FAKER

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE MASTERVERSE (MATTEL)

“Of all the deadly minions at Skeletor’s disposal, Faker’s mastery of deception and destruction makes him among the most dangerous.  The cybernetic doppelgänger of He-Man takes on the appearance of Eternia’s most powerful protector, fooling many heroes, including the Sorceress of Greyskull herself.  By the time the heroes discover Faker’s true nature, it may be too late.”

You gotta have the evil clone, right?  It’s, like, a staple of crazy, action-oriented fiction.  Even more so if there are toys involved.  I mean, it’s an easy repaint.  That’s the whole basis of today’s focus, Faker, who, as the above bio outlines fairly thoroughly, is a robotic duplicate of He-Man.  Faker’s been a fixture of the Masters of the Universe toy lines, though not so much the other media associated.  The cartoons have all featured a duplicate of some sort of He-Man, but it wasn’t until Revelation that one was officially dubbed “Faker”, thereby tying toy and show together fully.  So, Masterverse got to be the very first show accurate Faker figure.  Noice.

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Faker is a deluxe offering for the Masters of the Universe: Masterverse line.  He was the second deluxe offering, and began as a Target exclusive (though he wasn’t officially billed as such), before moving to a wider release.  The figure stands a little over 7 inches tall and he has 31 points of articulation.  His movement is more or less the same as the standard He-Man, though he doesn’t seem to have the same issue with the sticky hips, at least on my copy.  The sculpt shares a lot of its parts with the standard He-Man, as expected, although it’s actually a lot less parts than you might expect, given how Faker’s previous figures haven’t gotten any new parts in the past.  To properly differentiate him from standard He-Man, Faker is based on his look after his deception is revealed by the Sorceress, so he’s got a lot of his robotic parts revealed.  As such, he only actually shares the lower half of his body, plus his hands, bracers, and chest harness with He-Man.  All of the other parts are adjusted to feature the skin pealing back, which is actually pretty impressively handled.  What remains of the skin is consistent with regular He-Man, and the whole look adds a bit of menace to him.  His paint work is again pretty consistent with the standard He-Man, adjusting of course for the parts with the exposed silver.  He’s also got a slightly more metallic finish to the gold parts of his armor, and his eyes have red irises, so he’s got that proper “evil” feel.  Faker’s standard head has a split face, with have robot and half He-Man, but he also gets two extras, which go the opposite directions, so there’s the standard He-Man head (with the adjusted red irises), and a fully-revealed robot head.  He also gets the two sets of hands that He-Man had, as well as a tweaked Power Sword with Faker’s usual orange coloring, and Skeletor’s chest harness, also in orange, so that you can do a bit of a classic Faker throwback.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

Faker’s been sitting on my shelf waiting to be reviewed for a very long stretch of time.  I wound up grabbing him when Target put him on sale back at the end of 2021.  He was cheap enough that I felt it was worth it, but I just kind of kept forgetting to review him, for one reason or another.  He’s honestly a pretty fun figure.  Not a classic Faker, but a fun refresh on the concept.  I’d love to see a more straight update of his classic design as well, but I can definitely dig trying something new, especially when it turns out as well as this.