Tung Lashor

What is a Snake Man doing in the Horde? On the toy shelf Tung Lashor is one of King Hiss's warriors, a 1986 figure that the Battle Ram Blog describes as looking a lot like a poison dart frog with fangs, whose thin green-and-yellow tongue flicks in and out when you turn a dial on his back. He came with a purple repaint of King Hiss's staff and a dragonfly crossbow, and his whole character is the tongue: long, venomous and good for grabbing things.

Filmation never brought the Snake Men to television, so when Tung Lashor turned up in She-Ra: Princess of Power he came in a different skin and on a different side. The animators worked from Ted Mayer's early design for the toy rather than the final frog, which is why the cartoon Tung is a red, lizard-faced Hordesman in a blue tunic with Hordak's bat on his chest. He is usually at Rattlor's elbow and answers to Hordak, and the show never settles on what to call him.^[1]

The tongue is the one thing the two versions share, and the animators put it to work in nearly every scene he is in.

"Book Burning" is the episode that gives him a job. Leslie Wilson wrote the story and Francis Moss the teleplay, and it aired in October 1985. Adora and Bow visit Serena's village school to tell the children about the Rebellion, the Horde arrives to declare that only official Horde books will be taught, and Hordak takes the village over. He makes Rattlor his lieutenant for collecting the books and gives the classroom to Tung.^[2]

The classroom is the best scene in the episode, and it is Tung's. He tells the children that the rebels are criminals, bandits, thieves and robbers, one of them says that is not true, and Tung demands that whoever said it stand up. A child says "I said it," then another voice claims it, and another, and the best answer the Horde's new teacher can find is a threat to send the whole class to school in the Fright Zone.

The rest of the episode belongs to Cory, the boy who spies for the Horde until it tells him "We used you," and Tung is back in the street for the finish. She-Ra's flood leaves the troopers rusted and Tung wound up in a rope, which She-Ra describes as tongue-tied.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Book Burning (She-Ra: Princess of Power, 1985), 8:59 to 10:57, 1 minute 58 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

His other She-Ra outings are smaller. "Enchanted Castle" has him crouched behind a wall beside Rattlor with their tongues hanging out. In "Welcome Back, Kowl" the cartoon calls him Tongue Lasher; his tongue wraps around Madame Razz when one of her spells comes out a syllable wrong, and later, inside Hordak's fortress, she gets a spell right and freezes it. In "Micah of Bright Moon" he leads the robot squadron Hordak sends after the escaped king, licks the buttons of his controls and gets scolded for it, then loses the fight to the harpy Hunga in a couple of minutes. "Birds of a Feather" has him beside Hordak again, holding a map in his tongue.

The 2002 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series, a fresh continuity rather than a sequel to Filmation, returned him to the Snake Men, green-skinned, serving King Hiss and voiced by Michael Donovan, and in "History" he lunges with a stretched-out arm and leads a band of Snake Men out of a jungle cave. He is missing from the 1987 movie, which leaves out the Snake Men entirely, and from the cast announced for the 2026 film.^[3]

The 1986 Mattel figure is long retired and turns up on the secondary market. Mattel's Origins line brought him back in 2022 as part of its Rise of the Snake Men wave, and that figure has since sold out at BigBadToyStore, so there is no Tung Lashor on the shelf to point at right now.