It seems like every geek franchise has at least one mysterious, badass-looking character who gains a cult following despite having done hardly anything or had any characterization at all (at least at first). Star Wars’s Boba Fett is the classic example, though the franchise also produced Darth Maul, who had even less screen time. In the world of G.I. Joe there was originally Snake Eyes, but now he has more history than you can shake a stick at; fortunately, the likes of Mercenary Wraith and Agent Helix have filled that void. Meanwhile, Marvel Comics has gotten so much mileage out of this sort of character it’s become something of a joke (it began with Wolverine in the 1980s, followed by Cable in the ’90s and then a plethora of characters since).
But when it comes to toy lines, the reason an obscure character becomes so popular is often because they have so little background. Henry Jenkins, a media scholar and a professor at the University of Southern California, has made a living examining the social trends of what we’d call geeks. In his essay “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?”, during a discussion of fan filmmaking, he notes
Fans, for example, note that the Boba Fett action figure, far more than the character’s small role in the trilogy, helped to make this character a favorite among digital filmmakers. The fans, as children, had fleshed out Boba Fett’s intentionally murky character, giving him (or her) a personality, motives, goals, and conflicts, which helped to inspire the plots of a number of the amateur movies.
In Masters of the Universe, the role of the mysterious-yet-badass character is filled by Scareglow. A late addition to MOTU as it lay dying in 1987, few fans ever owned him, having moved on to Transformers or G.I. Joe or some other fad by then. He was produced in smaller quantities than earlier MOTU figures, and so between that and the utter lack of characterization beyond a single minicomic appearance, Scareglow became somewhat legendary among MOTU fan circles.
There seems to be a contingent of fans out there who hold it against such characters that they’re popular, considering them to be cheap fanboy sops undeserving of the attention. To those fans I say: lighten up–and maybe think about using your damned imagination, for a change.
But I digress. In what was arguably a crime against fanity, Scareglow never received an updated figure in the 2002 MOTU line–hell, he never even got a “staction.” And so the Masters of the Universe Classics Scareglow arrives amidst much anticipation. (more…)
