Trap Jaw

Trap Jaw is the Evil Warrior with a hinged metal jaw and a weapon socket where his right arm used to be. Mattel's own name for him is Kronis, and Mattel's own bio says Skeletor is the one who broke him, and Tri-Klops the one who rebuilt him.

Evil and armed for combat

Trap Jaw arrived in 1983, in the third wave of Mattel’s line, and his vintage card front reads “Evil & armed for combat”. The figure sold the idea better than the words did: the right arm ends in a socket, and three attachments clip into it. A pincer claw, a grappling hook, an energy blaster. Swap them out, and the character changes weapons in your hand. Very few figures in the line had a play feature that was also a character concept.

Mattel returned to the same idea with different wording each time it relaunched him. The 200x line billed him as “Trap Jaw, Evil Mechanical Menace”. The Masters of the Universe Classics card went back to the vintage phrasing and used “Evil & Armed for Combat” as its title.

In the Filmation series he is voiced by Lou Scheimer under the pen name Erik Gunden, the credit Scheimer used across the show. Filmation gives him a decent share of the run and casts him as the villain who wants power on his own terms. “Double Edged Sword” is the clearest example: Trap Jaw goes hunting for the fuel Eternium specifically because it would give him power equal to He-Man’s. Not power for Skeletor. His own.

Kronis of Infinita

The Classics cardback, released in 2010, is one of the longest and most eventful in the line, and one sentence in it settles a question people ask constantly:

Real Name: Kronis. Now a powerful Overlord of Evil, Skeletor defeated Kronis breaking his jaw and arm and leaving him for dead.

Mattel, Masters of the Universe Classics cardback.

Skeletor did not build Trap Jaw. Skeletor is why Trap Jaw needed building.

The rest of the card fills in the arc around that sentence. Kronis served Keldor for years, grew ambitious, raised an army of his own to challenge his master, and lost. The rebuild that followed was done by Tri-Klops, who found him and remade him into Trap Jaw, a man armed with combat weapons and an iron jaw. Only afterwards does the name Trap Jaw exist at all.

This flatly contradicts the version most commonly repeated, which has Trap Jaw captured by Skeletor and rebuilt as a punishment, into obedience. That framing comes out of the 2002 series rather than the cardback. Both are official Mattel output. They are not compatible, and the difference is not cosmetic: one version makes him a rebuilt slave, the other makes him a survivor patched together by a colleague after the boss tried to kill him.

The card also places him among the earliest recruits. He was freed from an intergalactic prison by Keldor, before the transformation into Skeletor, at the start of the Great Unrest. That puts him in the same enlistment bracket as Beast Man, and earlier than Tri-Klops, who the Classics cards say was recruited during one of the Great Unrest’s final battles.

And it gives him an origin off-world: the dimension of Infinita.

A wording dispute you should know about before quoting

Two independent transcriptions of this card disagree on a word, and this is the one case in our set where the disagreement actually changes something.

The transcription we treat as reliable, from the ItsAllTrue MOTU Classics bio checklist, has Keldor freeing prisoners to holster his ranks. The earlier actionfigure411 pass has bolster, which is the sentence anybody would expect.

Holster makes no sense there, which is exactly why it is plausible as a printed Mattel error. Mattel’s Classics copy carries plenty of those. But our record on these disputes runs the other way: on Teela and Evil-Lyn, both actionfigure411 readings were checked against photographed cards and turned out to be transcription slips, not Mattel typos. Here the reading that looks wrong is on the side that has otherwise been correct. No Trap Jaw card back photograph has been located, and until one is, we cannot say which of the two is on the card.

The two transcriptions also punctuate the sentence quoted above differently, actionfigure411 adding commas around Skeletor and a break before the clause about his jaw. Either way the meaning is the same and it is a dangling modifier: it is Skeletor who is now a powerful Overlord of Evil, not Kronis. Do not silently repunctuate it if you quote it.

Diedrich Bader in Revelation

In Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Trap Jaw is voiced by Diedrich Bader, who also voices King Randor in the same series. Justin Long is in the Revelation cast too, voicing Roboto, and the two credits get swapped a lot.

In the 2002 series he is voiced by Mark Acheson.

Sam C. Wilson plays Trap Jaw in the 2026 live-action film.

The film gives him a bigger structural role than the toy line ever did. He is the one who cripples Duncan in the opening assault on Eternos, and Duncan gets the rematch in the final battle, so Man-At-Arms's arc for the rest of the picture turns on what Trap Jaw does in the first ten minutes. Barrie Gower, who built the practical Skeletor suit, also handled the Trap Jaw build.

More on the 2026 Masters of the Universe film

• Skeletor
• Tri-Klops