Evil Orko

I don't know if you've seen the new Masters of the Universe action figures, but they are quite impressive. I saw them down at Kay-Bee and the re-design is pretty inspired. I won't go into He-Man and Skeletor too much, because I found a great article on them at Skyografix with lots of cool pictures. Wait'll you see the new Skeletor.

What I will focus on is Orko. As we all know, Orko was never anything more than comedy relief on the original series. He came in, tried to cast a useful spell, and ended up encasing himself in a bubble or drowning himself or setting himself on fire, everyone would laugh at him for being a moron, and that would be the end of the episode.

The new Orko is very different. It was only when I saw it that I realized how much times how changed. Once, the occult was a joke. Orko was a wizard, but that just meant he carried a wand and pulled rabbits out of his hat. The new Orko is an obvious nod to Harry Potter in that he looks like he's somebody who would be dabbling in dark forces.

I found some poor photos on eBay, but they don't give a really good look. Basically, he looks the same with the red robe and the pointy hat pulled over his eyes, but they stretched him out to a normal size, so he's not the cute little guy he was on the series. He's really thin with green slender hands, making his faceless eyes look that much more ominous - like you might not want to know what he looks like under there. He also comes with a plastic thing that looks like a splash of water if it was made out of purple, grainy crud. You can stand him on the crud with his hand stretched out over a green orb that you can fire out of it. It doesn't make too much sense, but the effect is to make it seem like he's astride a wave of dark slime, commanding this ball of energy(?) to shoot out of it. And the orb is big enough that it looks like it could do some damage. In other words, Orko looks like he could kick butt.

Needless to say, it was disturbing. They almost made Orko look evil. No, I take that back. They made Orko look evil, period. I guess they don't make wacky sidekicks like they used to.