Whiplash

Whiplash came out of Mattel's third series of figures in 1984, and Filmation drew him straight from the toy prototype.^[1] Everything about him comes back to the tail: long and prehensile, heavy enough to swing like a club and long enough to wrap around a prisoner and drag him along. Most episodes use him as Skeletor's enforcer, the one left watching the cells or sent ahead with a search party while Skeletor does the planning.

His first broadcast appearance is "To Save Skeletor" in September 1984, with John Erwin voicing him.^[2] The demon Sh'Gora has turned on Skeletor and his warriors, so Whiplash, still recovering from an injury, ends up leading He-Man and the Masters to Snake Mountain's hidden entrance, about as close as he ever comes to working with them.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, To Save Skeletor (1984), 1:42 to 3:36, 1 minute 53 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

"Trouble in Trolla" is the episode where Whiplash does his own plotting. Snoob, a young Trollan wizard, has been teaching him Trollan magic, and Whiplash has been secretly draining Montork's power so that Snoob wins the academy and owes him a favor, which he hopes will raise his standing with Skeletor. When Orko and Dree Elle work it out, his Kroom soldiers capture them, and his last move is a giant Scarg that only a combined spell from Orko, Snoob and Montork can shrink. The script gives him the scene where he tells Snoob flatly that he never could have beaten Montork alone, and he finishes the episode locked in a chest.

Elsewhere he is mostly on guard duty. In "Island of Fear" he and Mer-Man hold Adam and Man-At-Arms in the catacombs beneath Skeletor's island, and "Betrayal of Stratos" and "Beauty and the Beast" both leave him watching over Skeletor's captives. "Fraidy Cat" has the one joke at his expense, leaving Whiplash wound up in his own tail beside He-Man.