Ram Man

Ram Man is a Heroic Warrior whose legs are spring-loaded battering rams, a toy gimmick first and a character second: the 1983 vintage figure used an actual spring mechanism in the body to let it "launch" forward, and the cartoon built his whole fighting style around the same idea, curling into a blur and headbutting through walls, boulders and enemies with his helmeted head.

He is in "Colossor Awakes," shown on September 7, 1983, among the crowd in the palace courtyard turned to stone by Skeletor's ray.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Shadow of Skeletor (1984), 2:02 to 3:15, 1 minute 13 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

Several of his clearest episodes play his gimmick for laughs before trusting him with something real. In "The Royal Cousin," Prince Adam's troublemaking cousin Jeremy gets him soaked in a palace pool and dangling from a runaway Sky Sled; in "Game Plan," he and He-Man are dropped into Negator's computer-game maze together, crashing through its hazards the same way he would crash through a real wall. "House of Shokoti" closes its first half with Ram Man addressing the camera directly for a safety lesson about why ramming things with your head is fun to watch but a bad idea to copy.

"Not So Blind" is the clearest exception. A flash from the Singing Crystals blinds him and He-Man together, and it falls to a blind boy named Loos, brought along on the trip, to lead both of them out of the caves by sound and memory. The title is the point: Loos needs far less help than anyone assumed, and Ram Man is the one who has to admit it out loud.

"House of Shokoti" gives him his biggest outing: he, He-Man and Orko answer a distress call under attack from Trap Jaw's mechanical spiders, then join a desert expedition toward a vanishing pyramid where a petrified stone guardian and the sorceress Shokoti are waiting. He spends most of the two-parter rattled, reacting in open shock when Trap Jaw's head and claw arm emerge from a sack, hanging upside down in a shaft below Shokoti's face, but he stays with the expedition through both halves.

"The Taking of Grayskull" shows the gimmick working as advertised. He curls into a spinning white blur and headbutts straight through a canyon boulder, with no joke attached, the power used to solve a real problem.