Orko

Filmation built Orko for the cartoon: a floating red robe with a hat where a head should be, a Trollan who lives at the Royal Palace and whose spells go wrong at the worst possible moment, aimed squarely at the children the show was made for. Lou Scheimer voiced him, credited as Erik Gunden, and he is in most episodes of the run, usually as the one who gets Prince Adam out of the room or into trouble.

Decades later, the Masters of the Universe Classics cardback gave him a job description. It does not treat him as comic relief at all; it reads like a posting order.

"REAL NAME: Orko. Orko, a member of the Trollan magical elite, was assigned to watch over Adam." Everything around that sentence is the system it belongs to. After the rise of the Horde Empire, the card says, evil outweighed good across the five dimensions, so in every generation the Overlords of Trolla recruited a Cosmic Warrior, gave each one the Sword of He, and assigned each one a Trollan guide to watch over and advise them. On Eternia, after five centuries split in two, the Trollan Power Sword was rejoined and bequeathed to Prince Adam. And the card closes by explaining the failing magic: Orko was a powerful mage on Trolla, but the hidden mystic properties of Eternia turned his magic into little more than entertaining tricks, which he uses to entertain his friends and remain undercover.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Defection (1983), 5:48 to 7:45, 1 minute 57 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

"Orko's Favorite Uncle" (first aired October 6, 1983, written by Douglas Booth) is the one where the screwup gets the win. His Uncle Montork arrives on Eternia out of a lightning storm, "the best magician in our family" by Orko's account, and finds his Trollan magic works no better there than his nephew's does. The wizard Tauron captures him, puts him under an amulet's spell and sends him against Castle Grayskull.

He-Man wrestles a manticore and chases off a Talon Fighter, and none of it breaks the spell. Orko does, standing in the open with no magic to speak of and insisting on the family bond Montork has been made to forget: "You are my Uncle Montork. I'm Orko." Lou Scheimer voices both of them, and the show returns to Montork later in "The Return of Orko's Uncle."

He was posted, not stranded. Filmation's Orko is on Eternia more or less by accident and stays out of affection. Mattel's Orko is a member of the Trollan magical elite formally assigned to a specific Cosmic Warrior, in a program the Overlords of Trolla have been running "in every generation" since the Horde Empire rose. He is the latest in a long series of handlers.

The Power Sword is Trollan. The card calls it "the Trollan Power Sword." Orko's people made the weapon the entire franchise turns on, and the Etheria cardback says the same Overlords of Trolla "harnessed the aura of the Gods" into the Power of the Universe in the first place. The comedy sidekick belongs to the civilization that originated the power.

The failing magic has a stated cause, and a stated use. He is not incompetent. Eternia's own hidden mystic properties suppress Trollan magic, and the card's closing clause says he uses the resulting tricks to entertain his friends and remain undercover. The bumbling is partly cover for a posting he cannot disclose.

The Trollan material runs deeper than one card. The Sorceress (Temple of Darkness) cardback refers to Grayskull's Elders making a "secret bargain with the Trolla" before transfusing the Power of the Universe into the orb beneath Castle Grayskull. Whatever Trolla was owed for the sword, Mattel never says.

More striking is The Unnamed One. His cardback gives his real name as Gorpo, and describes him as a former Overlord of the Timeless Dimension who "betrayed his brethren when he attempted to steal the Power of the Universe for himself," was stripped of his form, banished, and went on to engineer the Snake Men by combining reptilian DNA. He is eventually killed by Dare, the new He-Ro.

So the same body of Mattel copy that makes Orko a Trollan agent of the good makes the Snake Men's architect a fallen member of the same order. The name has a history of its own: Gorpo was Orko's name in Filmation's early drafts, and Lady Edwina still calls him that in "Creatures from the Tar Swamp."