A strange thing happened on my way to a Throwback Thursday article on Extendar. It’s been a while since I looked at him, and I found out in the interim he’s… tarnished. The goldish color on his gloves has turned green, as can plainly be seen in the pictures. A quick check on eBay verifies that this is a pretty common thing from one extreme to the other.
I am rankled by this. To take such immaculate care of your toys as a kid only to have cruel cruel time take them out of your toy box and have their way with them… bastard!
Anyway, damage beside the point, Extendar is getting a brand new Masters of the Universe Classics figure, so I figured it was appropriate to take a look at his ancestor and see his humble beginnings.
Extendar was a late arrival to the line, and because of this, he was one of a sextet of figures I was lucky enough to have run across when K-Mart dropped their prices to a buck a figure to clear them out. I’m pretty sure I’ve told that story before in another Throwback article or some article somewhere. Nevertheless, clearly that experience stuck with me. It wasn’t every day as a kid that you went home with six figures for (I think) the price of two.
I’ve noticed some mixed reactions to Extendar. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of apathy towards him, but he was one of my favorites when I got him. I think my natural inclination to gravitate towards robots/cyborgs and the stronger characters on a team met up in perfect synchronicity. Extendar was a Cyborg who got stronger the further he stretched. Fully stretched out, he could almost take He-Man in a one-on-one fight. There was also a hint of the Marvel character Machine Man in his schtick, which added to his appeal. I’m still waiting for a good Machine Man character, but luckily I won’t have to wait much longer for a proper update to Extendar’s old figure.
Action feature-wise, while he seems limited in what we expect in our toys now, he still works well, and it’s easy to remember how cool his elongating was back then, perfectly replicating everything we needed him to do at the time. His joints lock into place nicely so even all these years later he can stay standing in his stretched-out form without slipping or sliding back down. If not for the weird discoloration, he’s still in great shape, and his pearlescent quality is still shimmery.
I still don’t get the “slap hands,” though. I always wanted him to have big punching fists at the end of those stretched-out arms. If there’s one constant, it’s the baffling nature of the fistless. I guess he was supposed to stretch and karate chop the opposition, which was the only option I was left with, but I certainly remember wishing for fists.
Speaking of things that made me shake my head as a kid, I remember in his mini-comic, which detailed his origins (very similar to his upcoming classics bio — cybernetic upgrade forced on him by the Horde), he was called “Extendar” before he ever gained his elongating powers. I remember wondering at the time how they knew to call him Extendar before he was able to extend. It’s like calling Mekaneck “Mekaneck” before his neck stretched. Or Fisto before he got his big fist. And no, I don’t think Fisto had a gigantic flesh fist before he got his fake fist. That’s dumb. But you don’t call a guy “Fisto” unless he has a big fist. Because if you do, that’s just weird. Same with Extendar.
Extendar served in a place of honor as the top-level bad guy for quite a while, fighting tons of bad guys in fully extended, super-powerful battles that always ended with him standing over a scattered array of his defeated opponents.
And now he has tarnished gloves to show for it.
Stupid aging!