Wednesday 18 December 2013

The many faces of Skeletor

As you may have seen in previous blog entries I went a bit mad and bought a whole load of Skeletors from the 80's Masters of the Universe toy line by Mattel. And one thing I have noticed is how different all the faces are. Some have just subtle differences caused by bad paint application, but some are more obvious.

I've looked around the web for more info on this, and can't find any. There is a small amount of info on the Hard head version of skeletor, but even that is vague.

So here is a selection of photos from the many figures I now have.

First up we have the original skeletor, this guys has a soft rubber head, removable armour and skirt.
Over all of the four I have they all look pretty much the same. The paint is applied with various amounts of accuracy and thickness. His mouth details changes the most with some having nice thin lines added, and others being really thick and blurred. There is also a fair amount of difference in the hue of the paint, this could be due to age, but the second guy from the left is a much brighter yellow than all the other original skeletors I have.


Next up we have Battle Armour skeletor. I have five of him, again most have small paint defects like the original version. And one has what I would class as a major variation. Old blue eyes. The guy on the right seems has and extra blue colour added to the underside of his eyes. This is the only version I have with this extra blue paint.


Now for some Hard head Skeletors. I have two Hard head original Skeletors and one dragon blaster.
The colour on the heads is much more vivid, the green and yellow are really very bright, but do go with the much darker blue plastic used for the body on the original style figures.  But check out the middle Hard head, he is missing the two frown lines.

Dragon blaster skeletor also has much smaller yellow face paint and eyes, making his face look much smaller even though the head is the same size.

And that's it from my current collection. As I find more I will amend this post.