Toy Review: Masters of the Universe Classics Karatti from Mattel by Mr. Beau Brown

Hey folks – I don’t normally give Beau’s stuff an intro because he’s a regular contributor now and doesn’t need it, but I wanted to mention that he actually submitted this several weeks ago. I just didn’t post it because I didn’t feel Karatti was Halloweeny enough. Heck, I wasn’t even going to review this sub-standard lump of crap at all. That’s why Beau is doing it. Here’s our conversation on the matter:

Phantom: I think I really hate Karatti. I don’t even want to review him.

Beau: I guess I could.

Phantom: DONE.

Beau: Oh… crap.

So here’s Beau, with a ton more enthusiasm than I could have ever worked up about this suck mutant from outer space.

Greeting Phantomaniacs!

Beau Brown here, back with another Masters of the Universe Classics review of Karatti. Phantom thought Karatti sucked so bad that he couldn't bring himself to review him. I think he sucks and but will review him anyway!

So New Adventures He-man... The attempt to revive the He-man line in 1990. I was a huge He-Man fan but when the New Adventures stuff started coming out I was repulsed by it. I hated the scrawny looking figures and was even more turned off by the cartoon. To me it looked like they said “Hey - kids these days are all into that Japanimation Robotech stuff! Let's make it look like that!” I think Robotech is fucking stupid and I certainly didn't want it anywhere near my He-Man.

Seriously look how unbelievably bad Skeletor looks. He has pupils. PUPILS! He has a skull for a face, he doesn’t have any pupils! But I digress...PUPILS!

What a douche.

Overlord of Evil my ass. Sometimes apparently he would have red eyes; you know, when he was concerned. Ugh, just awful.

Fortunately it wasn't long before Ninja Turtles came out and I moved right along from He-man to become a Turtles fan. Turtles offered me exactly what I loved about He-man, a really wacky visually diverse ensemble cast.

So I had a handful of New Adventures figures and Karatti was not one of them. You can see what I was missing out on here.

So all that aside, the 4Horsemen excel in taking some of the older, less effective character designs and working their magic on them to make them look great for Classics. Karatti doesn’t look bad. They made him more serious instead of droopy sad facey. He has a Predator look to him with the mask and the dreads. The paint app on the dreads is really nice. I really like the deep set black eyes. He has dark matte black around his eyes and then his eyeballs are glossy black which looks pretty great when they catch the light.

Like Optikk, he has the Trap-Jaw legs and also sports Trap-Jaw arms. As far as new pieces go, he has a new head, crotch piece, and armor. So not a ton of new tooling, but overall he looks good with a classic villain color scheme of green and purple with bronze armor. The armor has some nice battle damage blaster marks and claw/sword gouges, although they could have used a little paint. His legs are really boring. We have seen the Trap-Jaw legs more than enough now and they are just the one bronze color with a very small amount of lighter bronze on a few of the knobby bolty bits, but not much. Hooray for the Horde Troopers providing another option for robot/cyborg legs.

From his bio we learn that he is a moron and a coward. Continuing the tradition to pretty lame real character names we learn that Karatti's real name is Stickel-Vat, which sounds like some sort of topical ointment. He comes with two accessories. A machete looking sword and a laser axe. However! His foes truly fear his bone crushing karate chops! I think Jitsu has things pretty well covered in that area so Karatti is just going to be the predator looking bounty hunter space pirate guy as far as I am concerned. I think I lost his laser axe. It might have been eaten by the vacuum cleaner. Which I am not thrilled with but can live with. His machete works well for his space pirate feel.

His right hand is sculpted open enough to not be able to hold his accessories but not open enough to resemble any kind of karate chopping action.

Since I don't have much of an attachment to Karatti I decided he could be the one fig in my collection that Little B could play with. He seems to enjoy picking him up and throwing him. However he chewed some of the paint of his face and that might not be so good so maybe he won't get to play with him too much. Cause you know, China.

Without his armor he kind of looks like one of those modern wrestler guys. I mean all He-man characters kind of look like wrestler guys. It might be the dreads. Specifically one of those little guys that does lots of the aerial jumping off the ropes stuff. I am sure Phantom could name one (Evan Karagias? - Phantom). I can't.

Karatti is okay. Nothing to write home about. He was put into the lineup on the original roadmap to help space out the bigger names and now that we only have 2 years left and the roadmap has been condensed I do not think we will see anyone this obscure or unrequested from NA He-Man. I am sure we will get Flogg and NA Skeletor at least. Hydron looks awesome and I am looking forward to him. I frankly really like Classics NA He-man despite my loathing of the cartoon and vintage line. He totally reads as Flash Gordon Space He-man to me and I dig it. They have announced that at NYCC they will have another fan choice vote this time between Mara and Darius from NA He-man. Both characters were main characters on the show but never had figures released. So we will at least get one of those. Which is good. I guess.

Karatti gets a 2 out of 5. He gets a 1 for being lame and +1 since there isn't anything really wrong with him as a figure.

Good Journey!

-Beau