Toy Masters Episode 1 : The True Beginning of He-Man (or is it?)

Let me say one other thing about this whole he-man deal. When I came up with this concept, I was just doing it to help Mattel. You know what I mean? And all a hassle that's been caused as a result of it is incredible. Taylor is so goddamn angry with me, he can hardly stand it. And Ted Mayer is completely extremely hostile toward me. And I treated him incredibly well, whether it's outwardly voiced or not, there are a lot of hostility here that people are giving, whether they are outright about it or not. If everybody would have just taken their credit for what they actually did, and worked harmoniously like we did at the very beginning, then this could have turned out to be a good situation for everybody. Yeah, but it is sad if the one opportunity we have to end this thing on the right note by doing the 30th anniversary and having everyone with the fans and having nothing ill be said or happened, that would be the best way to close the story and move on. Yeah, I could be. And I think we might have a possibility here for that. Could be. Who would have thought a five inch piece of plastic with ridiculous muscles and avabangs could cause so much trouble? We certainly didn't when we set out to tell the story. It all started out so innocent. My buddy, fellow geek Roger Lay Junior, gave me a copy of a book by a guy named Roger Sweet and told me to read it. I know a lot of Roger is going on. Don't worry, I'll always refer to them by their full names. And there's no mistaking their voices. Roger Lay Junior is young and Puerto Rican, and Roger Sweet is old and sounds like his voice has been artificially slowed down. Now Roger Sweet was a designer at Mattel in the 70s and 80s. And in the book, Roger Sweet claimed that even though other people were taking credit, that he was the sole person who came up with the character of He-Man. The biggest action figure of my youth. A worldwide phenomenon that earned the company Mattel over a billion dollars and is still a generational pop culture touched on to this day. The book was fascinating and I was surprised that I never heard the story before. So I told my buddy Roger Lay Junior after reading it. Everybody knows where Star Wars came from. Everybody knows who Stan Lee is. But even we didn't know where the biggest selling voice toy in history, Masters of the Universe actually came from. We had Roger Sweet's story, but we knew there had to be more to it than that. And we were amazed that nobody ever tried to get to the bottom of it. So we decided to find out. We didn't know what we were going to do with the interviews. I was an unemployed actor at the time and he was a director in between projects. But at the very least we would document the stories of these people for the first time, have a fun little adventure together, and possibly even get a little closer to understanding how this juggernaut was created. What we got, so put it lightly, was more than we bargained for. It turns out the story behind the toy line itself was more fascinating and filled with more twists and turns than any He-Man story. And with many things like this, the telling of the story became an interesting story in itself. It was, in the words of the man who named He-Man, Roger Sweet, absolute, total, barbarian, fiction. From the Boys Adventure Club, this is Toy Masters. We begin our story around 1976 at the World's Biggest Toy Company in El Segundo, California, named after its founders Harold Mattson and Elliott Handler, taking a syllable from each of their names. This was the monolith that created Barbie. This was Mattel. Here to fill everyone in on the historical context and the environment that led up to the creation of He-Man is Derek Gabel, director of preliminary design at Mattel. Basically, Kenner at the Times has grown now, but I believe it was Kenner at the time. And Mattel were the two big toy companies, and they were very competitive with each other. 50 Adventures for GI Joe. They're up 50 Adventures for your GI Joe with Kung Fu Grap. It's Big Jim's rescue rake, and you can buy Big Jim of the stocking field radio. Big Jim was on patrol when the rock's latch shook, so he tells his men, "I'm going in for a look." It basically dolls for boys, that's where they were. And Mattel had Big Jim. He was pretty, you know, tough looking guy, a tougher looking than GI Joe, who's definitely wimpy. But anyway, we went on quite well with a similar kind of businesses. Then one day I can remember very clearly being invited into a conference room with Ray Wagner, who would have been the president at the time. And there was this thing put before us. It's an epic of heroes and villains and aliens from a thousand worlds. Star Wars, rated BG. And there was a monitor and 30 second clip or whatever, and a Bible, which showed the characters. The president of the company said to us, "When could you have product for us?" "We came to a conclusion that would probably be about March of the following year." This is Paul Cleveland, Mattel marketing executive, one of several people who claim to have created he-man. He's known as Tall Paul. He looks like a seven-foot tall baby in the Tommy Bahamas shirt. And Ray Wagner, who was president of Mattel, to time turned it down. Because we didn't have time to manufacture the Star Wars toys before the movie came out. And Kinner picked up the license. They did something which was ridiculous to be quite honest. It was the most stupid idea you ever heard of. They said, "We'll give the kids coupons for Christmas." "We'll give the Star Wars early bird-centiphiggers. These action figures are not yet available. But the Star Wars early bird-centiphigget packets were in stores." But the movie was so big, the kid waited. And then it was just done lucky, really. To be quite honest, they were lucky. And then it became a phenomenon. "Now, don't children can relive our great space battles. Or collect how wonderful Star Wars companions." Back at Mattel, back at the ranch, everybody's madder than hey. "It's the second guy now who's got the biggest thing ever in the male action figure area. And they had Star Wars and we had nothing." So we started grabbing at stores. "Okay, what else is out there?" And we made the action figures for Clash of the Titans. And we had the stuff on the shelves at retail three weeks before the movie was released. And they were selling great. And then the movie opened and by Monday, you couldn't give the stuff away. It's two years later, Clash of the Titans figures were used to decorate the huge Christmas tree out in front of Mattel because we had so many of them left over we couldn't give them away. I got over that and they said, "Well, we got this new one called Flash Gordon." So Mattel bought another license for Flash Gordon. "Compared with Star Wars, which was hundreds of millions, it was a bust." We're looking at this stuff and I'm saying, "Who's buying these licenses? Who's deciding we'd already passed on Star Wars, right?" So they're buying these licenses and everybody that walks in the door sells Mattel licensing rights for a big movie. And it's millions of dollars up front and millions of dollars in investment to tool up and market. I said, "Why don't we just do it ourselves? We can't do any worse. How much worse could it be?" And that's where we come into the market research that we did through Marty Miller's group. Interesting stories about Marty Miller later. He wouldn't scratch his butt without research. So Marty came to me and he said, "Okay, what am I going to research?" He says, "I need some stuff to research." So I got with Roger and the two of us, the betweness, worked at a whole bunch of categories. Roger Sweet, who you already know. He worked in preliminary design. Included in the list, first of all, was Star Wars, which was space military. And there was also current military. At the last minute, just before I handed him this list, I thought of this one other theme in relation to Frazzetta. I came up with this, what I call monster fantasy theme. I don't know anything about Roger talking about fantasy action or anything like that before we did the research. We came up with the categories on our own with the research department. Roger actually fleshed them out. He sketched these things and he kind of fleshed them out. Roughly, you know, it wasn't all presentation material, but we came up with this stuff for internal use. In the spring of 1980, we got the results and it looked like the barbarian theme was by far the strongest theme. Roger was a weightlifter. He liked lifting weights. I can remember him coming to me and he said, "G.I. Joe, he's such a wimp." You know, he's just this puny little thing. He says, "Why don't we make a character that's bigger than anything ever? It's almost as wide as he is tall." At the age of 13, I was 4 feet 11 and 3/4 and weighed 88 pounds. Some of the girls in my grade school class used to bullying me a little bit. And so I determined at that time I was going to try to get stronger. I got up to 5 feet 1146 pounds. There was a period when I was at Mattel where I went on an intense bodybuilding spree. During this period of time, there was an artist in our N.D. or maybe even packaging whatever guy called Mark Taylor. Great artist and he did a lot of stuff and a lot of his stuff had a bit of a frisetta look to it. look to it. After we had prepared the original work and we had our seven different categories to test. We weren't going to, it wasn't typical that we did the artwork for that. It went to the art department and these guys, Mark Taylor, being one of them. And he was the one that took this and made it, made the drawings, so it would test it. Mark Taylor was terrific illustrating these barbarian, and gnarly-looking characters. So I said, "Okay, well, how are we going to present this?" So he said, "Well, can you get the department that does a sculpting to sculpt something up?" And they didn't have the time to do it. So he said, "Okay, I'll do something. I'll sculpt it." I decided to take a big gym figure at nine and a half inches and just beef him up like crazy with clay. And then get cast made. I felt that I would have a better chance of selling the concept if it were three-dimensional. In two days, I sculpted this muscular guy over the big gym figure. I spent 60 hours in three weeks working on these three prototype figures and it ended up being a two-to-one body proportion. The width of the shoulders was two times in relation to the height of the figure. I looked at all these other figures. GI Joe figures with all kinds of mangled poses and they were standing at attention and there was this mega super heroes and they were standing wimpy with long underwear on that was colored and the star wars figures stood straight no expression on their faces. I said, "Hey, let's give this guy an action pose." So he looks like he's in action ready to attack something. Here's Mark Taylor. We'll be hearing a lot more from him later. Mark Taylor was an artist and character designer at Mattel. He's the one Roger Sweet mentioned in the opening phone call. The one Roger Angley says is so goddamn angry with him. That was me doing a Roger Sweet impression. Picture Old Billy Joel. He's credited with making the original drawings for the figures that became the first wave of masters of the universe figures. He builds a scopy figure with a twist waist and it was way out of proportions. It was very crude. So I went to him with one of these white casts and he looked at it and he said, "It's too amateur as you shouldn't show it." I said, "But would you still do an illustration for it?" And so he agreed that he would and he ended up doing a rough sketch of a very average looking guy, muscularity wise, but it had this chest holder that ended up being the holder that was used on the final he-man and also on the barbarian fantasy he-man of the he-man trio. That was Mark Taylor's contribution to the initial concept of he-man. When the product conference took place, there might have been say 30 people in their upper management. And marketing and just various from various departments. Once my turn came, I set the stand on the product conference table and I set the three figures on the stand. The figures that he made were so tall. He had three of them that he put out on the table. One of them had for his head a tank turret with a cannon. The other one had for his head something that looked like the point of a rocket or a bullet or a cannon shell or something like that. You couldn't tell, but it was a projectile, sometimes. And the third one had a Viking helmet and a fuzzy cape and a sword or a axe or something like that. And he called them it. This is tank head and this is bullet head or rocket head or I remember what the exact name was, but it described what it was. The third guy, he said, "And this is he-man." And the minute he said he-man, I looked at my boss and I said, "He-man." And he looked at me and said, "He-man." And we fell in love. That was it. We knew that was it. I brainstormed a two-page list of names which included Megatun Man, Mighty Man, Big Man, and He-man. And when I got that name, a giant bell went off in my head. So we said, "Okay, get rid of tank head and bullet head or rocket head or wherever he is." And let's run with He-man. Best thing Roger did was name that clay character, He-man. It just fit. This is Joe Morrison, Senior Vice President of Boys, Toys Design, and Executive Vice President of Marketing at Mattel. He's got George Clooney's Caesar haircut from the early 90s, and Old Harrison Ford's face, an attitude with a slightly higher voice. I liked the name when I was a kid. My godfather used to call me He-man. I said, "This is a good name. This is gonna work." And I can clearly remember Ray Wagner sitting there. He didn't really have any reaction. He looked at it and he just basically, you know, he was confused. We'd shown this so much stuff and he had no idea. And believe you me, nobody else did that. Anybody who thinks that they knew that this was gonna be the biggest thing in the history of male action figures or whatever, they didn't know that. Everybody was extremely non-committal. And we showed all the concepts. And at the toward the end, Ray Wagner, he said, all of them should be market-tested. Buddy pointed to the He-man trio and he said, "Those have the power." And he probably wasn't even as expressive as I just said it. Ultimately, in something like this, it is, you know, how you price it, how you decide the size, how you advertise it, and how you package it up and turn it into a product. Joe Morrison called a meeting to determine what the height would be. You had a brand out there in Star Wars that was phenomenally successful. They were small figures. When I saw the original figures, I don't remember what size they were. But they weren't the final size because I sat down with sales, management, and the marketing department made that decision. Okay, and we made it based on what we could get for what price. So pricing becomes very important. I also wondered he meant to be five inches tall. I wondered if it would be an inch taller than the Star Wars figures. The reason he's standing like he is right now, it was a compromise. He's about five and a half inches tall bent over. So if he stood up straight, he would be six inches tall. They wanted a figure that they could sell retail under $5. Whatever those final prices were, the prices dictated the final height of the figure somewhat. I personally supervised the sculpting of He-Man. Tony Grower was a sculptor. I took a bodybuilding book to him that showed Schwartz and Nigger and Franco Colombo who were outstanding bodybuilders at the time. My directions to Tony and this is an exact quote, make Schwartz and Nigger look like a wimp. So I wanted to make Schwartz and Nigger look like a punt. I kept telling Tony more muscles. More muscle, bigger muscles. We had to create a line that had good figures, bad figures. I needed somebody to help design these characters and I wasn't getting it from the group that Roger Sweet belonged to. These guys were preliminary designers. They come up with the initial idea, but they weren't the ones that would finish it. And the way it worked was the preliminary designers were the guys that supposedly came up with the little tricks and the way things were, the direction of Tony would take. Then it would be turned over to us. That's Ted Mayer. He's Mark Taylor's best friend, fiercest advocate and product development designer. Think engineer. He's a sweet, soft spoken man and R2D2 to Mark Taylor's C3PO. So at that stage, Derek Gabel told me to get off working on the line and hand it over. I seen Mark Taylor's work and work with him on some other projects and he was a good artist. Mark Taylor pretty much came up with the specific styles of the figures, except for he man, but bear in mind that all of those figures had the same general physique as he man. So we got the good guy, the one number one good guy, it's he man. Now we have seven more to fill. And what the hell are we going to do? So I'm thinking, well, Earth, land, sea, sky, air, sea land. The guy from the sea will call him sea man. But if you say that three times really fast, it's not working. And so sea man became merman, which works a lot better. Skeletor, the character was there, but he was called demon for demon. Skeletor is a lot better. I know that you measure a hero only by the villain. Well Skeletor, in my mind, I took it way back from Mark Twain's skull rock and I said, what is more terrifying than death? And Skeletor represented the epitome of death and evil. And an action figure toy line is one of the most expensive toy lines to build the tools for. And Mattel was a doll company and it's relatively cheap to build a tooling to build a doll. So I knew that the tooling cost is going to be prohibitive. If we're going to sell the executive committee on doing this, he manly. Paul Cleveland wanted to make the figures parts as efficient as possible. There were, I believe, two sets of legs, a regular set of legs and a more monster set of legs, two sets of arms, a regular set of arms, and a monster set of arms. Each individual character could have separate attachable armor and also the weapons and accessories. - I had familiarity with Big Jim because I was a Big Jim engineer and it was strictly an international toy by then. I had been abandoned by the US market. (upbeat music) - I knew that Big Jim had a bunch of accessories and one of the accessories was a tiger. So I got out the tiger. He man's scale, the tiger was scaled to a nine and a half inch character and not a five and a half inch character. So it was almost twice as big as it should be. I went to the sculpting people and the art people and I said, "I want to use this tiger from Big Jim." And I got massacred. How can you do that? It doesn't look real. It's out of scale. I said, "I don't give a damn. This is a fantasy action line. If you don't think it looks real, paint it green and put orange stripes on it." So they thought they'd be funny. And so they painted one green and put orange stripes on it and I said, "Cool." And everybody else did too. Tom Gullinsky, who was a president, said, "Paul, no green doesn't sell or never sell." And presented him with a 1 million battle cat. And he, he admitted he was wrong. And they stand next to him and it's almost shoulder high to him and they said, "Okay, so it's fantasy, but it's as big as a horse compared to him." And I said, "Okay, then put a damn saddle on it." True. Joe Morris and senior vice president of Boyd's Toys Design suggested that we make a play set that was a book type play set. So it would hinge on the side and then close like a book so that you could store a lot of masters, toys inside. And even though Derek Gabel had told me to get off the project when I went to him requesting that we do this prototype, he went along with it. I got together with Mark Taylor and we developed this castle as partners. I started working on Castle Grayskull because when I asked the model shop to do the 3D, they would work with engineering and they would come back with this real neat fortress like things. But they were all neat. The walls were all vertical. Everything was nice and I said, "No, it's got to be organic. It's got to look like parts of it are coming to life. It's got to look like it's falling down." So I sculpted it myself. My secretary, I remember her thumb prints or even in the little shingles on the top. But this castle, Grayskull, appearance had come from the first male action figure research study based on a concept that I had originated and described in an idea disclosure. This was a terrific set. It sold three and a half million units. That's a lot of sales. I wanted the packages to look like Frank Frazzetta had done them because he had this mystical kind of thing. I went to have this sword and sorcery kind of feel to it. I found this guy, his name was Rudy O'Brerro and he would do oil paintings. Oil paintings are very slow and tedious to do and he would not come out, but they had this feeling to it that was different than just doing him in gouache or something else. Rudy O'Brerro was one of several artists who ended up doing packaging art of masters of the universe, including advertisements and posters. The idea was to create an environment for the toy so that didn't exist on this planet. They didn't look like all the other toy packages. When they went on the shelf, wow, they look good. I took my family to a Toys or a Us and I just stood around looking at him. "Hey, I did all this and I said, "Hey, this is your dad's one man show." Now I did not name masters of the universe. I would have never called it that. They named it because they didn't want me to have that much ownership. They made that very plain. They felt I was way too into it already. In fact, one time Paul Cleveland told me, "What is it about you, product guys, that makes you think you're so important?" And I laughed. I laughed right at him and I said, "Because we are. "Because without us, you wouldn't have had it." I made this stuff up. I confronted him. I said, "You didn't do anything on he-man in the beginning." Roger Sweet didn't invent all the first eight characters. He invented the name he-man and a big clay thing. As far as Mark Taylor is concerned, it's kind of a, you know, I don't want to say cranky but opinionated and had his own ideas. The time when the masters Paul Cleveland was a project engineer and his charge was to take our control drawings and convert them into engineering type drawings that could be made into tooling and sent to China. It is totally bizarre because I don't remember him having that much to do with it at all. The four people that if you subtract them, masters of the universe would have never happened. Ted Mayor, absolutely. I think Ray Wagner, absolutely. Tony Guerrero, the phenomenal sculptor, and myself. That's interesting. Seems like someone is missing from this list, no? Paul Cleveland claims that he created all of the original masters of the universe characters. Joe Morrison says the character only worked because of the size he came up with in the advertising campaign he helmed and Mark Taylor was apparently dreaming of and drawing he-man since he was a child. But what about Roger Sweet? It was starting to seem like other people had a slightly different idea about who created he-man and how it all came about. But that is for next time. Next time on Toy Masters. Well Roger was notorious for he would go around to everybody's cubicle and because he was a pre-lin guy and he would see what he could pick up from them. We all knew about it. It was common knowledge. I never ran around anybody's office stealing ideas. And I didn't have a reputation for doing it either. Thanks for listening to episode one of Toy Masters, a Boys Adventure Club podcast. Please be sure to like, subscribe, share, review, all that stuff. More episodes with the rest of the story are coming soon. Toy Masters was produced and edited by me, Cory Landis and Roger Lay Jr. with help from Robert Bernat. Until next time, good journey.