the Universe toys, and assured us kids that they fit into the storyline somehow.
In the Marvel comics series the Meteorbs are portrayed as members of the Rock People. The Heroic Meteorbs appear among Stonedar and Rokkon.
...which, yeah, kind of makes sense, given that both are rocks that transform into some sort of creature.
The Rock People were another toyline which were advertised as being part of the He-Man world, but apparently only ever appeared in the She-Ra show, because the He-Man show had already stopped production when these toys came out. As a kid, I had one of the Rock People action figures (which I must have gotten as a gift on Christmas or my birthday). As with the Meteorbs, I had never seen the Rock People in any of the cartoons, so I didn't know how they fit into the storyline exactly, but I assumed that they were in the cartoon somewhere, and I just hadn't seen the episodes.
I also had two of the Meteorbs, Ty-Grrr and Crocobite, which I think I got for stocking stuffers one Christmas morning.
Anyway, the point of all this is to try to convey the fascination that the Masters of the Universe franchise could have on a child. As an adult, of course, I recognize that the Meteorbs were just a cynical and lazy cash grab to milk just a few more dollars out of a dying franchise by repurposing Japanese toys, and then trying to convince kids that they were really He-Man toys.
But as a kid, you looked at all these bizarre He-Man toys in the toyshop, and thought, "Wow, is there no end to all the magical creatures that are contained within the story of He-Man."
See also this Youtube Video:
PS--I was inspired to do this little dive into the history of fringe Masters of the Universe figures because of reminiscing brought on by this video HERE. But I'll wait to post that until I've finished my complete review of Masters of the Universe: Revelation.
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Check out Masters of the Universe #2 (The Coming of the Meteorbs! Falling Stars, Vol. 1) on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3ZCxFDJ
(This is an Amazon Associate's link. If you buy anything through that link, I get a commission.)
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