Battle Cat

Orko's latest unauthorized lab experiment conjures a small demon, which is the excuse Man-At-Arms needs to finally tell Orko the story he has clearly been waiting to tell: how a frightened palace pet became the war tiger riding into every fight at He-Man's side.

Years earlier, a young Prince Adam found an injured tiger cub while testing one of Duncan's animal-call gadgets. He raised it as a pet, enduring the other palace children's teasing over the cub's new nickname, earned for jumping at its own shadow. A dream visit from the Sorceress tells Adam to be patient with the cub. It will matter more than he expects.

That promise comes due years later, when Adam and Teela, too impatient to wait for Man-At-Arms's translation of an ancient warning, force open a sealed ruin and release a creature the episode names only as the Gedge. He-Man changes to fight it, Cringer follows out of loyalty rather than courage, and a stray bolt from the Power Sword catches him mid-fight. He comes out of it larger, armoured and, for the first time, willing. Guided by the Sorceress, He-Man names his new companion Battle Cat, and together they drive the Gedge back into its prison. Man-At-Arms closes by noting that none of it would have happened if the two boys had simply listened to his warning in the first place.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Battlecat (1984), 16:16 to 18:11, 1 minute 55 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

Mattel finally wrote him a history in 2010, on the Masters of the Universe Classics cardback, and the history is more specific than anything the cartoon offered. "Real Name: Cringer. A member of the Green Tiger Tribe, Cringer was saved from a Parek-Narr attack by a young Prince Adam and afterwards became his devoted companion for life." The rest of the card adds that Cringer helped Adam unite both halves of the Power Sword of He, that the sword's power is what turns him into Battle Cat, and that he is one of only a handful of allies who knows Adam's secret.

Two inventions in that text exist nowhere in the vintage packaging and nowhere in Filmation. The Green Tiger Tribe gives him a people. The Parek-Narr attack gives the friendship a starting point: Adam saved him, and the loyalty is repayment rather than ownership. Neither detail is carried by most secondary sites.

The Classics bio quietly rewrites the mechanics of the transformation. Read literally, it is a single event: the card has Cringer enhanced by the sword's power to become Battle Cat, once, permanently, at the end of Adam's quest. Filmation treats it as a repeated act, triggered every time Adam raises the sword and points it at him, with Cringer reverting afterwards. The card also assumes a two-halves Power Sword origin that has no equivalent in the Filmation series at all. Neither version is the correct one. They are two official accounts written twenty-eight years apart, and a reader who arrives asking how Cringer becomes Battle Cat deserves to be told that the answer depends on which Mattel product you are holding.

Mattel wrote the same beat twice. Battle Lion, the mount of King Grayskull, is given the real name Granger and described on his own Classics card as a giant lygor prince from the Green Tiger Tribe, gifted as a cub to the young Grayskull for saving their home from an attack by renegade Gar pirates. A young royal saves a creature from an attack, and the creature becomes his mount for life, told twice. The same card also calls Granger a lygor while assigning him to the Green Tiger Tribe, which sits oddly next to Cringer being a tiger of that same tribe. Whether the tribe is a species or a polity is not resolved on either card, and we are not going to invent an answer.