A toy line can stop because it has run out of characters to make, or because it has run out of room on the schedule. On 12 October, Mattel announced the first of those.
On 12 October, Mattel put a plain graphic on the Masters of the Universe Instagram account and wrote that “the Vintage Line is complete”, adding that “One legendary line has reached its final chapter, celebrating the heroes and villains that built the world of Eternia.” Half an hour later the same account posted a six-card checklist, each card a grid of figures with a tick box and a Mattel item number beside every one, under the line “A completed catalog never looked so good.” The cards run from He-Man, Man-At-Arms, Stratos and Teela on the first through to Scare Glow and Battle Cat on the last, and they are a handsome thing to look at!
What the checklist describes, though, is the set of figures Mattel chose to make, and the original toy line was bigger than that. Read the cards against a vintage want list. Blade, Saurod and Gwildor, the characters the 1987 film put into the line, are absent. So are Rotar and Twistoid, the spinning pair that closed the line out in 1988, and so are the Meteorbs, which never made the jump to Origins. The two Giants, Tytus and Megator, sold in Europe, are absent as well [1].
Mattel is on both sides of this one. Five days before the checklist went up, the company published nine photographs of Deluxe Laser Light Skeletor on its own store, and the eighth of them is the back of the package. Standing behind Skeletor in that illustration, in studded black armour with a sword raised, is Blade. Raising a pistol on the other side, armoured and reptilian, is Saurod. Neither has been announced; both have now been drawn on packaging that shipped in the same week the roster was declared finished. Origins has used that card art to trail its next figures for two years; Eldor turned up on the Snake Lair box and Laser Light Skeletor himself on Camo Khan’s card back, both of them well ahead of release.
The post says the vintage line is complete. It does not say Masters of the Universe Origins is ending and it does not mention next year, but it closes by promising that “the adventure is never truly over”, and no figure and no date comes with the promise. Toy Habits read the announcement as a claim about the Origins line as a whole and pushed back on it, citing a reader survey of 824 responses in which 92.2 per cent wanted Tytus and Megator; Toy News International read it the same way and went to retailer listings instead, reading a thinner 2027 off them as Mattel’s new DC and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles licences come up. Both of those are reasonable inferences and neither is something Mattel has said.
What you can buy this week
The two figures at the top of that last card are the ones to look at, because they are the newest and they are both orderable today.
Laser Power He-Man is on pre-order at BigBadToyStore at $27.99 with the add to cart control live, read this morning [2]. Mattel Creations has him in stock at $33.00. His opposite number, Deluxe Laser Light Skeletor, is a Creations exclusive and the store is not carrying him anywhere else; we covered the on-sale dates when they landed, and today is the day the window opens past Club Grayskull members, at 9:00am Pacific. The Creations listing reads orderable at $33.00 as this goes up.
If you are filling in behind those two, our Origins shelf has the rest of what we have catalogued, and the Laser Power He-Man entry carries the gallery and the specifications. For the characters themselves, start with He-Man and Skeletor.
The checklist covers six years of releases and every figure on it exists. But it is not the same document as the vintage line, and Blade and Saurod are on the back of a box that shipped the same week.
[1] Absence checked against the six cards themselves rather than against an outlet’s summary of them, at full resolution. Two of the cards bleed at their edges, so a figure can sit across the join; none of the names above appears on any card in whole or in part.
[2] The $30.99 row on the same BigBadToyStore listing is the Mint Pro packaging tier of the same figure rather than a different item.
Sources
- Masters of the Universe on Instagram, vintage line announcement, October 12, 2026.
- Masters of the Universe on Instagram, six-card completed checklist, October 12, 2026.
- Toy Habits, Mattel Claims MOTU Origins Line Is Complete But Falls Short, October 12, 2026.
- Toy News International, Mattel’s Masters Of The Universe Vintage Line Coming To An End?!?, October 13, 2026.
- Mattel Creations, Deluxe Laser Power He-Man and Deluxe Laser Light Skeletor, read October 13, 2026.
Key art: Mattel promotional artwork from the Masters of the Universe Instagram account.
Join the discussion