The 80s line

198-something. The Captain Chair TV series is on the air and some bright spark (no doubt inspired by the Star Wars toys) thought the little kiddies might like to buy some toys of the Captain. This is what they came up with...

Captain Chair

"Wait a minute," you're saying. "Aren't those He-Man toys?" Well, observant people, they do indeed look very similar to the Masters of the Universe toys everyone with even a slightly working memory can recall from the early 80s. This may require a bit of a...

Flashback.

It's 1981 and the He-Man toyline is launched, and at this stage in the product life cycle sales are not great. They're ok, but not amazing. The invention of the half-hour advert (aka 'cartoon') is still 2 years away, so how are Mattel going to milk this toyline for all it's worth until then?

Mattel came up with an idea which they later used again at the end of the toyline: sell the moulds to another company. Hardened He-Fans will know of the weird toys that came out in Argentina in the late 80s where somecompanywhosenameIcan'trememberoffthetopofmyhead took the He-Man figures, swapped all the arms, legs, and accessories about, manufactured the parts in an odd colour, thought up a new name and put the things out on the market.

What's less well known (probably because it happened in Europe and so no Americans were about to hype it up) is that in 1982 a small German company did a similar thing, which resulted in these here figures.

End Flashback.

Right, back to the figures in question. Above we have both the regular Captain Chair figure (right) and the mail-away version (left) that you got if you were a rich little kid and were able to afford all the toys in the line and send off the tokens (no, I didn't have one as a kid and spent many a night crying myself to sleep over it).

The regular Captain Chair is in pretty good condition considering it spent many hours being thrown down the stairs as Mr. Sabbath beat him to a bloody pulp (everyone always loves the bad guy more). He retains He-Man's springy waist and...that's about it really. Anything else I said would just be writing down here exactly what you can see for yourself in the picture.

Whilst the line was based on the TV series, these were also being made at the same time as the captain was getting his nifty new black costume in the comics. 'Hey, I know a sneaky way to make a bit of extra cash,' some clever toy company executive was saying, and soon there was a black repaint being produced.

Mr. Sabbath

Finally in our brief tour of my collection, we have Mr Sabbath. The condition of this one is not so good - no accesories, some paint-rubbing, and the anti-bridge sticker on his chest has worn away. Still has his cloak though, which is something of a miracle as it's made of paper and I remember as a kid it didn't take much playing with before the bloody thing ripped off.

The likeness to the comic character is ok, but this is a cheap 80s toy so don't expect too much. Hopefully he'll look a lot better when I have a few more characters to stand him with.

And...that's it. Yes, it's quite a pitiful collection really, but I've got to start rebuilding it somewhere.

- Damian

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