ETERNAL BARBARIAN

WEAPONEERS OF MONKAA

“I have the Powe—er, the, umm, the… Weaponeers of Monkaa?” That’s how it goes, right? That’s the catchphrase of that He-Guy dude, isn’t it? Sounds right.

There’s no denying that Weaponeers of Monkaa pays tribute to several popular toylines of the 80s. One such line is Mattel’s Masters of the Universe. In fact, WoM made its debut at Power Con, a convention devoted to MotU, and the whole line spawned out of Spy Monkey’s weapon sets that were designed to be compatible with Masters of the Universe Classics. This time around, SMC has taken the tribute one step further, creating the Eternal Barbarian, a figure with some striking similarities to a certain Master of the Universe.

THE FIGURE ITSELF

The Eternal Barbarian was initially available exclusively at Power Con 2013. Excess stock was supposed to go up on the Spy Monkey online store a little while after, but he sold out at Power Con. Due to the popularity of the figure, Spy Monkey decided to do another run of the figure to be released alongside the Granite Warriors assortment. The Barbarian is touted as the “Strongest Gearo in the Universe,” so the guy is meant to be one of the heroic Gearo faction, but other than that, I don’t know exactly how he fits into WoM-lore. Like just about every other WoM figure, the Barbarian is about 4 inches tall and sports 19 points of articulation in his default set-up. The Barbarian is constructed from the same selection of parts that we’ve seen many times before in this line. It’s good set of pieces, and the figure has a nice retro toy feel to it. His default head is the Empyreus head, which is a good, generic hero guy head, so it works quite nicely here. Of course, the figure still includes the other four possibly heads, should you want to change things up. WoM figures are defined by their color-schemes, and oh boy, is this one well-defined. SMC was clearly going for a He-Man homage with this guy, and he ends up with a fair bit more paint than the average Weaponeer. The body exhibits mostly clean work, and does a very nice job of applying the He-Man style to the WoM body. In place of the usual heroic gear symbol, he’s been given He-Man’s classic Iron Cross symbol, which really sells the homage. The heads are a little sloppier with the paint application (though certainly nothing too bad), but what’s cool about them is that they each have a completely unique paint scheme, and two of them even throw an additional two MotU characters into the mix, which just adds to the fun! The Barbarian is packed with the usual short blade and sickle, but he also includes an additional weapon pack, with two guns, hilts, short blades, serrated blades, angled blades, and sickles. Quite an impressive assortment.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

Seeing as I’ve never attended a Power Con (being only a moderate MotU fan at best), I missed out on the first run of Eternal Barbarians. So, I was quite happy to find out that SMC was doing a second run. I placed my order for this guy alongside my Granite series order. He’s definitely a fun figure, even to those not a fan of MotU, and he shows some of the versatility of the Weaponeer body.