Moss Man

Why would a team of muscled heroes need a spy who is mostly moss? Mattel's answer, in 1985, was camouflage: Moss Man was sold as the Heroic Warriors' master of disguise, a plant elemental who could vanish into vegetation and coax it to grow. The figure was a Beast Man body repainted in greens and browns and covered in flocking, with a pine scent in the plastic, the cheerful counterpart to Stinkor, who arrived the same year smelling of something much worse.

Filmation was already near the end of its run when Moss Man arrived, so the cartoon only had room for him twice, both times in the second season and both built from Mattel's toy prototype. Lou Scheimer voiced him, credited on screen as Erik Gunden, the name he used for a long list of the show's supporting characters.^[1]

Robert Lamb wrote "The Ancient Mirror of Avathar," and it opens with the best Moss Man gag the show ever drew. Melaktha and Prince Adam are standing on a beach, and the mossy mound beside them turns out to have a face. Melaktha greets him like an old friend and tips a handful of seeds into his open palm, and Moss Man joins the royal archaeologist's expedition to Avathar Island, home to the ruins of a vanished empire.^[2]

From there he is part of the search party rather than its leader. He rides out on Captain Falk's ship, stands behind the captain at the wheel, and follows Melaktha through vine-covered ruins, a treasure vault and a dark cave to the chamber where the ancient mirror waits. Twice the animators put spinning rings of light around his head, and in the storm that takes over the second half he rides it out in the ship's hold with Melaktha and Adam.

The episode belongs, in the end, to the lighthouse keeper's son Opie, whose boring checklist is what keeps the ship off the rocks, and Moss Man's part in it is small. It is still the closest the Filmation series came to a Moss Man story, and the opening on the beach shows what the toy was for.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Ancient Mirror of Avathar (1984), 9:49 to 11:34, 1 minute 45 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

Everything after Filmation is additional material outside the classic canon on this site, and Moss Man has two later lives. The 2002 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series spells him Mossman and gives him an introduction in "Orko's Garden," where Evil Seed impersonates him, the real Mossman turns up late with a folksy "Way I see it," and he signs on with the Masters because a few bad seeds should not ruin the whole garden. John Payne voices him, and the Moss Man (200x) entry covers that version.

Masters of the Universe: Revelation brings him back in 2021 voiced by Alan Oppenheimer, the original Filmation Skeletor. Skeletor cuts down his stand in the first episode, "The Power of Grayskull," with a sneering "You first, Moss Man," and in "The Forge at the Forest of Forever" Adam meets him again in Preternia, where Moss Man explains himself in two lines: "You think me unique, but I simply died and became a forest," and, a moment later, "at the scale of the universe, I'm terribly young. Only a million years old."

Neither live-action film has used him. The 1987 movie never brings him in, and no Moss Man has been announced for the 2026 film.