flying monkey man of the skies



Yes kids, UPS was cool and dropped off my Stratos from Mattycollector.com on Friday. I was unsure about buying Stratos, but I'm glad I did. Dude sold out in three days, which shocked pretty much everyone. I'm sure there was less produced of this figure than say, Skeletor, so that, coupled with the fact that this line is officially the hot thing of the moment, assured that he'd sell out. Nobody thought it would be that fast, but hey, you got to strike when you got the chance.

Stratos uses the Beast Man body, just as he did back in the old days. He has his differences, of course. A new head, new left hand (meaning you won't be getting any accessories into Stratos' hands), and some new feet, which for some reason has some fans on the brink of suicide. Stratos also features his rocketpack on his back and red wings on his arms, completing the look of the weird winged monkey.

I really think he could have used a better-engineered balljointed head to let him look forward a little bit better when he's in a flying pose, but considering this line is in its infancy and is a small-time product for Mattel, I can let that slide. It's not like that was an option on the Stratos toy in the 1980s anyway.

I never owned Stratos as a kid, and never really cared to. Visually, he isn't very interesting to me. Why would I want a goofy looking monkey when I could get a freakin' robot with interchangable arms or a warlord that was packaged with a big purple cat? As it is, Stratos still has his fans, enough to put him in the first wave of heroes in the 2002 line, and one of the first five figures in the new Masters of the Universe Classics line. I really don't have much to say, so I think I'll just regale you with a tale from back in the day, a young boy with a box full of MOTU toys.

I was often left at my paternal grandparent's house on the weekends when I was younger. My folks, still in their twenties at this point, often worked Saturdays. One fine Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1985, I'm sitting on the front steps leading up to the porch at my grandparent's house, a box full of MOTU toys to entertain me. Eventually, some black kids about my age, maybe a little older, ask if they can join in. I have plenty of the toys, so I say sure. Things are going well until one of them accidently drops Battle Armor He-Man on the steps, breaking the torso piece where the right arm connects to the body. About that time, my folks arrive to pick me up, so all the kids leave. I'm packing up my toys when my mom asks what happened to my He-Man. *Bear with me, this could be construed as racism* I say 'I was playing with these kids that were covered in chocolate, and one of them dropped him on the ground.'

I don't think my parents have ever laughed at anything so hard in their lives. Mind you, I'd never really seen or interacted with African-American people at this point, and I was four. Ah, life, eh?

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