Welcome to Consigned, Cool, and Collected, where, as we sort through a new collection, we’ll pick out an item that has a particularly notable “Cool Factor” about it. Today we’re looking at a 2011 American Toy out of The Florida Collection whose roots go back to Italy circa 1987 and whose popularity is owed almost entirely to the internet fan community.
The (Waning) Powers of Grayskull
By 1987, Mattel’s Masters of the Universe toyline was on its last legs: sales were falling, the cartoons were off the air, and the recent movie didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Mattel had planned to create further toys in the line, primarily in a new spin-off entitled “The Powers of Grayskull”, but these efforts were scrapped during the prototype phase. Well, mostly scrapped.
The end of 1987 saw the release of the heroic Tytus & evil Megator, two giants originally planned for inclusion in Powers of Grayskull line, under the main MOTU banner in Italy. As the internet expanded and the He-Fan community grew in the 90s, Americans discovered these oddities and dutifully added them to their checklists. If you actually had either one, you were a pretty serious collector.
Appreciation For the Classics
When Mattel launched the Masters of the Universe Classics line on it’s direct-to-fans Matty Collector webstore in 2008, it quickly began adapting fan-favorite characters from the various iterations of MOTU who had never gotten action figures before. In 2010 & 2011, it made Tytus & Megator widely available in the U.S.A. for the first time since their creation.
That’s the version of Megator we’ve got on eBay, the one expressly for the fans, thanks to the fans! You can take a look at it here.
See you next time for another installment of Consigned, Cool, and Collected!
