Tri-Klops

Tri-Klops is Skeletor's spy and tracker, identified by the rotating three-eyed visor bolted to his head. Mattel's own bio gives him a twist the cartoon never did: the visor is not an upgrade, it is a replacement. Scope is blind.

Evil and sees everything

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”.

In the Filmation series he is voiced by Lou Scheimer under his pen name Erik Gunden, and he is used sparingly, in single figures across the 130-episode run. What he is used for is consistent: finding things and finding people. He turns up in “The Time Corridor”, “Ordeal in the Darklands”, “The Royal Cousin”, “Eye of the Beholder” and “Betrayal of Stratos”. He is the villain the plot calls when Skeletor needs to know where something is.

Trydor Esooniux Scope

The Masters of the Universe Classics cardback, released in 2009, does more with the character in one paragraph than any cartoon has:

Real Name: Trydor Esooniux Scope. 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.

Mattel, Masters of the Universe Classics cardback.

The reveal comes further down, buried in the middle of a run-on sentence, which is very Mattel, so it is easy to miss: an accident left him blind. The card says he took the name Tri-Klops afterwards, and that he was forced into the tri-optic visor rather than choosing it. The visor is prosthetic. Everything the vintage card sold as superhuman surveillance is, in the Classics version, a man compensating for having no eyes. “Evil and sees everything” turns out to be a description of equipment, not of the man wearing it.

The card also names the vision modes, and they are worth having in full because the cartoons and the modern catalogue 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.

His Real Name field reads Trydor Esooniux Scope, but the bio prose calls him only Scope throughout. That field is one of the entries flagged as an uncertain split in our transcription notes, so the three-word form should be treated as a probable rather than a settled reading.

Skeletor’s engineer, on everybody else’s cards

Here is the thing the Classics line does with Tri-Klops that nobody talks about, because you cannot see it from his own card. You have to read the other cards.

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.

That is two of Skeletor’s warriors who exist in their current form because Tri-Klops assembled them. He is not a henchman among henchmen, he is the one who makes the henchmen. Mattel built that thread across three separate releases over several years, and then never mentioned it on the card of the character it is actually about. His own bio says only that he is a bounty hunter with a visor.

If you want the strongest illustration of why the Faker card matters, it is here: see the Faker page for the full contradiction between the vintage origin and the Classics origin. Tri-Klops sits at the centre of the Classics version and is entirely absent from the vintage one.

A wording dispute you should know about before quoting

Two independent transcriptions of this card disagree on punctuation in two places.

Ours, from the ItsAllTrue MOTU Classics bio checklist, ends a sentence after the clause about him being as good with a blade as he is crafty, and then runs the optic blasts clause straight on into the final clause with a comma. The earlier actionfigure411 pass does the opposite in both spots, which reads as the more grammatical version.

Nobody has photographed a Tri-Klops card back to settle it. The stakes are lower than on Trap Jaw or Mer-Man, since the meaning does not change, but the sentence boundaries do, so do not present either version as a verbatim quote until a card is read.

Henry Rollins in Revelation

In Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Tri-Klops is voiced by Henry Rollins, and the show promotes him from tracker to something closer to a founder, building a technology-worshipping following around his own vision equipment. That is the most anyone has done with the character on screen, and it works because the Classics card had already established him as the one who understands the machinery.

In the 2002 series he is voiced by Brian Drummond.

Kojo Attah plays Tri-Klops in the 2026 live-action film.

One correction worth making, because it is an easy slip: this is not Abraham Attah. Different actor.

More on the 2026 Masters of the Universe film

• Skeletor
• Evil-Lyn