>>11543941
Towards the end of vintage, after the movie came and went, Mattel was fixated on finding some way to make MOTU financially viable again. Mark Taylor and the other designers all pitched various ideas, and Taylor's suggestion was to transform MOTU into a GI Joe competitor.

Beyond that there's the snake connection, the class of 84' legacy, the overlap in fanbases, and the fact that ARAH is the final frontier for 80's action figure IP.

>But I'm open to any ideas, same as Joe. If they come off well, I'd pick up a few.
>As someone who was a kid in the late 80s/ early 90s, it's hard to express how foreign and off the NA toys were from what we knew as He-Man

Late reply but I dove through the archive just to find a few pics. I cant agree with you enough. It seems like they wanted to split the difference between GI Joe and He-man in both scale and design, but ultimately landed in a no man's land between the two that failed to target either audience. It's a betrayal of MOTU just as it is a poor excuse for a GI Joe competitor. Which is ultimately why the Mutants (and the vehicles/playsets) stand out so much. They're not at all "MOTU" but they're damn fun nonetheless.