Faker is the blue-skinned duplicate of He-Man. Who made him is the only real question about the character, and Mattel has answered it twice, in opposite directions, on its own packaging. Both answers are official. Neither has been withdrawn.
The joke that turned into a canon problem
Faker began as an economy. The 1983 figure is the He-Man mould in different plastic: blue skin, orange hair, red battle harness, and a chest panel showing exposed circuitry. Mattel got a new character out of a mould it had already paid for, and it worked, because the concept and the manufacturing shortcut are the same thing. He is a copy of He-Man, and he is literally a copy of the He-Man toy.
The vintage card front says “Evil robot of Skeletor”. That is the original position, and for twenty years nothing challenged it. When Mattel brought the character back in 2003 as a ToyFare exclusive in the 200x line, the card carried the slogan “Built by Skeletor, looks like He-Man, fights for Evil!” Two decades apart, two lines, same answer: Skeletor made him.
Then in 2009 Mattel released Faker in Masters of the Universe Classics, and the card said something else entirely.
The two origins, side by side
The vintage 1983 card and the 200x card: Faker is Skeletor’s creation. A robot duplicate of He-Man, made by the Overlord of Evil to fight for evil. Skeletor is the sole author of the character.
The Masters of the Universe Classics card, 2009:
Originally built by Man-At-Arms to cover for He-Man when Prince Adam is needed, Faker was abandoned in the royal junkyard after his first mission and salvaged by the evil warrior Tri-Klops.
Mattel, Masters of the Universe Classics cardback. The card carries no real name for Faker.
Read what that does. Faker is not Skeletor’s robot at all. He is Man-At-Arms’s robot, built by the hero side to solve the hero side’s most awkward logistical problem: Prince Adam and He-Man can never be in the same room, so Duncan built a He-Man that could stand in while Adam was needed elsewhere. Skeletor’s involvement is third-hand. Duncan builds him, Duncan junks him, Tri-Klops finds him in the royal scrapheap, and only then, says the rest of the card, does Skeletor commission the reprogramming.
These are not two tellings of the same story with different emphasis. They disagree on the single fact the character is made of. There is no reading in which both are true.
Why this is the best example in the whole line
Wikis flatten this. They have to: a single article has one infobox, one “created by” field, and one summary paragraph, so somebody picks a version and the other one becomes a footnote or vanishes. That is a structural limitation, not carelessness.
But the contradiction is the interesting part, and here is the detail that makes it delicious.
The Classics card that says Man-At-Arms built him is titled “Evil Robot of Skeletor.” Mattel kept the vintage epithet on the card front and printed the incompatible origin on the card back. The contradiction is not across two decades of packaging. It is on one piece of cardboard, front and back.
Neither version has ever been retracted. Mattel wrote the Classics bios across roughly a decade of releases without maintaining a continuity bible, which is the same reason four different Classics cards give four different accounts of who freed Hordak. Faker is the sharpest instance because the disagreement is total rather than a detail.
The honest position, and ours, is this: both origins are official, they contradict each other, and Mattel has not chosen. Anyone who tells you Faker was built by Skeletor is quoting the vintage and 200x cards. Anyone who tells you he was built by Man-At-Arms is quoting the Classics card. Both are right about what they are quoting and neither is right about Faker.
What the Classics version is actually for
Set the contradiction aside for a moment, because the Classics origin is doing real work.
The Adam and He-Man problem is the oldest hole in Masters of the Universe. If Adam becomes He-Man, then Adam is missing whenever He-Man is present, and everyone at court should have noticed by about the fourth episode. Making Faker a decoy built by Duncan is a fix. It is the kind of fix a competent Man-At-Arms would actually engineer.
And the reprogrammed mission is not just an attack on the palace. The card is specific: the job is to convince the people of Eternia that He-Man had betrayed King Randor and turned to evil. Skeletor’s use for a fake He-Man is not assassination, it is a smear campaign against a symbol. That is a sharper idea than the toy’s premise required.
It also puts Tri-Klops at the centre of the story, and he shows up in the same role on the Trap Jaw card, where he finds Kronis broken and left for dead and rebuilds him into Trap Jaw. Read the Classics cards together and Tri-Klops is the one who assembles Skeletor’s army out of other people’s discarded machinery. See the Tri-Klops page for that thread in full.
The Filmation appearance, which is exactly one
Faker appears once in the Filmation series, in “The Shaping Staff”, the second episode in production order, first aired 29 September 1983. The series premiered on 5 September, so it is second on the production sheet rather than second on air. He is created by Skeletor at Castle Grayskull to lure the Sorceress outside, fights the real He-Man, and falls into the abyss. He never returns.
The episode’s on-screen cast credits put John Erwin on Faker, alongside He-Man, Prince Adam and Beast Man. That is Erwin voicing the copy and the original in the same scene.
One production detail is worth having, because it explains why screen Faker looks nothing like toy Faker. Filmation’s Faker is identical to He-Man rather than blue and orange. According to the script notes, he was planned to carry the toy’s colour scheme and it was changed, which is why Skeletor’s line in the episode is “In this dim light she’ll think you’re He-Man”. The line is a leftover from the version where Faker did not look like He-Man at all.
Note also that Filmation’s Faker is Skeletor’s creation, on screen, in 1983. The show sits with the vintage card and against the Classics card.
| Production | Voice |
|---|---|
| Filmation, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983-1985) | John Erwin One episode, "The Shaping Staff". The on-screen credit reads John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam, Beast Man and Faker |
Who created Faker?
Mattel's official sources disagree, completely. The vintage 1983 card and the 200x card both say Skeletor built him. The Masters of the Universe Classics card says Man-At-Arms built him as a stand-in for He-Man, that he was junked after one mission, and that Tri-Klops salvaged and reprogrammed him for Skeletor afterwards. Both are official Mattel copy. Neither has been withdrawn.
Is Faker a robot or a magical duplicate?
The cards all treat him as a machine. The vintage card calls him a robot, and the Classics card describes him being built, junked, salvaged and reprogrammed. The Filmation episode presents him as something Skeletor conjures at Castle Grayskull, which is closer to sorcery. The toy has a circuitry panel on its chest.
Why is Faker blue?
The 1983 figure is the He-Man mould recast in different colours: blue skin, orange hair, red harness. That is what made him cheap to produce and it is also the character concept. Filmation's version is not blue, and made him identical to He-Man instead.
How many episodes is Faker in?
One. "The Shaping Staff", season one, episode two of the Filmation series. He falls into the abyss at Castle Grayskull and does not come back.
What does the 200x Faker card say?
"Built by Skeletor, looks like He-Man, fights for Evil!" It is a slogan rather than a bio, and it restates the vintage position six years before the Classics card contradicted it.
