I was not hugely into He-Man when I was growing up. This is not to say it was completely insignificant to me; I’ve written before about that time my parents got me Snake Mountain for no reason and it was probably one of the five best days of my life. But on the whole He-Man fell a pretty distant third behind Star Wars and G.I.Joe… right up till Hordak showed up.
If I remember correctly, Hordak was the principal bad guy, not for He-Man, but for She-Ra, which — being a spinoff dollie line for little girls — I of course vastly preferred to the boys’ brand, Masters of the Universe. She-Ra was pretty good, even if I could not for the life of me figure out why she needed that Bow guy. Even as a 9-year-old I was pretty sure that She- was way better off getting her -Ra on with any of the other Olympian femmes who cohabitated in her little crystal palace than the stalwart Rio wannabe with the porn-‘stache and complete lack of charisma. (I mean, a She-Ra/Double Trouble lesbian throwdown? Come ON now. Hot.)
But Hordak, boy, I got into his whole operation in a big, big way. Hordak was the head of the Evil Horde, and to this day I am fuzzy on what their general ambition was, other than mayhem and conquest, which is what everybody wants — surely, there is a gentleman’s club out there somewhere, of which Hordak, Megatron, Cobra Commander and Pizzazz are members, and Darth Vader is the chief. But I really liked Hordak and his team of cronies (especially Leech, but especially Grizzlor, but especially Modulok), and I loved every single thing about where they lived.
They lived here:
The Fright Zone! Next to Castle Greyskull or Snake Mountain, both of which had hinges and drawbridges and seemed to be enormous labyrinths of play-osity both outside and in, the Fright Zone seemed pretty shrinky-dink, size-wise. But it had three things which, to this day, I think warmly of. It had the Freaky Tree, which grabbed people. It had the Freaky Cage, in which one could imprison enemies. And it had the weird rubber puppet snake thing, which might have been a leftover idea from the asteroid monster in The Empire Strikes Back, but holy cow, I think I literally wore that puppet to school a bunch of times. I loved it.
I actually owned The Fright Zone. I never, though, got my hands on one of these things, and it became the single most sought-after fetish item of my entire childhood:
THE FUCKING SLIME PIT.
The Slime Pit was baller. A kid down the street from me had one. Nobody was allowed to use it in their own homes because their parents deduced — quite rightly I suspect — that they’d be picking dried slime out of the living room carpet for the rest of their lives. If you wanted to use the Slime Pit you had to take it outside, and pour that insanely snotty 80s slime product — a perfect boogery eggshell colour — over your captured heroes.
What did the slime do? Either in the mythology of He-Man or in my own mind, it a) read and controlled the minds of those onto whom it was poured, b) dissolved armour and weapons, and c) carried high-voltage energy and electricity to the Fright Zone. Who knows? Who cares? The business of the Evil Horde is beyond the ken of mortal beings, and only slightly closer to the understandings of children.