Inspired by He-Man.org’s Roast Gooble Dinner podcast, welcome to PGPoA’s latest MOTUC Bio Discussion!

Tri-Klops
Evil and sees everything
Real Name: Trydor Esooniux Scopeâ„¢

Originally an inter-dimensional bounty hunter and tracker, Scope was recruited by Skeletor during one of the final battles of the Great Unrest to bolster his weakened forces. As good with a blade as he is crafty, Scope took the name Tri-Klops after an accident left him blind and he was forced to wear a tri-optic visor which granted him expanded tracking abilities including Gammavision, the ability to see around objects, Distavision, a form of Far Vision, Night Vision, and the ability to generate optic blasts. Tri-Klops uses his three different eyes to spy for Skeletor!

Portrait art source: Original card back

My favorite Tri-Klops depiction wasn’t in the Filmation cartoon, where he was just another bumbling warrior, and it wasn’t the Millennium franchise, where for some reason he became Skeletor’s gadget guy instead of Trap Jaw. It was his very first media appearance, the minicomic “The Terror of Tri-Klops.”

In “Terror,” Skeletor is yet again seeking a way to defeat He-Man (even at this early stage in the franchise, he laments, “Always it’s the same–I devise a plan to conquer Castle Grayskull, and then the cursed He-Man foils my plot!”). Beast Man asks the boss if he’s heard of Tri-Klops–apparently one of Beast Man’s duties is to serve as Skeletor’s minion talent scout. When Skeletor first finds TK, he’s in the middle of slaughtering some demons.

Skeletor summons Tri-Klops and hires him to defeat He-Man. After easily taking down Battle Cat, Ram Man and Teela, Tri-Klops duels He-Man and nearly bests him before He-Man wins with his patented One Big Punch.â„¢ Upon being defeated, Tri-Klops admits defeat, and even saves He-Man from a cheap shot fired by Skeletor. So here we have Tri-Klops as a badass mercenary with a code of honor–lawful neutral, you might say. He’s a master swordsman and capable of taking on some of the most powerful heroes.

For the most part, the MOTUC bio follows this depiction of Tri-Klops. While it doesn’t incorporate the minicomic story, it does state that he was a bounty hunter and that Skeletor recruited him. Unfortunately, the idea of Tri-Klops being Skeletor’s Q is still canon in the MOTUC universe, as Faker’s bio shows.

The “real name” is drawn from the MOTU Bible, where Tri-Klops was originally an Earth astronaut named “Dr. T.E. Scope” who crashed on “Infinitia” (Skeletor’s home planet in the Bible) and mutated. It’s goofy, but I think it’s less egregious than other real names.

The bio also ditches the idea that Tri-Klops was a decent enough fellow who was duped into being a bad guy by Keldor (which was the plot of the TK Icons of Evil comic). That’s good, because these bios already have too many relatively “good” people who were tricked/brainwashed/merged-with-evil-demons to turn them bad.

All in all, I like this bio.

Next time: Webstor!