Moss Man Heroic Spy & Master of Camouflage! Masters of the Universe Origins Walmart Exclusive Deluxe Action Figure Item No.: No. HPG40 Manufacturer: Mattel Includes: 3 yellow armor pieces, alternate hand, mace, club, Poison from the Stars mini-comic Action Feature: Swap heads, hands, smells like pine Retail: $39.97 Availability: July 2023 (but in short supply until later in the year) Other: That's a pricey meat-a-ball
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When fans were fretting over some pretty bad distribution for Masters of the Universe Moss Man in 2023, I shrugged - at $40.00, I wasn't going to buy one. It remained difficult to get for quite some time, with some stores getting several (or a dozen) later in 2023 and into 2024. If you lived in a city with a lot of Walmarts, all of a sudden, a ton would appear and few would sell - or your store wouldn't get any at all. Feast or famine, with a figure a lot of fan reviewers said was one of the very best of the year. It's a great figure, but only for under its suggested retail price at Walmart. $20-$25? It's great.

The figure is effectively a redeco of Beast Man, with a new alternate open-fang head (which I'd love in Beast Man colors), Beast Man's armor, a bonus hand, the LOP head, and a couple of weapons. Being generous, this is a $15-$17 figure with an extra $5 worth of parts, putting it more or less on par with the non-exclusive Deluxe figures like Ram Man or Clamp Champ. While it's true other manufacturers do frequently charge a little bit more for flocking and scented figures, it's usually like a buck or two - so it's not surprising that this figure just sat once distribution caught up with demand.

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While not as sharp as the sculpting of the original toy, it's still good. You can see 1980s-style design work - which is limited in the amount of detail - without the cool skull soles on the Classics release. You get a skull belt buckle, and the familiar armor, plus an alternate masked head. And I have no idea why you get this, as it wasn't a part of a previous Moss Man toy, or the cartoon, and is the kind of thing you saw more of in Transformers toys. The articulation has ball-jointed shoulders (not hindered by the soft armor), swivel wrists, elbows, and knees - it's a lot of joints for a figure that was famously swivel shoulders and nothing else in the 1980s. Also his head looks more and more like a Klingon to me lately.

Flocking sucks all the sculpted detail out of a figure. I haven't de-flocked this one to confirm it, but I assume you've got a hairy Beast Man body under that green flocking. The multi-color mix of hair looks spectacular with some browns mixed in with the green. Mattel didn't cheap out here - and they left the joints flocked. I worry that may result in additional wear over time, but I guess that's a future problem. If he continues to get cleared out, I might buy another one to see if I can remove the flocking so I can play with it. No other humanoid figure in the line is flocked as of yet, so that replication of the original toy's feature was sure to be a huge selling point. Or rather, fans would complain if Mattel didn't flock it, and at $40, they complained about the price. It's hard to win with us.

The default configuration has a flocked, open-mouth Beast Man head just like the original toy. His left hand is open, and can be swapped with an alternate gripping hand. You can also pop off the head and add some yellow Beast Man armor, like you saw in the vintage Weapons Pak set. It's nice to have options, and this release goes out of its way to let you configure him to your liking.

It looks like with the armor, Mattel continues its quest to slowly recreate the original Weapons Pak in the modern era. You'll find some other accessories with Wun-Dar and Castle Grayskull, and I guess if you're really able to squint you can get the blue axe (in clear) with John Cena with the Grayskull Mania ring. But in this set, you get a good remake of Moss Man's brown club, and the mace is similar to the one with the Skeleton Warriors and Pig-Head figures - but brown. There's a lot in the box, which is welcome - especially since you get one figure for the price of two.

I should also point to the packaging and its many Easter eggs. You can see the legendary unmade toy Gigantosaur, as well as rare vintage toys like the Turbodactyl and the recently-updated crowdfund Eternia.

Walmart's flocked Panthor came out at a similarly high price, followed by clearances and now can be had for a lower price on the secondary market. I assume the same will hold true for Moss Man for at least a couple of years. There always seem to be weird issues with modern Moss Man figures, like the mail-away figure from the 200X line with its rules about having to buy three figures on the same receipt to get it, or the ear variant vexing completists of Masters of the Universe Classics. It's less of a problem today, but Moss Man can't catch a break. Thankfully, you can probably catch a Moss Man.

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