Trap Jaw (200x)

Trap Jaw is already at Skeletor's side when the 200x series opens, one of the Evil Warriors present at Snake Mountain in "The Beginning, Part 1" before Adam has even raised the Sword of Power. He turns up through the first season and into the second, and the pattern rarely changes: he is sent out in company, with Evil-Lyn and Beast Man after the Ram Stone in "Lessons," with Skeletor himself digging up the Diamond Ray of Disappearance in "Turnabout," brawling alongside Beast Man as the audition act for two new bounty hunters in "The Monster Within." He is rarely the one Skeletor trusts with a plan of his own.

That changes once. Most of his appearances use him as a recognizable piece of Skeletor's bench strength; "Trust" spends an entire episode asking what he is like when nobody else is watching.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, House of Shokoti Part I of II (1983), 5:31 to 7:29, 1 minute 58 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

Skeletor sends Trap Jaw alone after Stratos, who is hunting the legendary metal Eternium in the frozen Ice Mountains, and the ambush that follows buries both of them in the same cave with a busted wing and a busted leg between them. Trap Jaw proposes the obvious truce, that their only chance is to help each other, and breaks it within minutes by grabbing for Stratos's blaster. When something starts hunting them through the caves he begs to be let back into the deal on the grounds that Stratos is "supposed to be all good and heroic," and Stratos agrees, with conditions he will go on to test twice more before the episode is through.

The episode's best scene puts that pattern in front of a third party. The Kulitox, who guard the Eternium, lock Trap Jaw and Stratos together in a supply chamber and simply watch. Trap Jaw goes straight for what looks like a stockpile of the metal, crowing that he is "gonna be indestructible," while Stratos tries to stop him; it turns out to be Deuterium, which, as the episode dryly puts it, "apparently makes you sick." The Kulitox elder gives the verdict to Stratos, and it is the line the script was built to reach: "You have earned our trust. Not by word, but by deed." Paul Dobson plays Trap Jaw whining and scheming in equal measure, and it is the one episode where he is more than a henchman filling out a frame.

"Turnabout" has Trap Jaw at Skeletor's side rather than running his own errand, the two of them digging the Diamond Ray of Disappearance out of an ice cave before He-Man points out that the weapon they just risked everything for is broken. It is a small, undignified beat, and typical of him outside "Trust."

"Of Machines and Men," into the second season, is pure comic deflation: a planet-wide power failure sweeps through Snake Mountain along with everywhere else, and Trap Jaw comes back from what was meant to be a simple reconnaissance run able only to mumble, while Tri-Klops complains his eye sensors are out and Skeletor decides whoever caused this is worth getting to know.