Trap Jaw

Trap Jaw is in Filmation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe from the start. In the first episode, "Diamond Ray of Disappearance," shown on September 5, 1983, Skeletor uses his new diamond to summon Mer-Man, Evil-Lyn, Tri-Klops and Trap Jaw for an assault on the Royal Palace, and the episode's cast list gives the voice to Erik Gunden, the name Lou Scheimer used on the show's credits.

Filmation gives him a decent share of the run and casts him as the villain who wants power on his own terms. Robby London's "Double Edged Sword," shown on October 4, 1983, is the clearest example: Trap Jaw goes hunting for the fuel Eternium because it would make him as powerful as He-Man, says so twice in the first act, and finds that the power burns off in minutes. The Eternium is for himself, not for Skeletor.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, House of Shokoti Part I of II (1983), 6:25 to 8:10, 1 minute 46 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

Mattel's figure arrived in 1983, in the second wave of the original line, and its card front reads "Evil & armed for combat." The figure sold the idea better than the words did: the right arm ends in a socket that takes three attachments, a pincer claw, a grappling hook and an energy blaster, and swapping them changes his weapon 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," and the Masters of the Universe Classics card went back to the vintage phrasing for its title.

The Classics cardback, released in 2010, is one of the longest in the line, and it is the one that gives him a real name: "Real Name: Kronis. Now a powerful Overlord of Evil, Skeletor defeated Kronis breaking his jaw and arm and leaving him for dead." The sentence is clumsier than it means to be: it is Skeletor, not Kronis, who is now the Overlord of Evil.

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, so the name Trap Jaw only exists after the defeat. On this telling he is a survivor patched together by a colleague after the boss tried to kill him.

The card also places him among the earliest recruits. Keldor freed him from an intergalactic prison at the start of the Great Unrest, before the transformation into Skeletor, which puts him in the same enlistment bracket as Beast Man and earlier than Tri-Klops, whom the Classics cards have joining during one of the Great Unrest's final battles. It also gives him an origin off-world, in the dimension of Infinita.