Tri-Klops

The vintage 1983 card front reads "Evil and sees everything." It is a promise about hardware, and the figure delivered it: the visor physically rotates, so a child could turn the head-mounted eye block and pick which eye faced front. The 200X line restated the same idea as "Tri-Klops, Evil Three-Eyed Villain."

He debuts in "Diamond Ray of Disappearance," the Filmation series premiere, where Skeletor summons him alongside Mer-Man, Evil-Lyn and Trap Jaw to demonstrate a new weapon that banishes anyone who looks into it.

In the Filmation series he is voiced throughout by Lou Scheimer under his pen name Erik Gunden, and he turns up across at least ten vintage episodes, almost always for the same reason: Skeletor needs something or someone found, and Tri-Klops is the one sent to find it. He also crosses over once into She-Ra: Princess of Power, as one of Skeletor's henchmen holding a captured Adora in "Battle for Bright Moon."

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Quest for He-Man (1983), 1:33 to 3:31, 1 minute 58 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

The 2002 reboot is not part of the classic canon this encyclopedia follows, and neither is anything that came after it, so the versions below are other takes on the character. The 2002 series keeps the rotating visor but rebuilds him around it as a tech-priest, flying surveillance drones the show calls Doomseekers and, in "Roboto's Gambit," his biggest episode, fielding a self-multiplying army of bone-white skeleton warriors against the Royal Palace. Paul Dobson voices him throughout that run.

Masters of the Universe: Revelation gives him the biggest promotion of any era. Henry Rollins voices him, and "Poisoned Chalice" rebuilds Snake Mountain as the seat of a technology-worshipping cult, with Tri-Klops preaching a "Motherboard" gospel to rows of hooded followers and converting drinkers of a stolen chalice into machines. It is the most the character has ever been given to do on screen, and other characters' Classics cards had already pointed that way by casting him as Skeletor's engineer.

The 2026 live-action film carries the design into a tactical, armored direction, with Kojo Attah playing the role.

The Masters of the Universe Classics cardback, released in 2009, opens with the Real Name field, "Trydor Esooniux Scope," and then: "Originally an inter-dimensional bounty hunter and tracker, Scope was recruited by Skeletor during one of the final battles of the Great Unrest to bolster his weakened forces."

The reveal comes further down, in the middle of a long sentence, and it is easy to miss: an accident left him blind. The card says he took the name Tri-Klops afterward, and that he was forced into the tri-optic visor rather than choosing it. The visor is prosthetic, and everything the vintage card sold as superhuman surveillance is, in the Classics version, a man compensating for having no eyes.

The card also names the vision modes, and they are worth having in full because the cartoons and the modern catalog copy do not use them: Gammavision, the ability to see around objects; Distavision, a form of far vision; Night Vision; and the ability to generate optic blasts.

Two more details sit in there. He was an inter-dimensional bounty hunter and tracker before Eternia, which makes him a professional rather than a follower. And the recruitment happened during one of the final battles of the Great Unrest, which dates his enlistment: later than Beast Man, who joined Keldor before the transformation, and later than Trap Jaw, who Keldor freed from prison at the start of the Great Unrest. The Classics cards do sequence the Evil Warriors, and Tri-Klops arrives last of the three.

The bio prose calls him only Scope throughout; the three-word name lives in the Real Name field alone.

Tri-Klops's own card never mentions the job the rest of the Classics line gives him. The other cards do.

Trap Jaw's card: after Skeletor breaks Kronis's jaw and arm and leaves him for dead, it is Tri-Klops who finds him and rebuilds him into Trap Jaw.

Faker's card: after Faker is abandoned in the royal junkyard, it is Tri-Klops who salvages him and, at Skeletor's request, reprograms him.

Two of Skeletor's warriors exist in their current form because Tri-Klops assembled them, which makes him the Evil Warriors' builder as much as their tracker. Mattel built that thread across two other characters' cards and never put it on his.

The Faker page covers the full contradiction between the vintage origin and the Classics origin. Tri-Klops sits at the center of the Classics version and is entirely absent from the vintage one.