Stridor

Filmation had a robot horse before Mattel had Stridor. A blue android horse turns up in earlier episodes, and in "Pawns of the Game Master" Prince Adam calls it Strider. Mattel's armored war horse followed in the summer of 1984, designed by Colin Bailey under the working name War Horse, and the Battle Ram Blog wonders whether the finished name came from the cartoon.^[1][2]

The toy is a brown-and-orange armored horse with a white head, a saddle sized for one five-and-a-half-inch rider and guns at his flanks, sold with the line "Half war horse/half war machine. Stridor carries He-Man to victory!" He has no action feature to speak of; the guns and the tail move, and the rest is armor plate and stickers. On the shelf he was He-Man's answer to Skeletor's Night Stalker, the same idea in black.

The cartoon used the toy's design only once, in an episode that gives him more to do than carry a rider.

J. Michael Straczynski wrote "Origin of the Sorceress", first aired in September 1984.^[3] A wheel of fire is raining meteors on the royal palace just as Man-At-Arms shows off his newest invention, the robot horse Stridor, and the attack turns out to be the work of Morgoth the Terrible, an ancient sorcerer trying to break back into Eternia. The Sorceress summons He-Man, and the two of them ride Stridor to the ruins at Dark Mountain to stop Morgoth before dawn. While they wait she tells He-Man who she was before Grayskull, which is a story the Teela Na entry tells in full.

Morgoth's gem sits behind a barrier that no living thing can cross, and Stridor, a machine, goes where He-Man cannot, and he takes a beating for it before knocking the gem within He-Man's reach. Afterwards, back in the workshop, Man-At-Arms finds that the ordeal has changed something in Stridor's programming. He wants to run free, and He-Man and Man-At-Arms let him go.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Origin of the Sorceress (1984), 18:14 to 19:59, 1 minute 45 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

The blue android horse that came before him is a different machine, seen in "A Friend in Need" and "The Royal Cousin" and named Strider in "Pawns of the Game Master." "Double Trouble" gives the same blue model a pair of white wings as the mount of He-Man's ally Kol Darr, whom Skeletor copies with a magic mirror, and the guide to that episode calls it Stridor.^[4] Neither looks anything like Mattel's toy.

The later continuities have left him alone: Stridor does not appear in the 2002 series, Revelation or Revolution, the 1987 film did not use him, and no Stridor has been announced for the 2026 film. His later life has been on the toy shelf.