Eponyms: Nothing to Do with My Little Pony

I think it's safe to say that we children of the 80's were blessed with the best cartoon and action figure IPs of any generation. While Reaganomics was trickling down financial viscera upon the needy and John DeLorean (of the New Jersey DeLoreans) struggled to birth a cocaine empire to salvage his mondo-awesome car company, we were treated to Fred and Daphne repeatedly abandoning the serious business of investigating groovy mysteries for the immediate gratification of their gratuitous and frankly depraved sexual predilictions, leaving a plucky lesbian, a degenerate hippie with obvious learning disabilities, and a talking dog to do the yeoman's work. If drug culture and alternative lifestyles weren't your bag, there was always the communist utopia of the Smurfs, whose uniformity was broken only by the disparate skill-sets they had to offer up to their red, bearded Papa as the greedy capitalist Gargamel strove to distill from their minature corpses the ingredient essential to his alchemical formula for gold. And if communal living, alchemy, and political theory didn't do it for you, there was He-Man.


I embed this painting by, I believe, Matisse (though it may actually be a Renoir from his 1883 summer in Guernsey) not to emphasize the glistening musculature and overly modest loincloths of these unrepentantly heterosexual superheroes and villains, but rather to appreciate the subtle poetry of these characters' names. The eponymous protagonist needs little analysis: how better to immortalize the nuance of his unique motivations and the complex psychology of the hero mindset than by lashing together the masculine pronoun and the generic noun for the male gender? This is the equivalent of e.e. cummings's "l(a" or William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," and like these works, are best appreciated in quiet contemplation.

But what of the myriad other names from this elaborate and rich universe? Shall I speak of the wind warrior Sy-Klone, the bee-like Buzz-Off, or perhaps he of many faces, Man-E-Faces? Might I dwell upon the inspirational tales of men overcoming conspicuous physical disability to triumph and thereby grasp at immortality: a man with a disproportionately large metal hand named Fisto; the crab man named Clawful; the conjoined evil twins, Two-Bad. Sure, the poet-philosophers who crafted this pantheon may have plumbed the depths of certain wells a few too many times: Skeletor, Spydor, Stinkor, Spikor, Panthor, and Grizzlor. Of course, those of a certain moral deformity might unscrupulously appropriate one or two of these names to dub acts of sexual licentiousness that would make Daphne and Fred blush a crimson worthy of that man's neckerchief. For instance, a "Thunder Punch" to the "Moss Man" below one's "Mantenna" might produce a "Dragon Blaster" on your "Man-at-Arms." I call it a "Prince Adam."

Looking back at this now, I confess I didn't appreciate how much the He-Man universe resembled the harrowing chronicles of two rival circuses sending their carnie abominations into gladiatorial contest. But honestly, if you were the ringleader of that menagerie, what else would you do? Apart from a lot of coke, of course.