The Masters of the Universe toyline started off as group of intergalactic barbarians in fur pants, and a year later had spiraled into such insanity that it made 'intergalactic barbarians in fur pants' sound boring. The cartoon was cancelled before the toyline ended, which meant that for a full six months the character creators were aware that their 'jobs' were coming to a close.
All I can assume is that they decided that if they were going to have to explain to their kids why rat meat was on the menu for Christmas dinner, they sure as hell weren't going to make things fun for the little bastards whose parents could still afford toys.
Faker
In all 80’s TV shows there is an episode that features one of the main characters having an evil doppelganger. This plot device was favoured for two main reasons. 1: it allowed us to see how dangerous the hero could be if his morality ever slipped, and 2: the 80's.
The Thundercats episode ‘spitting Image’ had an evil Panthro clone. The Knightrider episode ‘Trust Don’t Rust’ (wow) introduced us to KARR. In the ‘Scooby Doo’ episode ‘To switch a Witch’, a hilariously misjudged plot saw an evil twin trying to have her sister executed for being a practitioner of the black arts.
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The list goes on and on. Hell, BEWITCHED ran for 254 episodes and this was the plot to 255 of them. The only thing more popular then having an evil doppelganger in a TV show in the 80s was snorting cocaine off a prostitute and hating yourself.
Masters Of The Universe executives saw this trope and wanted a big old slice. Unfortunately the imprisoned mental patient that they were forcing to write episodes at the time was trying to encode cries for help into every script, meaning a couple of bumps in a tried and tested format.
The He-man episode ‘The Shaping Staff’ brought us faker, a robotic He-Man clone. Faker is almost identical to He-man except in one very special way – he looks totally fucking different.
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Obviously, there has to be some kind of difference in looks for the viewer to be able to differentiate the hero from the evil version, and historically this was evil facial hair. When Masters of the Universe came along they decided that this might be a touch too subtle for their target audience which was, apparently, congenital retards and instead made Faker an entirely different coloured skin, clothes, eyes and hair.
Not even God knows how this was meant to work.
As mentioned earlier, Masters of the Universe released the toyline before the new additions made it onto TV which meant that the characters were trialed a little. As the feedback for Faker was presumably just a graph with ‘fuck you’ scrawled across it, by the time he hit our screens the character had been altered to make him identical to he-man.
Hahaha, just kidding he had glowing eyes and a totally different voice.
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An average He-man episode started with Skeletor stirring some shit up by exhibiting a power he had never used before and would never use again, with THE SHAPING STAFF being true to form. Skeletor waves the staff about and simply creates Faker out of thin air and distain for continuity. Why he hadn’t tried this before is never really explained. Why he never tries it again becomes obvious the second any other Master of the Universe sees Faker. The only way this 'plan' could have worked was if Faker stayed as far away from the real He-Man as possible, which is why Faker instantly makes a bee-line for the real He-man.
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His ruse is as transparent as a Nigerian email and has all the tactical cunning of going tiger hunting with a bacon rifle. He gets the shit kicked out of him and falls down a hole becoming the only He-man villain to ‘die’.
When the shows producers had to defend the decision to show a character being killed, they argued that as he wasn't technically a living creature, he couldn't technically die. Their argument should really have been that kids would have actually been mentally enriched by seeing such a redundant business plan be destroyed.
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| Even Skeletor had to admit Fakers' death was pretty funny. |
Due to the fact that 'internet fan fiction writer' is almost synonymous with 'adult-diaper wearer', Faker has remained a fan favourite with limitless stories about his secret origins and adventures poxing the web.
The Writers of New Adventures of He-man took this into account, with Faker apparently scheduled to play a big part later in the series. In the episode entitled THE COURAGE OF ADAM, Man At Arms builds a He-man replica robot. When it gets smashed and malfunctions it briefly flickers Faker colours (skip to 5.30) as a hint for the future.
Would Faker have been a robot like his original toy version? Or a magical creation, following his animated incarnation? Perhaps he would been given true He-Man powers and become a worthy adversary? Luckily, we'll never know: the series was cancelled before any of that happened, meaning a new generation of kids was spared exposure to the blue pile of shit.
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