{"id":11987,"date":"2011-03-10T16:13:16","date_gmt":"2011-03-10T22:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/?p=11987"},"modified":"2011-03-10T16:13:59","modified_gmt":"2011-03-10T22:13:59","slug":"motuclassics-com-review-preternia-disguise-he-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/?p=11987","title":{"rendered":"MOTUClassics.Com Review:
Preternia Disguise He-Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> While I had a ton on fun with Bane Week, it caused some MOTU reviews to be delayed. Maybe we could do a MOTU theme week – I’m sure Mattel would love to sell 5 new MOTU Classics toys in one month, wouldn’t they? Today, we’ll look at one of the three MOTU items for February, Preternia Disguise He-Man.<\/p>\n

To subscribe, or not to subscribe, that is the question. I have no idea what percentage of the MOTU fanbase has joined Club Eternia. It sounds like it’s a sizable chunk, but the demand present on sale day still seems pretty high and Mattel wisely chooses to keep the subscription exclusives relegated to figures that hardcore collectors would want while still being items that casual fans could pass on without too much regret. In its first year, Club Eternia featured Wun-Dar<\/a>. A simple He-Man repaint to be sure (though given a new, unique characterization), but I loved that figure. He’s still one of my favorites out of the fifty or so figures in the line. For 2011, Mattel chose another version of He-Man, this time his Preternia Disguise. <\/p>\n

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The origins of this look are relatively simple. In the vintage mini-comic The Powers of Grayskull \u2013 The Legend Begins<\/em>, He-Man & the Sorceress travel back in time because they’re bored. It’s this mini-comic that introduces the concept of Preternia, He-Ro, as well as some techno-organic dinosaurs. Unfortunately, He-Man & the Sorceress left the door to the past open and are soon followed by Skeletor. While they’re walking around exploring the wonderful world of Preternia, Skeletor teams up with King Hiss and mayhem ensues. He-Man is allowed to help, but only if he wears a disguise. It\u2019s never quite clear why that is, but you can imagine that if He-Man hadn’t shown up in Preternian history books before the Sorceress left, then she smartly chose to keep it that way. Anyway, He-Man changed clothes. Boom! New figure! <\/p>\n

I don’t want to keep typing Preternia Disguise He-Man over and over and “PD He-Man” just doesn’t have the right ring to it, so, for the review, I’m going to call He-Man what I call the figure: Strangor. I just did a quick Google search for that name to see where it originated and… the only links I see calling him that come back here. I swear I heard it somewhere… <\/p>\n

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Anyway, Strangor here is mostly built from the He-Man buck though his arms feature the matching bracers from Tri-Klops. The new parts are the two pieces that make up his tunic and a new head. The first thing you surely noticed about Strangor is that his belt seems awful tight. I promise you that it looks better in person than it does in the head-on pics, but not a whole lot. The problem really isn’t the belt\/waist, but rather the bulk of having the upper tunic be a separate piece from the torso (underneath is a brown He-Man chest with smooth abs). Since this figure is paid and guaranteed to sell the same number of units as every other subscription figure, I’d like to see a little more tooling.<\/p>\n

I don’t always like the way that the fuller armor pieces sit on the figures. It pushes their arms out and increases the width of the torso more than it should, but it’s armor<\/em> so I get it. This is supposed to be cloth. This figure would be light years better if Mattel could’ve sprung for a new torso (think Alan Scott<\/a>). Despite my wishing they were torso pieces, the tunic is nicely sculpted and do look like simple togs on a bodybuilder. <\/p>\n

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Okay, other than the bulky tunic, I really liked the figure and one of the reasons is the head sculpt. Yes, it’s your standard He-Man expression, but instead of trying to fit a huge hood over the head like the huge tunic over the chest, everything has been sculpted anew. The mask is sculpted on instead of simply being paint and the hood is a separately sculpted piece. It’s pretty cool and, dare I say, 200x Skeletorish. The nice thing about the hood is that it sits far enough forward on the face to cast shadows. That’s usually a problem for hooded characters.<\/p>\n

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There’s not a lot of paint on the figure and what is there is a mix of good and bad. The light airbrushing on the tunic for texturing is nicely done and the paint on the face is really sharp. But the paint on the belt and boot trim didn’t come out as nicely. The boots had a lot of variation on the ones I saw: some had little to no dark areas while others were well covered like the one in the photos for this review. All the belts lacked a certain crispness though and I think the look of the figure unnaturally draws your attention to it, making the slightly sloppy paint seem a little worse than it might be on another figure.<\/p>\n

Articulation is standard though the tunic does block things here and there. The skirt has slits in the sides to give the legs a little more freedom, but don’t expect any deep poses. The arms are prevented from coming down to his sides and the ab crunch loses some mobility inside the tunic piece. Other than these conflicts everything works as expected.<\/p>\n

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Since Strangor didn’t feature a lot of new tooling on the figure itself, he did come loaded with some cool accessories. The most important of which is the Cosmic Key. It’s mostly based on the movie design, but a handle has been added so the figures can hold it (though I did enjoy that the figure is cradling it in the packaging). It probably sounds silly, but I really like the key. I love the metallic blue and bronze keys and I’m always unnaturally entertained by vac-plating. Another handy feature is that the chromed forks are on a separate piece so they can rotate (and possibly so a future Gwildor can include a cosmic key in the off position). Continue to Page 2…<\/a><\/p>\n

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He-Man also included another Power Sword. I’m not going to look a gift-accessory in the mouth as I’m glad Mattel found that budget was leftover after the key & gun and used it, but a different deco here would’ve been cool. Maybe a brown to match the tunic?<\/p>\n

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The last accessory was a pretty cool and unexpected one – a Bionatops blaster. Though we must face the sad truth that this will probably be as close as we ever get to a Classics Bionatops, it’s pretty cool in its own right. It’s faithful to the original although it has that nice 4H update to make it work better as a handheld weapon (the scope isn’t on a long pylon for example). I really appreciated that the butt of his rifle goes perfectly up against the figures shoulder. That doesn’t happen enough in the wide world of action figures. The only thing annoying about the rifle was caused by the packaging itself – it look so awesome slung behind his back in the bubble that I find myself wishing the 4H had included a way for it to attach to the figure.<\/p>\n

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Despite being fairly obscure in the ranks of MOTUdom, he’s got a decent sculpt and great accessories. He also fleshes out the Preternia crowd – while the mini-comic only showed him there for a short time, his bio hints at a longer stay, so he’ll hang out with them on my shelves (and he’ll do so probably without that tunic piece). Overall, Strangor here might not be the most exciting figure, but that’s probably a good thing for the subscription figures, right?<\/p>\n

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For more MOTU reviews, check out our
MOTU Classics Collector’s Guide<\/a>.<\/h2>\n

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<\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I had a ton on fun with Bane Week, it caused some MOTU reviews to be delayed. Maybe we could do a MOTU theme week one day – I’m sure Mattel would love to sell 5 new MOTU Classics toys in one month, wouldn’t they? Today, we’ll look at one of the three MOTU items for February, Preternia Disguise He-Man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":11990,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[7,34,10],"tags":[407,78,20,16,934,933,932],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.itsalltrue.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/pdhTN.jpg?fit=50%2C50","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pObc6-37l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4221,"url":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/?p=4221","url_meta":{"origin":11987,"position":0},"title":"Matty’s Full March-June Schedule! Hordak, Mer-Man, & Faker Reissues","date":"March 2, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"On the MattyCollector News page, Matty has updated their full March through June schedule. Most of it is the same, but we do get our first word of reissues for Hordak, Mer-Man, and Faker. Toy Fans, We do our best to plan when products will be released, but sometimes the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "DCClassics.Com"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":23289,"url":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/?p=23289","url_meta":{"origin":11987,"position":1},"title":"MOTUClassics.Com He-Man Review(Masters of the Universe Day)","date":"April 28, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Back in 1987, LA Mayor Tom Bradley decreed that April 28th as \u201cMasters of the Universe\u201d Day. Today, 26 years later some crazy toy bloggers are teaming up for a day of MOTU reviews. I want to do something special, so I figure it was time to finally reveal why\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "MOTUClassics"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5073,"url":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/?p=5073","url_meta":{"origin":11987,"position":2},"title":"MOTUClassics.Com Wun-Dar Review","date":"April 26, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I don't know how to start this article. For Scareglow or Man-At-Arms, I could regale you with memories of childhood past. For Goddess or He-Ro, I could talk about how it's cool to discover these old characters that didn't make the cut in my youth. For Zodak or King Grayskull,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "MOTUClassics"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10496,"url":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/?p=10496","url_meta":{"origin":11987,"position":3},"title":"MOTUClassics Update: Three New Bios Revealed","date":"December 10, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Today on Facebook, Mattel unloaded three new bios and packaged shots of three upcoming February 2011 Club Eternia figures: Bow, Battle Armor Skeletor, & the subscription figure Preternia Disguise He-Man. The figures always look good in package and the bios are the usual mix of interesting and cringeworthy...","rel":"","context":"In "MOTUClassics"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":30880,"url":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/?p=30880","url_meta":{"origin":11987,"position":4},"title":"MOTUClassics.Com Gwildor Review","date":"March 23, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"","rel":"","context":"In "MOTUClassics"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":25516,"url":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/?p=25516","url_meta":{"origin":11987,"position":5},"title":"Comikazi Armchair Coverage & MOTU Classics Reveals","date":"November 4, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"","rel":"","context":"In "Event Coverage"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11987"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11987"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11996,"href":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11987\/revisions\/11996"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.itsalltrue.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}