Collectors have been arguing about the second Chronicles He-Man since the summer: is this a deliberate new release, or is it a running change that Mattel pushed through the factory and never bothered to announce?
Mattel’s own product photography for that second figure, five shots of it on a plain white sweep, went up on a Walmart listing this week, and after a summer of close-up comparisons and disputed photography, the listing answers the question in its product codes. Item 18738810423 carries the UPC 194735440955 and the Mattel assortment code JTN97. The original, item 17954851467, carries 194735350766 and JKJ26. On Mattel’s own numbering those are separate products, and a running change does not get a new code.
A second code buys Mattel a second price, and it has taken one. Walmart has the new listing at $29.95, for the same 6.5 inch figure in the same tooling. The original, on the same storefront, sits at $26.97.
Put the two sets of photos beside each other and start with the bracers, because everything else on the figure takes a while to see. The first figure wears chrome ones; the second wears brown leather with a silver panel let into the outer side. The sword hilt goes from bright silver to a darker gunmetal. The belt gains a silver plate behind its gold medallion, the kilt carries more stitching and more weathering, and the hair is a cooler, ashier blond than the warm orange of the first run. Everything else is the same tooling, down to the Power Sword and the swap fists lying in the tray beside him. In a blister at arm’s length, the bracers are the easiest of these to catch.
Toy Habits ran the official images first, and its June piece reported that both versions shared one UPC; the running-change reading was built on that number. The listings as they stand do not bear that out. A shared code would have meant the deco in the box was down to which case a shop happened to open, with nobody able to ask for one or the other. Separate codes mean Mattel intends to sell both decos, and a shop that wants the revised figure can order it by number.[1]
That leaves the question of when, and on that point the listing is much less help. Neither Walmart item is orderable at the moment, and the new one is still sitting under the internal working name PROJECT-CR-FIG-11 rather than a finished product title, which would ordinarily suggest a listing built ahead of stock. It is worth saying that the original’s listing does the same thing, under PROJECT-MW-CR-FIG4, so the placeholder is a habit on this line rather than a signal about this figure.
The first one, in the meantime, is what anybody can order today, and at the older price. BigBadToyStore has the Chronicles He-Man in stock at $26.99 with a live add to cart. The figure in that box is JKJ26, the chrome-bracer version our catalogue entry covers, and it has been the hardest of the Chronicles leads to keep on a shelf all year! BBTS carries fourteen Chronicles products, but the new He-Man is not among them yet.
We did the numbering work on this line back in September, when the Wave 4 case contents turned up early and the UPCs showed that Skeletor 2.0 and Man-At-Arms V2 both sat well outside the run of codes the first three waves share. He-Man, as of this week, joins them. The pattern across the line now looks consistent: Mattel is reissuing this cast with upgraded paint, and giving each upgrade its own SKU, the way it did with Evil-Lyn on Mattel Creations.
Which makes the running-change reading wrong. This was never a factory quietly slipping a better paint job into the same box, under the same code, for shops to discover case by case. It is a second wave of the same figures, sold as such.
[1] BBTS also lists a substandard-packaging tier of the original at $25.64, flagged as limited availability. That tier grades the box, not the figure inside it.
Sources
- MOTU Chronicles Version 2 He-Man Official Images Finally Surface, Toy Habits, 17 October 2026
- MOTU Chronicles He-Man Variant Is More Than a Running Change, Toy Habits, 14 June 2026
- Walmart item listings 18738810423 and 17954851467, read 17 October 2026 for price, UPC, assortment code and stock state
- BigBadToyStore product 185850 and a store search of the Chronicles line, read 17 October 2026
- Key art and product photography: Mattel, via the Walmart product listings
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