Wargaming Masters of the Universe - An Introduction

If you were a kid in the 80s, chances are you watched the filmation He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon and played with the musclebound action figures (they are not dolls!). The barbaric looking but honourable hero faced off against the so-evil-his-head-is-a-skull sorceror Skeletor, in a neverending conflict to protect, respectively conquer, the planet Eternia. Both the cartoon and toy range were heavy on the recycling department, with heavy reuse of animation sequences and toy bodyparts, but we lapped it up anyway, because reasons.

By the Power of Grayskull... I have the POWER!

He-Man, whose secret identity was the foppish Prince Adam, drew his power from his enchanted sword and the ancient Castle Grayskull. You might be confused for thinking this is Skeletor's lair (like the artist of the original art below) but this is really the good guys' base of operations, because these were the 80s and stuff like that totally made sense.

The Heroic Warriors trying to reclaim their home from the evil Skeletor...

Skeletor's actual lair was the called Snake Mountain for obvious reasons and had a lovely purple and lava theme going. From here he lead his monstrous minions to victory or, as it always turned out to be, humiliating defeat. We still thought he was badass regardless.

It's a giant snake on top of a mountain, get it?

Now we are adults pushing 40 and while some of us still collect action figures that throw us back to the years of our youth, others have moved on into other hobby's, like 28mm miniatures collections. Of course, it was only a matter of time before the two would get put together. There had been a small range released by Grenadier/Pinnacle Products in the 80's, who were very much stylised after the toys and have been going for a pretty penny whenever they show up on ebay. I'm lucky enough to own the complete 4 sets, including some unreleased variants that were to go into a fifth set, so they will make an appearance here in time. 

The inside flap of a Grenadier MOTU set showing the available miniatures

These have long been OOP though and while some people have done their own conversions to great results, it is only recently that more and more official and unofficial actual MOTU miniatures and scenery items have been popping up. And it's those who got me to get out the paint brushes and dig in.

This blog will document my journey into wargaming MOTU in 28mm scale.