Man-E-Faces

Man-E-Faces is an Eternian actor whose head rotates between three faces: human, robot and monster. Mattel's own name for him is Perkaedo, and its cardback makes the three personalities the permanent aftermath of a potion Skeletor gave him.

The gimmick and the tragedy

The 1983 Mattel figure is a piece of engineering first and a character second. The helmeted head housed a rotating drum with three painted faces, and a dial on top let a child click between a human face, a robot face and a green monster face. Three characters in one figure, from Mattel’s second vintage series. The card front subtitle was “Heroic human…robot…monster!”

What Mattel wrote onto the Classics cardback in 2011 turned that gimmick into something considerably darker.

Real Name: Perkaedo. Perhaps the greatest actor on Eternia, Perkaedo, the Master of Disguise, performed before King Randor and Queen Marlena at Prince Adam’s 18th birthday celebration.

That is the opening of Mattel’s Masters of the Universe Classics cardback. The rest of the card tells you what happened at that performance. Perkaedo drank a magic potion created by Skeletor, which turned him into a terrible monster of great strength, loyal only to evil. He-Man and the Sorceress cured 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”.

Three things there are worth sitting with.

He was an actor, not a warrior. Mattel’s real name for him is Perkaedo, and his profession before any of this was performance. That is why the card can end by calling heroism “his greatest role”, which is a joke and a diagnosis at the same time.

He was poisoned, not cursed. The card is specific: Skeletor made the potion, Perkaedo drank it at a public event, and it turned him into a monster loyal only to evil. He did not choose any of this and he was not born to it.

And the cure did not work properly. He-Man and the Sorceress reversed the transformation, but the process left him permanently divided across three personalities. The word Mattel uses is “forever”. The three faces are damage from the treatment, not from the poison. The toy’s selling point is, in the official telling, a chronic condition.

One transcription note. No Man-E-Faces card back has been photographed, and our two transcriptions differ only in small points of punctuation, including a dash and a curly apostrophe. The substance is not in doubt; the exact typography is, so we quote sparingly and flag it rather than presenting an edited sentence as Mattel’s exact words.

The date that ties him to everything else

“Prince Adam’s 18th birthday celebration” is not a throwaway. That event is a fixed point in the Classics-era timeline, referenced elsewhere in the He-Man and Adam material, which means Mattel placed Perkaedo’s ruin at a specific, dateable moment in the royal family’s history rather than in vague backstory. Skeletor’s attack was on a state occasion, in front of Randor and Marlena, and its collateral damage was a civilian entertainer.

It also links him to another figure in the line. The Roboto Classics cardback says Roboto was originally built by Man-At-Arms as a chess opponent for Man-E-Faces. Two of the Heroic Warriors are connected by a board game, and Man-E-Faces is on the receiving end of both stories: Skeletor gave him a potion, Duncan built him a friend.

Where Filmation and Mattel disagree

Filmation got there first, and told it differently.

Our own episode data for “The Mystery of Man-E-Faces”, the season one story in which Adam recounts his history, describes him going from being a villain who terrorised innocent people to a noble hero and actor of the Royal Court. Read that order carefully. In Filmation, the villainy comes first and the acting career comes after, as the life he built once he was reformed. In Mattel’s Classics account, the acting career comes first and the villainy is an interruption that a potion caused and a cure half-undid.

Both are official. Both are Mattel-licensed. They put the same two facts in the opposite order, and the character reads completely differently depending on which you take: a reformed criminal who found a vocation, or a performer who was attacked and never fully recovered.

We are not picking one. Anyone who tells you Man-E-Faces was always an actor is quoting the 2011 card and ignoring the 1983 cartoon, and anyone who tells you he started as a villain is doing the reverse.

What the disguise is actually for

Filmation used him twice, and the second use is the more interesting one. In “The Shadow of Skeletor”, he goes undercover by disguising himself as Beast Man to work inside Skeletor’s operation.

That is worth noting because it is the only screen use of the thing the Classics card actually calls him: the Master of Disguise. Not a man who punches with three different heads, but an actor deploying a professional skill against the person who ruined him. The toy sells transformation as a weapon. The one episode that uses it properly sells it as craft.

Lou Scheimer voiced him in the Filmation run, credited under the pseudonym Erik Gunden, across 2 of the 130 episodes. That is a small footprint for a character this well remembered, and it is a reminder of how much of Man-E-Faces’ standing comes from the toy rather than the cartoon.

Later versions

Man-E-Faces has stayed in production long past the vintage line. Mattel made him in the 200x range, in Classics in 2011, in Origins, in Masterverse, and in both the Filmation and 200x Origins Cartoon Collection sub-lines, including a Deluxe release. Super7 produced a Club Grayskull version in 2018, Mondo made a 1/6 scale figure, and Iron Studios made a 1/10 statue. He also appears in the 2021 Netflix animated series line as a Core figure.

We have not sourced voice credits for those later screen appearances and are not listing any we cannot attribute.