Clamp Champ

Clamp Champ was designed to stand beside a king. Mattel's 1987 style guide calls him the "Heroic soldier with the iron grip" and says he "is responsible for guarding King Randor and the Royal Palace of Eternia." David Wolfram designed the figure late in the line, building him from He-Man's legs, arms and chest with Fisto's armor stretched to fit and a new head, and painting him more carefully than the early figures, with two-tone boots and bracers. There is no action feature in the body at all; it is all in the weapon, the power pincer, a "trigger action claw weapon that traps and holds warriors."^[1]

He reached shops after Filmation's He-Man had ended, so his classic adventures were told in print. In the mini-comic "The Search for Keldor" he is a tireless defender of King Randor who takes down Ninjor by strength alone, and whose super senses keep anyone from catching him by surprise; the box art and his commercial set him against Ninjor too.^[2] Earl Norem painted him for the Masters of the Universe Magazine, he turned up in the newspaper strip and in Star Comics as an older Clamp Champ from another timeline, and he was part of Mattel's 1987 Power Tour stage show.

His first cartoon was Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Kevin Smith's 2021 series for Netflix, which this site treats as non-canon. He is there in the first episode, "The Power of Grayskull," charging into the fight alongside Teela and Fisto, but his scene comes in "Cleaved in Twain," by Eric Carrasco and Kevin Smith, first aired November 23, 2021.^[3] King Randor has ordered Eternos evacuated, and Clamp Champ and Fisto have stayed behind to hold the empty palace. When Adam, Teela and Andra walk in, the guards take them for looters ("Your king and queen are gone not ten minutes and you treacherous thieves try to loot the palace!") until they recognize a prince they thought was dead.

Adam calls him by name, "Raenius, where is everybody? Where's Mom and Dad?", and the answer is the one a royal guard would give: "I just sent them off, in the talon-fighter." The plan is to meet at Point Dread once the city is empty. Then Skeletor's corrosive mist rolls over Eternos and turns the people it catches into his Army of the Dead, and Clamp Champ and Fisto are among them. Teela shouts "Raenius, it's me!" at the creature that was her friend, and she and her companions have to fight them both. Over the bodies, Teela says it plainly: "Their souls were honest and true." Method Man voices him.^[4]

Teela is sure that Fisto and Clamp Champ are already in Preternia, the afterlife where Eternia's heroes go, until Skeletor tells Adam, "I just damned them both to Subternia instead!" Masters of the Universe: Revolution (2024) opens with Prince Adam and Orko in Subternia, asking Scare Glow to release "the souls of our friends, Clamp Champ and Fisto," because "Raenious and Malcolm died as heroes."^[5] Scare Glow refuses, and the episode becomes a fight; the Scare Glow entry tells the rest.

Clamp Champ has no part in the 2002 series, the 1987 film or the cast announced for the 2026 film.