Then, a while ago it hit me. I know EXACTLY what this guy smells like. He smells like Stinkor. I know. That doesn't sound like a good thing, does it? Well, it's not, but it's not a horrible thing either. See, I was real big into He-Man when I was a kid. I loved He-Man, and the toys were cheap enough, that my family could afford to get me a He-Man figure every now and again. They were like 3 or 4 bucks. No big. But after a while, there were just so many He-Man characters that to have them all you had to be a rich kid, or obsessed. I had a bunch. I had He-Man, and Skeletor, and Beast-Man, and Ram-Man (Ram-Man was my favorite, because he had spring loaded legs that would shoot him across the room if you aimed him right) and I had Castle Greyskull, and I even had a Snake Mountain playset which I got from a yard sale after I was by all rights a bit too old to be playing with He-Man figures. And while I won't bore you by listing all the figures I had, I'll just say I had a respectable collection of He-Man paraphernalia.
One figure that came out toward the end of the He-Man craze was a character called Moss-Man. He was the character that was featured in a show about saving the environment (and this was just a few years before Captain Planet came on with his mullet and his booming voice that put Smokey the Bear to shame) and he was green and furry looking-as a Moss-Man would be expected to be. Now, the Moss-Man figure had a special feature. He didn't have a wicked weapon or anything like that. He was a pacifist. What Moss-Man had was...well, air-freshener. He was green and fuzzy and he smelled like pine. Not real pine, mind you, but the kind of pine one associates with the tree-shaped pieces of cardboard that get hung from your rear-view mirror. And Moss-Man was mine. I loved him because he was fuzzy, and he smelled good, and he was a good guy that looked cool. I mean, how cool is a big muscle-bound green guy who feels like moss and smells like "pine"? Tres cool if you ask a seven-year-old.
But around the same time that the Moss-Man figure came out, there was another character who had a similar gimmick. Only he was a bad guy. I didn't have this figure, but I knew kids who did. Personally I couldn't see the point in buying this guy, because he had no appeal. Where Moss-Man was fuzzy, this guy was pretty run of the mill. Where Moss-Man's smell was pleasant and reminded you of cleaning products, this guy had a chest piece that covered up his OWN face, so that HE couldn't smell himself! His name was Stinkor, and he looked like a skunk. He smelled like a skunk...kinda. He smelled like a skunk in the same way that Moss-Man smelled like pine. I still remember thinking, "who IS this guy?" I'd never seen him on the show, whereas Moss-Man had gotten a whole episode to extoll the virtues of smelling like the trees.
And just now, when I went looking for a picture of Stinkor, I found this little tidbit from the guys who worked on the show (just for background, "The Horde" were a new line of bad guys at the time on the show and in the toys):
The male designers introduced each character with great excitement, relishing every nasty attribute they could name. The only hitch came when Stinkor was introduced. Arthur immediately vetoed a character that was basically a walking fart joke. Only two skunk characters have worked in cartoons to my knowledge; Pepe Le Pew and Flower from Bambi.Larry and I thought of a dozen hilarious situations for Stinkor, Hordak, and She-Ra. Things like;Stinkor enters the room and Hordak turns his arm into a giant match;Stinkor gives away the Horde's position in an ambush because of his scent;Stinkor sprays a cloud of gas at the rebels and She-Ra turns her sword into a giant fan and blows the stink back causing the Horde to pass out; that sort of stuff.There was a character named Perfuma in She-Ra. She and Stinkor would have made a fragrant combination. We even thought of a thirty second moral ending about air pollution, and one about the effects of different foods, like beans, on digestion.
All of that is to say, Stinkor never made it to TV. And he sat on the shelves like a toystore pariah, unsellable and double packed into every crate of He-Man toys I'm sure. He was a character that only a few kids I knew of had, and they only had him because they had EVERY figure. You gotta have Stinkor if you want to have them all. So because of those people, I know what Stinkor smelled like. And our faculty member smells like him. Kinda like skunk. Maybe it's Jovan Musk or something. But it's really funny to me, because every time he walks into the room, I envision this:
