Western Publishing produced the official MOTU coloring books under the Golden Press imprint (for the giant 80-page editions) and the Whitman imprint (for the standard 32-page editions). The first wave shipped in 1984; the 1985 wave is when the line peaked in volume and variety. Distribution went through every supermarket children’s-book aisle, drug store, dime store, and discount retailer in the United States and Canada.
Each coloring book had a painted cover and a printed interior of black line-art pages designed for crayon or pencil colouring. The cover paintings were commissioned from the same in-house Western Publishing pool that produced the Golden Look-Look books and the Whitman jigsaw puzzles. The interior line art was a mix of swiped Filmation cels (traced and simplified for the colouring format), original simplified character illustrations, and licensed art from the Mattel design team.
The 1985 coloring book titles include He-Man and the Power Sword, The Search for Eternia’s Gold, Battle for Castle Grayskull, Adventures of He-Man and Battle Cat, Skeletor’s Big Plan, Teela and the Power, and the Giant He-Man Coloring Book (an 80-page Golden Press version). Each Whitman edition shipped at $0.79 to $0.99 retail; the Golden Giant ran $2.49.
The interior format on the Whitman 32-page books was standard for the period: 16 line-art pages, 8 dot-to-dot or maze puzzle pages, and a 2-page back-cover spread for displaying the completed work. The Golden Giant 80-page format expanded the line-art selection but retained the same puzzle filler.
Condition issues are predictable for coloring books. Books that were actually used are coloured and worth almost nothing; collector value is concentrated in uncoloured copies. Uncoloured NM copies with no creasing and no scribbling run $15 to $30 each on eBay. Sealed copies, occasionally surfacing from old retailer dead stock, run $50 to $100. The Golden Giant 80-page is the trophy and runs $40 to $80 uncoloured.
The line continued through 1987 with new titles each year. By 1988 the licence was wound down. Western Publishing’s MOTU coloring book line is one of the most prolific licensed-property colouring efforts of the 1980s and remains a budget entry point for vintage MOTU collectors.
Catalogue source: heman.fandom.com, Western Publishing archival catalogues (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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