Beast Man

The vintage 1982 card front carries two words: "Savage henchman!" Beast Man was in the very first wave of Masters of the Universe figures, alongside He-Man, Skeletor, Man-At-Arms, Teela, Mer-Man, Stratos and Zodac, and the card gave him nothing beyond the epithet, so the mini-comics and the cartoon had to supply the rest.

The Filmation series filled the gap with a role rather than a history. John Erwin voices him across the 1983 to 1985 run, and the show uses him as the villain who tries first and fails first. He appears in "The Shaping Staff", the second episode in production order and first broadcast on September 29, 1983, impersonating King Randor while Evil-Lyn works the Shaping Staff. In "The Dragon Invasion" he sets an army of dragons on Eternia for Skeletor. In "Return of the Gryphon" he and Trap Jaw steal a mystical orb from the village that guards it.

"Prince Adam No More" is the episode that pins his position down. It opens with Skeletor throwing Beast Man out of Snake Mountain over his repeated failures against He-Man. Across the Filmation run he is the henchman whose function is to be sacked, humiliated and taken back.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Return of the Gryphon (1983), 1:48 to 3:27, 1 minute 39 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

Mattel wrote him a past in 2008, on the Masters of the Universe Classics cardback. It is short, and it changes more than its length suggests: "Real Name: Raqquill Rqazz. Like others of his race, Rqazz has the ability to control beasts and monsters."

Read that sentence again, then read how the card opens. It does not say "Beast Man, whose real name is Raqquill Rqazz". It calls him the Beast Man named Raqquill Rqazz, and the line above confirms what that phrasing means: the animal command is not his personal gift, it is what his people can do. Mattel wrote Beast Man as a species. Every other Evil Warrior on the Classics cards is an individual with a job. Beast Man is a member of a kind, and the card names the place he was thrown out of, the Vine Jungle.

The second reframing is the timing. The card has him joining Keldor, an alchemist it describes as young, not Skeletor. Skeletor did not exist yet. That places Rqazz among the earliest recruits, before the transformation that created the Overlord of Evil, which puts him in the same bracket as Evil-Lyn: someone who signed up with a man and ended up serving a skull. The Classics cards sequence these enlistments deliberately. Trap Jaw was freed from prison by Keldor at the start of the Great Unrest; Tri-Klops was recruited during one of its final battles. Beast Man predates both.

In Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Beast Man is voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson. Kevin Conroy is also in that cast, voicing Mer-Man, and the two credits are frequently swapped in circulation.

Conroy died in 2022, and Revelation was among his last roles.

In the 2002 series Beast Man is voiced by Scott McNeil.