Man-E-Faces

Adam tells the story out of order on purpose. By the time Man-At-Arms hears it, the man with three faces is already trading jokes at Orko's party and standing in the Royal Court as an actor. The flashback that follows spends most of the episode answering a question nobody in the room has to ask anymore: who is he, and how did someone who can swap between a human face, a mechanical face and a monster's face end up in the Eternos ballroom at all.

The answer starts with a stranger terrorizing Widget Woods, alone and frightened rather than evil. Skeletor finds him first and hands him to Beast Man, whose power to control animals and monsters works on him too. "I have to do as Beast Man commands," he says mid-fight, and the line carries the episode's real point: a monster acting monstrously is not the same thing as a monster being evil.

He-Man breaks the mind control with an appeal rather than a punch, and the Sorceress gets the clearest statement of the theme. Sometimes the ones who seem the worst are the ones who need the most help. Then comes the scene the episode has been building toward, not the fight before it. He-Man asks him a question that has apparently never once come up in his life. "Who are you?" "No one ever asked me that before." The name he takes is built out of the very trait that used to terrify people.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Mystery of Man-E-Faces (1983), 9:52 to 11:50, 1 minute 58 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

Mattel wrote its own origin for him onto the 2011 Classics cardback. Real name Perkaedo, "perhaps the greatest actor on Eternia," performing before King Randor and Queen Marlena at Prince Adam's eighteenth birthday celebration. Skeletor's potion turns him into a monster loyal only to evil; He-Man and the Sorceress cure him, but the card says the process left him "forever split between not just two, but three personalities," and he now uses those three forms in the service of justice, in what the card calls "his greatest role."

That account and Filmation's put the same two facts in the opposite order. On screen, the villainy comes first, and the acting career is the life he builds after he reforms. On the card, the acting career comes first, and the villainy is a potion's side effect that a cure only partly undid. Both are official. Both are Mattel-licensed. Nobody who has only read one of them is telling you the whole story.