Cora’s TV Adventure – Take Two

Before we get to the main event, I was at the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow blog of the Seattle Worldcon again, this time talking about the 1960 East German science fiction film Der schweigende Stern a.k.a. The Silent Star.

Back in January, I wrote about how I appeared in a segment on viewers’ opinions on NDR TV.

Well, guess what? This Saturday, I was on TV again. And this time around, it even has something to do with science fiction and the Hugos.

The story started last Friday, when I got a phone call from Désirée Bertram, a journalist working for buten un binnen. For those who don’t know (which is most likely everybody who’s not from Bremen and surroundings) buten un binnen is the regional news program of Radio Bremen TV, it has been broadcast daily on weekdays (and later on Saturdays) since 1980. The title is Low German for “without and within” and is taken from  the motto inscribed above the doorway of the Schütting, seat of the Bremen chamber of commerce, in gilded letters: “Buten un binnen – wagen un winnen” (Without and within – to dare and to win). BTW, I love that it rhymes in both English and Low German.

Back in 1980 – and I’m pretty sure I watched the first episode as a young kid – buten un binnen felt fresh and modern compared to the deadly dull evening news programs featuring serious looking older men (and very rarely women – since women were considered too emotional to read the news) in suits and ties who announced very serious news in very serious tones. buten un binnen was different. The anchors were fairly young, they wore sweaters and no ties and impressive facial hair (it was the early 1980s), they were less reverent than the staid elderly gentlemen of the mainstream news programs, asked hard questions and even made jokes on occasion. Nowadays, this sort of style is common for news programs, but back in 1980, it was something genuinely new and different. As a result, buten un binnen became hugely popular and remains so to this day. When the public TV channel ARD tried to banish all of its regional programming from its nation-wide channel (where the two hours from six to eight PM were once reserved for regional programming) to the less popular regional third programs, buten un binnen managed to avoid this fate for a while, since it was by far the most popular regional news program in Germany and the one that people were actually watching.  Though nowadays, buten un binnen is broadcast on the regional channel Radio Bremen TV.

As for why a journalist from buten un binnen called me, well, she’d read the article about my Hugo nomination in the Weser-Kurier and wanted to interview me. Now I always sent out my press releases about my Hugo nominations to all the local media, including Radio Bremen. However, I never got a response from them. When I won in 2022, I even adressed the e-mail directly to one of their radio journalists, who was a classmate of mine at university, though I still had to send it via their central contact address. No response. And now they suddenly contact me out of the blue in response to a newspaper interview about me.

I had a nice chat with Désirée Bertram and explained what the Hugos are, what Galactic Journey is, what we do and so on. She also asked me if they could interview me at home, how the conditions are, if there’s enough space to fit in a TV team and their equipment and so on. I said, “No problem, you can film me at home, there’s enough space and since I’m self-employed, I’m also flexible with regards to time.”

Initially they planned to shoot the interview on Tuesday, which gave me three and a half days to get the house in order – and luckily, the house was more orderly than it had been in January. Though the garden was not in great shape. The front lawn needed mowing and there were other issues like dead plants as well.

Now I dislike gardening work. I find it deeply unpleasant and so I’ve hired my neighbour Vladimir, who has a gardening and house repair business, to do the garden for me. Which normally isn’t a problem, except that the time frame was a little tight. So I asked Vladimir, “Could you maybe mow my lawn and clean up the garden by Monday, because buten un binnen wants to interview me on Tuesday?”

Indeed, Vladimir and his two helpers did mow my lawn and got rid of the dead plants for me on Monday – only to be promptly interrupted by a gust of rain. I also bought some strawflowers and lavender plants at the DIY store and planted them in a planter that was filled with mostly dead heather and weeds. At any rate, my garden looks much more presentable now, though in the end you can see very little of it in the TV report.

In the end, the buten un binnen TV team shot the interview on Wednesday rather than Tuesday, which gave me one additional day to clean up the house and reorganise my Masters of the Universe collection to show them off a little better.

The TV team showed up on Wednesday at noon in a van emblazoned with “Radio Bremen”, so all the neighbours could see what’s going on. And believe me, they were curious, because everything out of the ordinary gets noticed in this neighbourhood.

Inside the van, there were three people: Désirée Bertram, the journalist who’d contacted me, as well as a camera operator (his name is Lür Wagenheim according to the credits at the end of the TV report) and a sound technician. They lugged a lot of equipment into the house. Home cameras have gotten much smaller since my days with the public access channel Bremer Umland, but professional TV cameras are as big and heavy as they ever were.

This time around, I did not have a microphone clipped to my collar with a wire running under my shirt. I was glad about that, because it’s summer and I’m not wearing a lot under my t-shirt, so the wire would have been on my bare skin.

The house was inspected and the two Hugo trophies and my Masters of the Universe collection were duly admired. “I had no idea there were so many of those figures,” someone – I think the sound guy – said, “I always thought there were only four or five or so.” I replied, “Oh, there were a lot more than that [there were 72 figures in the vintage Masters of the Universe line, not including vehicles, playsets and mounts like Battle Cat or Panthor], only that they weren’t all available at the same time and some were never sold in Germany at all.”

As for filming, I pointed out that the dining room/hall was probably the best place to film, but we could also use the living room (actually a misnomer, since the room is only used on Christmas and sometimes for visitors), except that one of the automatic blinds is broken and permanently down and will likely remain so, since Dad couldn’t locate the problem and if he couldn’t find it, no one else stands a chance. The living room also needs redecorating, because I want to get rid of my parents’ outdated decor. “You can also film me in my office,” I said, “But it’s not very exciting – just an attic room.” – “Can we film you working somewhere else?” – “I can unplug the laptop, no problem,” I said.

So in the end, the dining room/hall it was. I unplugged the laptop, took it downstairs and started it up. “Do you have some research materials we can show?” Désirée Bertram asked. I replied, “You’re lucky, cause my parents’ collection of Das Jahr im Bild [The Year in Pictures, a kind of almanac] is right here on the shelf and I can pull out the 1970 edition. Though I hope it doesn’t cause everything else to come crashing down.”

As a matter of fact, I’m currently in the process of reorganising the bookshelves in the dining room/hall area, cause they are full of my parents’ books – lots of coffee table type books about ships and motorbikes and WWII, chronicles of the companies where my parents worked that no one really cares about as well as a shelf worth of Marie Louise Fischer novels – which aren’t necessarily topics that excite me very much. I’m not going to get rid of them altogether – not even the Marie Louise Fischer novels, because maybe I want to write something about her work – but I don’t want them clogging up prime real estate in the house. Some of the books have already been relocated to the basement, though others are still there. And those Das Jahr im Bild books really are useful for research.

So I pulled Das Jahr im Bild 1970 from the shelf – and no, nothing came crashing down, though I wondered why on Earth we own a book listing all the churches in Bremen? – and put it quite prominently on the table. Then I typed random stream of consciousness stuff, opened Galactic Journey and scrolled through one of my articles and flipped through the pages, while I was being filmed from all angles.

One funny moment was, when the pewter mugs and decorative plates in the shelf behind me were scrutinised, whether there’s anything political or potentially problematic visible. “Welll, unless the city of Hamelin or the propeller manufacturer Voith are considered problematic now, it should be fine.” The decorative pewter mugs, plates, spoons, etc.. also belonged to my parents and will probably be removed eventually – because they’re not to my taste at all – though so far I haven’t been able to bring myself to get rid of them.

I was asked a few questions and occasionally had to repeat an answer for another take. I was also handed some sheets of white cardstock and a marker and asked to write the date 1969 onto the cardstock. The first time I did it, I was asked to do it again and turn the marker, so you can’t make out the very prominent manufacturer’s name. Radio Bremen is a public TV channel and have to be wary of anything that might be considered product placement, cause that would be illegal advertising. And yes, there have been scandals involving product placement and illegal advertising in German public TV going back to the 1980s, though none of them ever involved Radio Bremen. The most infamous case is probably the very prominent appearance of Paroli cough lozenges in the Schimanski Tatort episodes “Zahn um Zahn” (Tooth for a Tooth) and “Freunde” (Friends), which allegedly were only greenlit, because the then head of the public TV station WDR claimed to have no idea that Paroli was a real brand.

I was also asked to take the Hugo from the shelf, put it on the table and admire it. Later, I was also asked if I could hold the trophy, while answering a few questions. “Not for very long,” I said, “It weighs four and a half kilos and is very heavy.”

After those shots had been finished, the TV team because to assemble a green screen in my dining rooms. Basically, it’s is a metal frame covered with green cloth. The thing was huge and pretty much divided the entire dining room. Squeezing past it wasn’t easy, squeezing past it while carrying a Hugo trophy was even more of a challenge. They also had problems with light shining through the green cloth from behind. Internal lights could be switched off, but sunshine streaming in through the garden door was a problem. “I can lower the automatic shutters, if you like,” I said. “Oh, that would be wonderful.” Of course, the switch to operate the automatic shutter was on the other side of the dining room table, so I had to squeeze past the green screen again to reach it.

I also asked if the fact that the print on my t-shirt – which is reproduction of the cover of the 1966 edition of Foundation – is green was a problem.  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” I was told, “We can exclude it from the process.”

I was then asked to stand or sit in front of the green screen, answer more questions and write “1969” onto the white cardstock again. I was also asked to look around and follow an imaginary object with my eyes. The Hugo was also filmed against the green screen.

Of course, I know what a green screen is and how it works. I’ve known that since I was a kid and eagerly watched “making of” documentaries about science fiction movies. However, this was my first experience with an actual green screen. Coincidentally, it was also the first time working with a green screen for journalist Désirée Bertram.

Now Radio Bremen has always had cutting edge TV technology and they have been using early versions of the green screen process since the 1960s, mostly to insert animated backgrounds into the famous Beat-Club/Musikladen music program. And nowadays, they use the tech for news programs, to make me appear in front of footage of the first Moon landing.

After the filming at my home was done, the TV team also wanted to film me outside. Now buten un binnen is a regional TV program for Bremen and surroundings, so of course they wanted a local hook. And the one they chose was the crash of Lufthansa flight 005 while landing at Bremen airport on January 28, 1966.  I wrote about this crash for Galactic Journey and incorporated eyewitness statements, including that of my Dad who chanced to drive past the crash site very shortly after it had happened. The article is here BTW and I’m very proud of it, because it took a lot of research.

Nowadays, there are two memorial steles commemorating the victims in a park near the crash site. The first stele was donated by the Italian National Olympic Committee and is dedicated to the seven members of the Italian national swim team as well as their coach and a TV reporter who died in the crash. That stele was erected in 1967 shortly after the crash, though it has been moved since then, when the runway of Bremen airport was extended in the early 1980s. The second stele, which lists the names of all 46 victims, was only erected in 2019 and no, I have no idea why it took them so long to honour all 46 people who died in what is still the worst plane crash ever at Bremen airport. Though Bremen has a thing for putting memorials decades later. The memorial stele for the three victims of the Gladbeck hostage drama (most of which did not actually take place in Gladbeck, but in Bremen), 15-year-old Emanuele De Giorgi, 19-year-old Silke Bischoff (who went to my school) and 31-year-old police officer Ingo Hagen, was not set up until 2019, thirty-one years after it happened, either.

So the TV team loaded everything back into their van and also filmed me going out and into the house. When I opened the door, I nearly stumbled over a stack of packages that had been delivered. I actually did see the mail person, but he never rang the doorbell. The packages actually contained things ordered weeks apart, because two shipments had been delayed due to holidays, one arrived unexpectedly fast and Mattel Creations packages arrive whenever they please anyway.

They also asked me if I could drive to the memorial for the victims of Lufthansa flight 005 in my own car, because they still had more filming to do in the city center afterwards. “No problem,” I said.

Just before we drove off, my neighbour Franziska chanced to come by with her two young kids whom she’d picked up at the kindergarten. The two kids cheerily greeted the TV team and me. Of course, a TV van is not nearly as exciting as heavy machinery, but still exciting enough for little kids.

We then drove to the park with the two memorial steles for the victims of flight 005. I drove ahead, since I know the way better, and the TV van followed. I drove onto a parking lot by the park, which is used by dog walkers and the like, again followed by the TV van.Of course, it had to start to rain the moment I stepped out of the car.

The two memorial steles are quite close to the parking lot, located amidst a copse of oak trees. Thankfully, the grass had been mowed, so we didn’t have to wade through tall grass to get there. I told the TV team that I had actually taken a photo of the stele with the names of all the victims and googled every single one to see what I could find out about them. “This was the pilot,” I said, pointing at the name, “This was the co-pilot. This was a flight attendant. Here’s the actress Ada Tschechowa.”

I was filmed walking along a small path in the park, planes roaring overhead and traffic rushing by on Kladdinger Straße (which was particularly busy that day due to two traffic jams on Autobahn A1 and Bundesstraße B75). I was also filmed at the memorial, looking at the inscription and writing the year 1966 onto the white cardstock, while insects were buzzing all around me. “I’m not sure if they’re attracted to the scent of the marker or my deodoriser or my shampoo,” I said. The TV team assured me that insects wouldn’t be visible on the screen and they aren’t.

After the shooting at the memorial for the victims of Lufthansa flight 005, the TV team and I parted ways. The TV team returned to the city center for some more filming, while I wondered what to do now. I was hungry, because the TV team arrived at twelve o’clock and I didn’t want to have lunch before to avoid unpleasant smells or bowel movements. However, it was after two PM by now and too late for lunch, at least lunch outside the home. So I decided to have an ice cream instead and stopped by the ice cream parlour Il Sole in Brinkum on my way home. I had a martini sundae and then continued homewards.

I’d been told that the TV report would air in the Saturday edition of buten un binnen, unless something urgent came up. However, there were no urgent news and so the report actually did air on Saturday. You can watch it – and read the related text – here. And here is the full buten un binnen episode. My segment starts at the 19:24 minute mark

I think it’s a lovely piece and it’s always interesting to see how much work (roughly two and a half hours of filming plus post-production) goes into such a very short report.

Of course, I watched buten un binnen live on Saturday evening and then had dinner. When I checked my e-mail afterwards, I already had two acquaintances e-mail me to let me know that they had seen me on buten un binnen. I suspect I’ll get more of this in the next few days, because – as I said – almost everybody watches buten un binnen. I’ve also noticed an uptick in people visiting my blog, though I don’t know if Galactic Journey has a similar uptick.

ETA: Gideon has since confirmed that Galactic Journey receive an influx of visitors from Germany following the buten un binnen report as well.

And that was my second TV appearance in 2025.

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He-Man Goes Ruhrpott – Cora’s Adventures at the 2025 Los Amigos Masters of the Universe Convention in Neuss, Part 2: The Con and My Haul

On the long Pentecost weekend, I attended the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe convention in Neuss. For the rather eventful trip to get there, see part 1.

Like last year, the Los Amigos convention took place in the Stadthalle Neuss, a multipurpose event and convention center of the type found in most German cities. It’s a nice enough venue with a hotel attached and a parking lot that is probably sufficient for most of the events taking place there. However, the Los Amigos convention (and indeed most SFF and fan cons) isn’t your usual event. For starters, it draws a lot of people.

Parking Woes and the Wild Listeners

Last year, my Los Amigos experience began with a long queue to get into the con. This year, the various delays on route meant that I arrived at eleven thirty, one and a half hours after the con opened, so there was no queue. However, there was another problem and that was the parking situation.

As mentioned above, Stadthalle Neuss does have a parking lot attached. You have to pay to use it, but the fee is reasonable. However, the parking lot is not very big and so parked cars had spilled out onto the space in front of the entrance to the Stadthalle and adjacent hotel and even onto the driveway leading to the Stadthalle.

I drove up to the parking lot gate and rolled down the window only to find that I couldn’t reach the ticket button from the window. So I tried opening the door only to find that I couldn’t open it far enough to actually get out and press the damn button because some kind of pipe fence was in the way.

I spotted a trio of guys who looked like con attendees standing by the side of the parking lot chatting, so I called over to them if they could help me and press the button. All three wandered over and I noticed that they seemed familiar, almost as if I’d seen them before. Initially, I assumed I’d met them at last year’s Los Amigos convention or maybe at Toyplosion. But then I caught a glimpse of the t-shirts the three guys were wearing and realised that I recognised them because they host the Wilde Hörer (Wild Listeners) podcast that discusses the Masters of the Universe audio dramas.

“Oh, you’re the Wilde Hörer,” I said, “I really like your podcast.”

One of the three Wild Listeners pressed the ticket button, but nothing happened. No ticket appeared and the barrier did not open. The Wild Listeners crowded around the machine and tried pressing various buttons (which were not labeled) and finally succeeded in hitting the “call for assistance” button. A somewhat bored female voice asked what the problem was. “The barrier won’t open,” one of the Wild Listeners said.

“The parking lot is full,” the bored female voice replied.

“Is there anywhere else in the vicinity where I can park?” I asked.

“Not in the vicinity,” the bored voice replied, “There’s a parking lot at the vehicle licensing office.”

Of course, I had no idea where the vehicle licensing office of Neuss even is, but the woman had already switched off the loudspeaker. So I thanked the Wild Listeners and tried to reverse my car, which caused further issues, because there was another car behind me. One of the Wild Listeners told the driver that the parking lot was full, so he reversed as well, and I was able to turn around.

However, there still was the question where to park my car. I was about open Google Maps and tried to locate the Neuss vehicle licensing office or any other parking options in reasonable distance. But then I realised that the hotel adjacent to the Stadthalle had a parking garage, so maybe I could park there and pay the hotel for the privilege. I also spotted parking spaces directly in front of the entrance to the Stadthalle and the hotel, which are probably intended for short term parking. Even better, one of them was free. There were also signs announcing “Private Parking”, but judging by the cars parked in those slots, con goers had clearly taken over these parking spaces as well. So I pulled into the free slot, thinking that, “A) It’s hardly the congoers’ fault, if the Stadthalle doesn’t have sufficient parking for its capacity, and B) they can’t tow us all and besides, I will happily pay for parking.” I looked around for a ticket machine, but there was none, so I just put my parking disc on the dashboard. I also decided that once there was room on the main parking lot again, I would move my car there.

Stadthalle Neuss and the Dorint Hotel

The entrance to Stadthalle Neuss and the Dorint Hotel

Sculpture outside Stadthalle Neuss

A large sculpture of two stylized human figures outside the main entrance of Stadthalle Neuss.

Once I had found a place to park my car, at least for the time being, I could finally go to the con. On my way into the Stadthalle, I saw a guy carrying a life-size Havoc Staff to his car. “Does Skeletor know that you have his staff?” I asked. He laughed.

This time around, having arrived late turned out to be an advantage, for there was no queue at all. I could just walk up to the ticket counter, show my pre-booked ticket, get my armband and walk in.

Foyer of Stadthalle Neuss during Los Amigos

The glass-enclosed lobby of Stadthalle Neuss during Los Amigos.

Life-size Flying Fists He-Man

And here is the man himself. A life-size Flying Fists He-Man welcomes visitors to the Los Amigos convention in Neuss.

I later learned that the same torrential rainfall that had hit me on the Autobahn in Wuppertal also hit Neuss, while con goers were queuing outside the Stadthalle. The organisers actually opened the doors a little early, but plenty of people still got soaking wet. So I guess the delay turned out to be lucky after all, because I didn’t have to run around the con in wet clothes.

The counter for the convention exclusives and resulting queue had been relocated to the coat check area underneath the lobby. That means that the glass-enclosed lobby was less crowded and also less hot.

Queue for exclusives at Los Amigos

The queue for Los Amigos convention exclusives in the coat check area of Stadthalle Neuss

Arriving late also meant that the exclusives I was interested in were already sold out and exclusive plushie dragon had not been shipped in time for the con. So I could bypass the exclusive queue. I did plan to buy a con t-shirt, but by the time I’d done my rounds, the t-shirt counter was unmanned, so I’ll have to do without.

The coat check area under the lobby is also where the toilets are. The signage had been adapted to the occasion and so the women’s bathrooms were marked with Teela and the men’s bathrooms with He-Man. Stadthalle Neuss does not have gender-neutral bathrooms, but if they did I wonder which character would have been chosen for the sign? Orko? The gender-fluid Double Trouble from the 2018 She-Ra cartoon?

Teela toilet sign

Even warrior goddesses need to use the bathroom on occasion.

In general, the crowd was approx. sixty percent male and forty percent female, i.e. the same gender breakdown that Mattel’s market research found was buying the toys in the 1980s. Some of the women were parts of couples, but most of them were also geeks in their right and not just wives/girlfriends dragged along by their parents. There was also a remarkable number of kids around who seemed to be enjoying themselves a lot. Seeing kids geek out about Masters of the Universe always makes me happy, because the fandom needs new blood to continue. In general, Los Amigos has a reputation as a family-friendly convention and also offers kids programming.

There were a few cosplayers and there was also a cosplay contest later in the day. I spotted a Man-at-Arms and no less than three She-Ras, one adult and two little girls. A one point, adult She-Ra and her two mini-mes posed together.

Like last year, there were also freebies to pick up. There were a bunch of Eternia mini-figures on offer and I picked up Teela/Sorceress as she appeared in the CGI kids show. I have the matching He-Man as a mini-figure, but not the Teela.

There was also a big stack of Masters of the Universe Revelation jigsaw puzzles with different pictures. Several people took multiple puzzles, but I took just one – featuring Teela, Andra and Evil-Lyn – because that weekend also happened to be the birthday of a neighbour kid and it would make a nice gift for her. She was happy about her gift, too, as was her little brother. When I took the boxed jigsaw puzzle to the car, an elderly couple who were obviously not con goers, but regular guests of the adjacent hotel, wondered, “Why are all of those people carrying boxes of jigsaw puzzles?”

“They’re being given away at the con,” I told them, “So if you want a jigsaw puzzle, feel free to take one. Though you may have to buy a ticket to the con first.”

“No, thank you,” the elderly lady replied, “We were just curious what was going on.”

Warriors of the Galaxy and the Weird Wonderful World of Knock-Off Toys

In the lobby of the Stadthalle, almost directly next to the ticket counter, was the booth of Formo Toys, an indie toy company which produces high quality fantasy action figures in the style of the vintage 5.5 inch Masters of the Universe figures. They have a line called Legends of Dragonore featuring various heroes and villains as well as dragons. The lines originally started out inspired by unproduced Masters of the Universe concept art and characters, but then turned into its own thing. I bought two of the Wave 1 figures – the two female characters Yondara and Pantera – at last year’s Los Amigos, because I really liked the designs and they fit perfectly into my Masters of the Universe Origins display, which suffered from a notable lack of female characters at the time.

Like last year, the Formo Toys booth was manned by Peer Brauner, the artist who sculpts the figures. He’s a local – well, sort of – and hails from Oberhausen. He even recognised me from last year and we chatted for a while. I asked him if Wave 2 of Legends of Dragonore was out yet, since that wave includes some intriguing characters such as a green-skinned witch, an African huntress, an indigenous character with wings and a tree/leaf creature. He replied that they had only just received the test shots and that it would be a while before Wave 2 came out, especially since Donald Trump’s insane tariffs are hitting Formo Toys hard like the rest of the US toy industry. Considering all the terrible things Trump has done and is continuing to do – Los Angeles was literally on the brink of civil war, while I was at the con – getting outraged about tariffs on toys might seem frivolous, but it is notable that Trump really seems to have it in for the toy industry – also note his comments about little girls not needing so many dolls or him threatening the “country of Mattel“. Which is an odd choice, because the toy industry isn’t harming anybody, but just producing products that bring joy and ideally also positively influence the development of children. So honestly, why would any government target the toy industry, especially smaller companies like Formo Toys or Neca or Super 7? It makes no sense at all. Not that anything Trump does makes sense.

But even though Wave 2 of Legends of Dragonore wasn’t available yet, Formo Toys did have something new on offer, so new that many stores still have these figures on pre-order, namely the triumphant return of the Warriors of the Galaxy.

So who on Earth are the Warriors of the Galaxy? The Warriors of the Galaxy have a remarkably long history going back all the way to 1983, when Mattel‘s new Masters of the Universe toyline turned out to be successful beyond anybody’s wildest imaginations. Other companies wanted a piece of the cake, too, and so various Masters of the Universe knock-off toylines were launched, both by established companies like Remco (whose World of the Warlord toyline, based on DC‘s sword and sorcery comics of the 1970s and 1980s, actually prompted a lawsuit from Mattel) and Galoob as well as by fly-by-night operations based in the Far East.

One of these fly-by-night outfits was Sungold Toys of Hong Kong. Not a lot is known about them beyond the fact that they appear to have been founded around 1980 and operated in the 1980s and 1990s, specialising in knock-offs of popular, mostly American toylines. In 1983, Sungold Toys introduced the Galaxy Warriors, a Masters of the Universe knock-off toyline that was in roughly the same scale and also copied the muscular bodies and somewhat squatted posture as well as the sword and sorcery theme of the Masters of the Universe figures.

I should probably say a few words about knock-off toylines. Even if you’ve never heard of knock-off toylines, I guarantee that you’ve seen them around and maybe even owned some of them. Like the name implies, knock-off toylines are copies of popular brand-name toylines that look just similar enough to fool the casual observer, but are mostly of notably lower quality. There are knock-offs of pretty much anything and they are usually sold in supermarkets, discount and dollar stores, drugstores, gas stations, market stalls, those messy Italian toy stores which seemed to carry every toy ever produced, only that you never had time to properly explore them (honestly, every German kid has a story about one of those Italian toy stores and that amazing toy they only ever saw there – or maybe it were always the same toy store, existing outside time and space and accesible via portals all over Italy), etc…, but also in regular toy and department stores, often alongside the very lines they were imitating. They’re usually manufactured in whatever the center of cheap consumer good manufacturing is at the time – Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1980s, Thailand and Vietnam in the 1990s and China today – and distributed both by no name fly-by-night companies as well as by companies that specialise in such products such as Simba Toys of Germany (who’ve since moved into the higher priced brand-name market)

The main selling point of knock-offs is that they are notably cheaper than the original, but close enough to the real thing that if you squint hard enough they will do. You might think that the target market for these knock-off toys are lower income families, but that’s not the complete story. Plenty of people who could afford the brand-name product buy knock-offs, because they just don’t care or can’t tell the toys apart or just need a quick, cheap gift for a birthday or to shut up a kid. Of course, kids were never fooled by knock-offs, but adults often were, since most adults don’t give a damn about toys and can’t tell a Galaxy Warrior from a Master of the Universe. Many people also tend to view toys as disposable and so go for the cheaper option, because they believe the kids won’t notice and they’ll only break the toys anyway. In my younger years, I was something of a crusader against knock-off toys and always insisted on buying brand-name products as gifts for kids in the family. “No, we’re not buying Petra or Sindy or Steffi Love, we’re buying a proper Barbie. No, we’re not buying Simba toy cars, we’re buying Hot Wheels. We’re not giving kids cheap crap as presents, because kids deserve quality, too.”

Nowadays, I have a more nuanced view of the issue. When buying toys for kids, I still go for brand name products – for reasons of safety and quality, though it should be noted that knock-off toys sold in the EU (and most likely the US, too) still have to pass all safety standards or they wouldn’t be allowed to be sold. However, I also respect that some knock-off toys are actually quite interesting and unique with regards to design or just so plain weird you can’t help but like them. There are also dedicated collectors of knock-off toylines and some of those cheap knock-off toys have become quite expensive on the aftermarket, particularly if they are mint on card, because these were cheap disposable toys that were never meant or expected to last. Indeed, I saw a whole table full of various vintage Masters of the Universe knock-off figures at the Los Amigos convention, including several Galaxy Warriors. One of the hosts of the Tales From the Fright Zone podcast collects knock-off figures and purchased several at that table.

Some knock-off toylines even become brand names of their own like the various Barbie knock-offs such as Sindy by Pedigree from the UK, Petra by Plasty from West Germany (the company still exists, the doll does not) or Steffi by VEB Puppenfabrik Waltershausen from East Germany who actually survived her West German rival and is still being produced as Steffi Love by Simba Toys.

One of the best known Masters of the Universe knock-off  toylines with its own identity is Rulers of the Sun by Olmec Toys. Created by Yla Eason in 1985, Sun-Man and the Rulers of the Sun were created not just to make a quick buck, but to fill a gap in the original toyline. Because in the 1980s, Masters of the Universe was a very white toyline. By 1985, there was only one Masters of the Universe character of colour, Jitsu, who was not only a villain, but also a cliché. Yla Eason was a black mother whose young son loved Masters of Universe, but was sad that there was no character in the toyline who looked like him (Clamp-Champ, the lone black character from the original Masters of the Universe toyline, was not introduced until 1987). So Yla Eason created the black hero Sun-Man and the Rulers of the Sun, a racially diverse toyline of Masters of the Universe style heroes featuring Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous characters and even a token white guy. Olmec Toys also produced racially diverse versions of other popular toylines of the day such as Princess of Power, G.I. Joe (which was more racially diverse than Masters of the Universe in the 1980s, but also managed to tell non-American kids that they weren’t welcome in the bloody tagline) and Barbie (which introduced the first black doll in 1966 and had been offering a black Barbie since 1980).

I strongly suspect that both Clamp-Champ and Netossa from Princess of Power directly owe their existence to Sun-Man, when Mattel realised that both Masters of the Universe and Princess of Power had no black characters at all (and note that Barbie had had black characters in 1966). And forty years later, there not only are several characters of colour in Masters of the Universe, but Mattel has also officially canonised the Rulers of the Sun toyline and reissued all of the characters in the Masters of the Universe Origins line.

Unlike other knock-off toylines, the Rulers of the Sun were never sold in Germany (Germany frequently didn’t get black characters, e.g. we didn’t get Clamp-Champ either, because it was assumed that they wouldn’t sell in what was still a very white country back then), so German fans have no nostalgic connection to these figures and some German fans also resented the Rulers of the Sun being included in the Masters of the Universe Origins line, supposedly because they were watering down, though good old-fashioned racism also plays into it. Therefore, I was happy to see a display celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Sun-Man and the Rulers of the Sun at Los Amigos. Because Sun-Man deserves to be celebrated for making toylines more diverse.

40 years of Sun-Man display at Los Amigos

The 40 Years of Sun-Man display at Los Amigos.

The Galaxy Warriors by Sungold Toys are another knock-off toyline which took on an identity of its own, though for an entirely different reason. The quality was pretty good by knock-off standards and the figures also had some interesting ideas and designs. Initially, there were twelve characters in the Galaxy Warriors line – a mix of humans, monsters and creatures with animal heads – plus a couple of beasts to ride upon. The figures were sold on blister cards with striking Frank Frazetta inspired (or rather just plain copied) artwork and some of the figures themselves were also obviously inspired by Frank Frazetta’s artwork. The characters had names, but no bios. Nor were there mini-comics, cartoons or any kind of storyline or even any indication who was good and who was evil, though there are theories. Basically, it was up to your own imagination who these characters were.

What makes the Galaxy Warriors legendary among the collectors of knock-off toys is that the basic molds were reused again and again for a plethora of knock-offs of the knock-off for years to come. In addition to the Galaxy Warriors, there are also Galaxy Fighters, Galaxy Heroes, Combo Heroes (these were quite common in Germany and sold at lots of supermarkets, durgstores, etc…), Freedom Fighters, Swords and Sorcerers, Galactic Gladiators, Lords of Insects, Troll Fighters, umpteen wrestling toylines and even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle knock-offs such as Turly Gang, Turtle Warriors or Tortoise Warriors. Sungold Toys also produced a She-Ra knock-off line called Galaxy Adventure Girl, which again spawned umpteen knock-offs of its own. The figures also come in lots of variations with regard to colours, accessories and packaging. Check out this YouTube channel for hilarious overviews and reviews of many of those Galaxy Warrior knock-off toylines. In short, the Galaxy Warriors  are a weird and wonderful rabbit hole of increasingly bizarre toys that is affectionately nicknamed the Galaxy Hole.

Formo Toys decided to bring back the Galaxy Warriors, now renamed Warriors of the Galaxy (though I doubt that anybody would have sued them for using the original name, since everybody and their sister was making Galaxy Warrior figures anyway), still based on the old designs from the 1980s, but now with much better sculpting and higher quality. When Peer Brauner showed me the Warriors of the Galaxy, I exclaimed, “Oh, wow, I remember those guys.  I used to see them all the time at the Comet supermarket at the Roland Center mall or the Woolworth store at the Berliner Freiheit mall or at Kaufhalle.”

Wave 1 of the Warriors of the Galaxy recreates three of the twelve original Galaxy Warriors: Magnon, a helmeted blonde human warrior who is the He-Man analogue of the Galaxy Warriors (okay, there’s also Rahh, who looks even more like He-Man, but whose status as a true blue Galaxy Warrior is unclear), Huk, a viking with a red beard and horned helmet and Baltard, an orc with pointy ears and a top knot, who is also one of the most memorable Galaxy Warriors, a) because his head sculpt was used over and over again in the various toylines reusing the Galaxy Warriors mold and so Baltard appeared in anything from wrestling lines to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles knock-offs, and b) because his delightfully grumpy facial expression makes him look as if he’d rather sit at home by the fire place with a mug of ale in hand and read a good book rather than be dragged out to fight all sorts of battles against all sorts of opponents. Baltard is such a knock-off legend that he even has his own Instagram page dedicated to the many weird and wonderful incarnations of Baltard, the orc warrior who never found a gang he did not want to join.

I was internally debating whether to get Baltard or Huk, since they’re both very cool, but then I decided to get both. And since I was buying two Warriors of the Galaxy already, I might as well buy Magnon, too, so I have the full first wave and Baltard and Huk have someone to fight.

Warriors of the Galaxy Wave 1 action figures.

Wave 1 of the Warriors of the Galaxy in packaging.

The packaging has very similar aesthetics to the vintage Galaxy Warriors packaging, though without blatant Frank Frazetta rip-offs and featuring the actual characters on the card. Baltard is billed as the “Unstoppable Creator of Chaos”, though he still looks as if he’d rather sit by the fire place with a mug of ale in his hand than creating chaos. Magnon is billed as the “Noble Hero of Planet Ferror” and Huk is billed as the “Bane of the Stormy Isles”, suggesting that he might be a bad guy. Or maybe he is just a little too fond of engaging in those popular viking pastimes of looting, raping and pillaging.

Unlike their predecessors from the 1980s, the new Warriors of the Galaxy have bios on the back of the packaging and they also come with mini-comics (which you can see here), telling their story. Magnon hails from the planet Ferror and is locked in a war with Huk’s vikings, when an intergalactic portal named the Galaxy Hole dumps all sorts of alien creatures, monsters and warriors onto his planet. Once of those warriors is Baltard, a mercenary who finds himself permanently on the losing side. The big bad appears to be another character from the vintage Galaxy Warriors line, Spikes, a faceless warrior with an all black body, sporting a green Spartan, who is one of the more memorable designs in the line. He recruits Baltard and Huk to his cause, though Huk finds out what Spikes is really up to – namely making a pact with various supervillains from around the galaxy – on the final page of his mini-comic. Meanwhile, Magnon receives a telepathic message from Yondara of Legends of Dragonore on the final page of his mini-comic, warning him of just such a pact. And since the Legends of Dragonore characters also pass through interdimensional portals as well in order to collect pieces of the divine armour of power (a very Jack Kirby-esque design that you can assemble, if you buy all the characters in the first wave), they can all interact.

Those mini-comics are a veritable treasure trove of knock-off toyline Easter Eggs. From the the original Galaxy Warriors, in addition to Huk, Baltard and Magnon, I spot Spikes (the faceless Spartan), Ygg (ugly minotaur monster creature), Thor (a human with evil eyes and a red helmet who looks like he stepped out of a 1930s science fiction cover), Rahh (an even more blatant He-Man rip-off than Magnon, who dies in Magnon’s arms on the page), Triton (human hero with dark curly hair), Tiger-Man (the sword and sorcery version of Tony the Tiger) and Anubi (a wolf/dog creature). From the Galaxy Fighters, there is Iguana (a reptilian monster warrior). From the Combo Heroes, I spot Unicorna (warrior with a unicorn head), Satanas (guy with a half-human and half-skull face and a batwing head dress, just in case there’s any doubt that he’s evil) and The Evil (green-skinned guy with mad eyes, assymetrically cut blonde hair and a long coat/vest, who looks more like a coked up 1980s pop star or a demented Ninja Turtle than actually evil). One of the Galaxy Adventure Girls shows up as well as well as Yondara and the evil magician Oskuro from Legends of Dragonore. And yes, I had to look up which character comes from which knock-off line and what their official names are. Though I wouldn’t be at all unhappy if all of those wonderful weirdos were eventually released. And indeed, Ygg and Spikes are supposed to come out in Wave 2 of Warriors of the Galaxy, which means that poor Magnon will have his hands full, because all the other Warriors of the Galaxy are villains, except for possibly Huk whom I still don’t see as a villain. But then, the villains have much cooler designs.

And here are my three Galaxy Warriors – pardon, Warriors of the Galaxy – out of the packaging.

Warriors of the Galaxy Baltard, Magnon and Huk

Baltard, Unstoppable Creator of Chaos, Magnon, Noble Hero of Planet Ferror and Huk, Bane of the Stormy Isles, reporting for duty.

Warriors of the Galaxy Huk, Baltard and Magnon

Emerging from the Galaxy Hole, Huk, Baltard and Magnon are ready for action.

And just for fun, my two Legends of Dragonore ladies Yondara and Pantera joined in as well.

Warriors of the Galaxy Baltard, Magnon and Huk and Legends of Dragonore Pantera and Yondara

Pantera gets cozy with Baltard, while Yondara is more taken by Huk and his manly beard than the noble hero Magnon.

Warriors of the Galaxy Huk, Baltard and Magnon and Legends of Dragonore Pantera and Yondara

Now Pantera is cozying up to Huk and his manly beard, while Yondara is proving that she is taller than Magnon.

I really like these figures. They’re not cheap, but the quality is great and they’re so much fun. In fact, I like them so much that I ordered the remaining four Legends of Dragonore figures of Wave 1 as well (which will also allow me to assemble the divine armour of power, which is currently a torso and head without limbs). And once Wave 2 of Legends of Dragonore and Warriors of the Galaxy comes out, they will certainly join my collection. Expect photos and maybe even a toy photo story.

Close Encounter with a Legend and More Con Adventures

At the table next to the Formo Toys booth, there was a lady with long white hair sitting at a table with a beautiful model of a concept art Castle Grayskull (this version). I initially assumed she was a regular con goer who’d sat down at an empty table (well, except for that Castle Grayskull) to rest for a moment, since places to sit down were somewhat short in supply at Stadthalle Neuss, which is sadly a common issue in Germany and elsewhere.

But then the lady got up and came over to the Formo Toys table, while I was chatting with Peer Brauner and asked me in English, if I could take a photo of her and Peer together. So I took a photo of the two of them with her phone. She said thank you, I said “No problem” and the lady returned to the table with the Castle Grayskull model.

Later I learned that this lady was Rebecca Taylor, widow of Mark Taylor who designed most of the early Masters of the Universe figures as well as Castle Grayskull. The model on the table was actually based on his original concept design. Rebecca Taylor also worked on Masters of the Universe herself and designed various stickers and cardboard inserts of the original Castle Grayskull playset. She was also the guest of honour at the con. Here is an interview with her and her late husband at the Battle Ram Blog.

As for why she asked me to take a photo of her and Peer Brauner, Mark Taylor was apparently involved in the Legends of Dragonore toyline before his death in December 2021, so Rebecca Taylor and Peer Brauner know each other quite well. They also did a panel together with artist Axel Gimenez later that day.

I continued making my round of the glass-enclosed lobby of Stadthalle Neuss. The displays and the stalls of the various artists and customisers were all in the lobby, while the programming and dealers room were in the auditorium at the center of the building.

Next, I stopped at the stall of the Retro Fabrik to buy episodes 5 and 6 of their new Masters of the Universe audio dramas on CD. Masters of the Universe audio dramas have a long history in Germany, because the vintage audio dramas by Europa were the entry point into the world of Masters of the Universe for many German kids in the 1980s, since the Filmation cartoon didn’t start airing in Germany until the late 1980s, unless you were lucky enough to have cable TV and access to Sky Channel. I was one of the lucky few and saw the Filmation cartoon via Sky Channel in the Netherlands and also spoke English, so I could actually understand it, so the cartoon was my primary Masters of the Universe influence. However, I was also familiar with the audio dramas.

The vintage audio dramas by Europa are long out of print and cannot be reissued either because of rights issues, though you can listen to them on YouTube. So Retro Fabrik issued a series of brand-new audio dramas with their own storyline and continuity. For the Los Amigos con, they’d also brought along David M. Schulze, the voice actor who plays He-Man and Prince Adam in the new audio dramas. Here’s a panel and Q&A session with the Retro Fabrik guys and David M. Schulze at the Los Amigos con. I actually saw this panel happening live on stage, while I was browsing the dealers room.

Retro Fabrik panel on stage

The Retro Fabrik audio drama panel at the 2025 Los Amigos convention in Stadthalle Neuss

Various artists were also displaying and offering their work in the lobby of Stadthalle Neuss, including Ken Coleman, Raul Barrero, who takes the amazing product photos of the Mondo figures, Axel Gimenez, who does much of the packaging artwork for the Origins line and also designed many of newer Snake People, and Simon Eckert, who does most of the packaging artwork for the Masterverse line. I chatted a bit with Simon and bought some art prints from him.

There were also some very cool custom figures on display (and for sale) in the lobby.

Masters of the Universe Custom figures

Various Masters of the Universe custom figures and dioramas on display at Los Amigos. You can also outfit your home bar with Masters of the Universe themed accessories

Custom Slime Pit He-Man and Revolution He-Man and Teela kiss artwork

Two entries in the Los Amigos custom contest: A great Slime Pit He-Man, i.e. He-Man is subjected to the Evil Horde’s Slime Pit and turned into a mindless zombie, and a drawing of the kiss between He-Man and Teela in Masters of the Universe Revolution.

Display of painted Masters of the Universe mini-figures.

An amazing display of handpainted Masters of the Universe mini-figures complete with Castle Grayskull. I think these are the mini-figures from the Fields of Eternia RPG.

Teela's costume from the 1987 Masters of the Universe live action movie

It’s a little hard to make out because of the light, but this mannequin is showing off the original costume worn by Chelsea Field as Teela in the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie.

There was also am exhibition of original animation cels from the Filmation He-Man and She-Ra cartoons, courtesy of Pierre, an animation art collector from Düsseldorf. See him interviewed on the bumo TV YouTube channel here.

Filmation animation cels on display at Los Amigos

A wall of Filmation animation cels on display at Stadthalle Neuss.

Filmation Animation cels on display at Stadthalle Neuss

Another look at some of the Filmation animation cels, mostly from the She-Ra cartoon, on display at Stadthalle Neuss: We have Hordak with a rather unique version of his arm cannon, Shadow Weaver being creepy, a Horde Trooper, Hordak in rocket mode, He-Man, Man-at-Arms, Tung Lasher groping Adora and Bow.

Filmation animation cels on display at Stadthalle Neuss

Yet more Filmation animation cels from the He-Man cartoon on display at Stadthalle Neuss: We have the Sorceress, Stratos, Prince Adam apparently making an ice sculpture of Orko and Man-e-Faces.

Filmation animation cels on display at Stadthalle Neuss

And even more Filmation cels, all from the He-Man cartoon, on display at Stadthalle Neuss: We have sleepy Orko, Cringer taking a dump, Queen Marlena giving someone the side eye and Teela in warrior mode.

There was also a custom display for Altaya‘s Masters of the Universe figures. These are non-articulated figures with a base and they were only sold in France by Altaya, a company that specialises in selling collectible figures, vehicles, etc… with magazines. What makes them notable is that Altaya made several characters like the royal archaeologist Melaktha or Horde Admiral Scurvy that never had a figure in any other line, though it’s also notable that a lot of Great Rebellion members are missing.

Altaya Masters of the Universe figure display

This Altaya Masters of the Universe display looks great and – as the sign announces – it is for sale. However, it’s also huge.

Inside the air-conditioned auditorium at the center of Stadthalle Neuss, there was the stage where the programming took place and the dealers room/flea market in what is normally the audience seating area, though the seating had been removed.

Los Amigos stage at Stadthalle Neuss

The currently empty stage at Stadthalle Heuss where programming took place. Note the large She-Ra banner.

Los Amigos stage at Stadthalle Neuss

The other half of the stage at Stadthalle Neuss decked out for the Los Amigos con. Here we have a He-Man banner to match the She-Ra banner on the other side. The various objects on the table and the floor are tombola prizes.

The Dealers Room and My Haul

The dealers room was a mix of professional vendors and private collectors. It seemed to me as if the dealers room was a little emptier and less busy than last year, though that might also have been because I arrived late. With regard to offerings, there were a lot of fairly recent Masters of the Universe Origins, Masterverse and CGI figures. I already have most of those, though I purchased a Masterverse New Eternia Skelcon.

Now I already have one Skelcon, but I wanted at least two to flank Skeletor’s throne, because the Skelcons are Skeletor’s army of minions and one Skelcon isn’t much of an army (for comparison, I have five Eternian Palace Guards).  Unfortunately, the Masterverse Skelcon was never released in Germany. This happens occasionally, e.g. the figures based on the 1987 are also difficult to find. But for some reason, it’s always the army builders that are hard to find here in Germany, see also the Origins Horde Trooper. So when I saw a Skelcon for a reasonable price for sale at Los Amigos, I snapped it up.

Masters of the Universe Masterverse Skelcon in box

The Masterverse New Eternia Skelcon in its box with beautiful artwork of Skelcons attacking Avion and battling the Avionian troops led by Stratos, courtesy of Simon Eckert.

Masters of the Universe Masterverse New Eternia Skelcon unboxed.

And here is the Skelcon unboxed and ready attack Skeletor’s enemies. These guys are one genuinely creepy army.

You can’t really make it out in the photo, but inside the mouth of the Skelcon, there are lots of little screaming faces to represent the souls consumed by these creatures. This is a reference to Masters of the Universe Revelation, where the Skelcons were revealed to be Eternian citizens who had been turned into monsters by some kind of corrosive mist and had their souls ripped out by Skeletor. Yes, Masters of the Universe can get very dark on occasion.

***

The throne room of Eternos Palace, shortly after Skeletor stole the Sword of Power and became Skelegod:

Masters of the Universe Masterverse Prince Adam, Andra and Teela battle Skelcons in the throne room of Eternos Palace

Skeletor has stolen the Sword of Power during this past of Masters of the Universe Revelation, so Adam is wielding a battle axe instead. In the cartoon, he takes it from a display on the wall of the throne room.

“Be careful. These monsters are really just transformed citizens. We don’t want to hurt them.”

“Adam, I’m pretty sure these things don’t remember who or what they used to be. And in case you hadn’t noticed, they’re trying to kill us. And now grab that axe properly and start chopping.”

***

There also was a sizeable number of vintage Masters of the Universe figures and accessories on offer, both loose and in varying states of completeness and mint on card.  One vendor had a whole table of vintage mint on card figures, which were on sale for three to four figures, even though several of the blisters had yellowed and sometimes the cards were faded and beaten up, too. The whole display looked as if someone had broken into a toy shop or department store that closed sometime in the 1980s (there was a creepy store like that in the town of Berne, which had been closed for ages, allagedly because the owner was murdered, yet the mannequins and merchandise were still inside the shop, unchanged since the 1970s, though increasingly faded from exposure to sunlight through the display windows) and found those poor figures still on the shelves, exposed to the elements. And to be fair, that’s usually where  mint on card or in box toys come from these days – they’re warehouse finds. Though one dealer showed off one of those warehouse finds – a whole box of mint on card vintage Dragon Blaster Skeletor figures – at the con and the packaging of those figures looked absolutey pristine, as if they’d come through a time portal straight from 1985. There is one of those Dragon Blaster Skeletors on offer on the website of the vendor and for the low price of 1399.99 EUR he can be yours. But with toys that old, the condition of both toy and packaging is always a gamble, even when mint, which is probably also why I don’t even consider buying vintage figures on card, even if the pristine examples occasionally trigger a little pang of nostalgia of seeing these figures in a store back in the day.

That said, I was sorely tempted by a vintage Slime Pit and would probably have inquired what it costs, if it hadn’t sold right before my eyes. But since we are getting the Fright Zone in Origins, I suspect that we will eventually get the Slime Pit as well. The other vintage toy that tempted was a Dragon Walker – my favourite Masters of the Universe vehicle. But if I ever get a Dragon Walker, I want a functioning one, because the bizarre movement pattern is half the fun about this one.

Los Amigos Dealers Room

A look across the dealers room at the 2025 Los Amigos in Stadthalle Neuss

Los Amigos dealers room

Another look across the dealers room at the 2025 Los Amigos in Neuss. On the right, you can actually see the warehouse find case of vintage Dragon Blaster Skeletors being opened and shown off.

But while the vintage and modern era of Masters of the Universe were well represented, everything inbetween – Princess of Power, New Adventures, 200X and Classics – were less well represented, which was quite different from last year. I saw a handful of New Adventures figures, but the only vintage Princess of Power toy I spotted was a mint-in-box Clawdeen. If she’d been loose and in good condition, I might have bought her for my vintage Catra, but not in box.

As for 200X, there was one stall which had quite a lot of 200X figures, both mint-on-card and loose. I don’t systematically collect 200X figures, but I have been picking up figures and characters I like here and there. And this particular stall had a 200X Evil-Lyn figure and I bought her. She is beautiful – and still the only proper 200X Evil-Lyn ever made. Both Classics and Origins made an Evil-Lyn figure in 200X colours, but just repainted the regular body (which is also Teela’s body) rather than give her her 200X gown.

The Masters of the Universe 200X and Classics Evil-Lyn

The 200X Evil-Lyn and the interpretation of the same look in the Masters of the Universe Classics line: Note that the boots and outfit are just repaints of the regular Evil-Lyn outfit, which is in turn a repaint of Teela’s outfit. My Classics Lyn is sporting the helmet-less with the short hair, which is how she appeared in the 200X cartoon.

Masters of the Universe 200X action figure

My small but growing of 200X Masters of the Universe figures. We have Two-Bad, Beast-Man, Mer-Man, Evil-Lyn, Keldor, Blood Armour Skeletor, Prince Adam and Serpent Claw Man-at-Arms. It’s notable that the 200X Skeletor clearly doesn’t like shoes, both as Keldor and Skeletor.

Poor Duncan and Prince Adam are vastly outnumbered faced with five Evil Warriors (six, if you count Keldor and Skeletor separately). I came close to buying a loose 200X Mekaneck at Los Amigos to bolster the ranks of the Heroic Warriors, but one of his arms had fallen off.

I do have a 200X Teela (purchased at Marchè Noir), but she is a carded and I have been debating whether to take her out – it is twenty-year-old carded figure after all. Though the 200X packaging isn’t as iconic as the vintage packaging and I don’t collect packaged toys anyway, so I should just go ahead and open her. After all, it’s my figure and my money

That said, I do not have a 200X He-Man, even though there were umpteen He-Man variants, including really bizarre ones like Snake Hunter He-Man, Samurai He-Man or Jungle Attack He-Man, in the 200X line. And I have seen 200X He-Man figures for sale, but for some reason I never saw one I liked. I should probably remedy that eventually.

The 200X cartoon actually shows us Keldor’s and Lyn’s first meeting. They’re both trying to steal the same artefact – or rather Keldor sends his minions to steal the artefact and only reveals himself, after Lyn makes short work of them.

Here is my take on that scene:

Keldor confronts Evil-Lyn, while Two-Bad, Beast-Man and Mer-Man look on.

In the 200X cartoon, Lyn beats up Beast-Man, Tri-Klops and Kronis (the future Trap-Jaw) and Two-Bad doesn’t join the Evil Warriors until roughly halfway through the first season. However, I only have Two-Bad, Beast-Man and Mer-Man, so they will have to do.

“Oh, you’re on trouble now, girly. Give it to her, boss! Show her that no one misses with the Evil Warriors.”

“Evil? I thought we were the Outcast Warriors?”

“Evil Warriors sounds cooler and scarier.”

“Keep away from me! I just kicked the butts of your minions and I can kick yours, too.”

“I doubt that. But where are my manners? Allow me to introduce myself. I am Keldor, future King of Eternia. And your name is…?”

“Lyn of Zalesia. Now Evil-Lyn, sorceress, thief and apparently the person who will beat up the future King of Eternia, if you don’t let me go right now.”

“But why so fast, my pretty? You impressed me, when you dealt with my minions…”

“Uhm, boss, you’re supposed to zap her, not flirt with her.”

“…and I am not easily impressed. I could use someone with your talents. Join me and I will give you riches and power beyond imagination. For every king needs a queen…”

“Hmm, join a gang called the Evil Warriors….”

“The Outcast Warriors, the Disinherited, those unfairly ignored and persecuted by the ruling class.”

“You know, Keldor, I’ve heard of you. The Gar halfblood, the first-born prince denied the throne and cruelly banished from the palace, come to take back what should have been his in the first place. I like what I’ve heard, for I have no love for the House of Miro and the Council of Elders myself. But I like what I see even more. For none of the stories about Keldor, the outcast prince, mentioned how handsome you are. So yes, I will join you and then we shall rule Eternia side by side, together.”

“Uhm, why does she get to be queen and not one of us?”

“Because she’s a girl and we’re not, idiot.”

“Keldor could still pick one of us. Who says the consort needs to be a girl?”

***

Keldor is canonically bisexual, BTW – as mentioned in the Masters of the Multiverse comic mini-series. Though he tends to prefer women – most notably Lyn and Crita from New Adventures, where Skeletor is positively charming, when flirting with her. With Lyn, he’s mostly just abusive.

However, the romantic bliss of Keldor and Lyn is short-lived, because Keldor manages to get his face burned off, when the acid he throws at Randor backfires on himself. Lyn takes the mortally injured Keldor to Hordak, so Hordak can heal him. However, in the process Keldor becomes Skeletor and the change affects not just his body, but also his mind. And the newly born Skeletor is not only his usual terrible self, but also seems to have no affection for Lyn in this incarnation, so Lyn falls out of love with him and proceeds to try to betray him by freeing first the Snake Men from the void and then trying to free Hordak from Despondos, because the 200X Evil-Lyn has a thing for freeing terrible monsters from their imprisonment to stick it to Skeletor.

The 200X Evil-Lyn never shows any sexual interest in Duncan, neither on screen nor in the comics, but I still thought it would be fun to have them flirt.

Lyn flirts with Duncan, while Skeletor looks on.“In the name of the King, you’re under arrest, Lyn of Zalesia. And now put down that staff and the dagger.”

“I don’t think so, Duncan.”

ZAP!

“Can’t move.”

“That’s paralysis spell. Love the new armour, by the way, Duncan. It suits you. But why so grim, when we could have so much fun together?”

“Because I’m the royal Man-at-Arms and you’re a criminal and Skeletor’s lover besides.”

“Skeletor’s lover? Pah, that’s long over. Well, Keldor, he was devilishly handsome, smart, ambitious and he was going to make me queen of Eternia. But Skeletor isn’t Keldor, not anymore. He’s rude, cruel and besides, he lost all interest in me.”

“Lyn, check out my new blood armour. Isn’t it great? Oh, you’ve captured Duncan. Good job. Throw him in the dungeon. We’ll torture him later.”

“See what I mean? He’s an idiot. That’s his third new armour this month. And trust me, you don’t want to see what his Mecha Blade, Serpent Crush and Disco armours look like. Honestly, why on Eternia does anybody need Disco armour?”

“If I’m your prisoner, Lyn, could you just lock me up already, because I don’t want to listen to your domestic disputes with Skeletor.”

“Really, Duncan, you’d chose a dark, damp cell over my soft, warm bed? Cause I could make you my personal sex slave. Skeletor wouldn’t even notice. He’s way too obsessed with breaking into that blasted castle. So, what will it be, Duncan?”

***

Lyn actually does make Duncan her personal sex slave in the six-issue mini-series, which started off the DC Comics Masters of the Universe run in 2011. In that series, Skeletor has won and conquered Eternia and instead of killing the heroes, which would have been the smart thing to do, he steals their memories and brainwashes them into forgetting who they are. But then their memories start coming back…

Duncan – wearing very few clothes – ends up as Lyn’s right-hand man on some tropical island which she rules. We never see anything happen between them, but it’s strongly impied that they’re lovers or rather that Duncan is Lyn’s personal sex slave, since he clearly didn’t consent to any of this. As mentioned above, Masters of the Universe can be quite dark on occasion.

There were a number of Classics figures of offer, but there were only a handful I was interested in. But then, my Classics collection has grown a lot in the past year.  In the end, it came down to a choice between two figures – both quite expensive. One was Hordak in his Filmation colours, who comes packagd with Imp. The other was a Classics Battle Cat, for while I have a Masterverse Battle Cat and he looks great, the Classics He-Man cannot ride on him, because he’s too big. This is time where the slight size difference between the Classics and Masterverse – about half an inch – becomes a problem.

In the end, I went with Battle Cat, because I’ve seen the Filmation style Hordak on eBay for cheaper and he will eventually come up again. Besides, the Classics Battle Cat looks amazing and is probably the best version of Battle Cat. So my Classics He-Man now has his best friend:

Masters of the Universe Classics He-Man and Battle CatMasters of the Universe Classics He-Man on Battle CatOf course, there were other vintage toys on offer as well in addition to the various Masters of the Universe lines, though fewer than at Toyplosion. I spotted a number of Star Wars figures, some Bravestarr, MASK, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Real Ghostbusters toys as well as Playmobil. There also were quite a lot of modern DC Comics and Marvel Legends figures. Meanwhile, there were almost no examples of girl-aimed toys like Barbie, Jem, My Little Pony, Care Bears, etc…

I also came across a stall which had a remarkable number of toys based on the rtaher obscure Filmation Ghostbusters cartoon (not to be confused with The Real Ghostbusters), including the two female figures Futura and Jessica. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Filmation Ghostbusters cartoon, even if it was overshadowed by The Real Ghostbusters, and secretly hoped that we’d get a crossover (which was never going to happen), because the US is clearly big enough for two teams of Ghostbusters, cause double busting makes you deel twice as good. The toys based on the Real Ghostbusters were easy to find even in Europe, but as a kid I only ever saw toys based on the Filmation Ghostbusters once in – yes, you guessed it – one of those messy toystores in Italy. So seeing these very obscure toys twice in the space of less than a year (first at Toyplosion and now at Los Amigos) makes me wonder whether the universe is trying to tell me something.

And that was it for my pretty epic Los Amigos haul:

Los Amigos haul

And here is my Los Amigos haul: Clockwise from the top left we have the Masters of the Universe Classics Battle Cat, a Masters of the Universe Revelation puzzle, an Eternia Mini Teela figure from the CGI Series, a Ruhrpott mug and tote bag from Mine Zollverein in Essen, two Masters of the Universe audio dramas on CD, the Formo Toys Warriors of the Galaxy Magnon, Huk and Baltard, a Masterverse Skelcon action figure, the 200X Evil-Lyn action figure and three art prints by Simon Eckert.

Other People’s Con Reports

Of course, there are also plenty of other reports about the 2025 Los Amigos con.

Rudolf Barnholt reports about the con for the local paper Neuß-Grevenbroicher Zeitung. Fun fact: Hape Kerkeling, the German comedian from the Ruhrgebiet region who was mentioned in part 1, frequently portrays one Horst Schlämmer, a fictional reporter working for this very newspaper.

The local news site Rhein-Wied News also has a report about the Los Amigos convention, sadly uncredited and illustrated with what appaears to be AI images. Honestly, how hard can it be to find official images of He-Man?

German toy collectors in general and Masters of the Universe fandom in particular are concentrated on YouTube, so there are a lot of YouTube videos about the con.

Goreminister shares a documentary about the 2025 Los Amigos with lots of footage and interviews and also mentions the torrential rain.

Customiser Master Ölli shares his impressions of the 20215 Los Amigos.

Toy Collector NRW shares a video with footage and impressions of the 2025 Los Amigos, as does Infoxicating Coffee Break.

There also are a lot of haul videos: Der Movie Picker shares some impressions of the con as well as his haul (and I’m so jealous of that Disco Skeletor). The two hosts of Tales From the Fright Zone share their impressions of the 2025 Los Amigos and their haul. Der Sitti shares his and his wife’s haul and some impressions of the con. The highlight is a vintage Slime Pit – quite possibly the same one I had my eye on. DJ Shifrocs shares his haul at the VTS Experience YouTube channel. It Waits TV also shares his haul as well as a some footage of the con.

Chriss Tainment, who is one of the organisers and also moderated the panels, shares his haul and he did buy several of those Filmation Ghostbusters figures I had my eye on. Silent Mike also shares his haul and he also bought those Filmation Ghostbusters figures. Amazing how many people remember loving the Filmation Ghostbusters cartoon, especially since it is often considered the lesser of the two Ghostbusters cartoons. Which is wrong, both Ghostbusters cartoons are great in their own way.

The Quest for Lunch Revisited

By the time I’d finished my Los Amigos rounds and taken my haul to the car and relocated my car to the actual carpark, which had emptied out a little by now, it was shortly before two PM, i.e. high time for lunch.

Now last year, the food options at Los Amigos were rather limited. The Los Amigos organisers had promised that there would be more food options on site this year, but in practice it was still just burgers, sausages (particularly the ever popular Currywurst, fries, crepes and drinks. The lines for these rather underwhelming food offerings were also pretty long.

Los Amigos food area

A look across the outdoor food zone at Los Amigos in Neuss

I did got myself a bottle of water at the drinks stall – and the operator had to go hunting for one, because the drinks stall mostly seemed to be focussed on selling beer. But otherwise, I decided to go looking for food outside the con.

Unfortunately, there were no dining options in the immediate surroundings of Stadthalle Neuss. There were dining options in the city center, but the city center of Neuss is pedestrianised and there are few parking options in this area. Of course, I could have tried walking from the Stadthalle to the city center, but I wasn’t sure how far it was, plus I’d been walking around the con for several hours and wasn’t in the mood for spending more hours walking around Neuss, especially given the weather.

However, Google Maps showed my a street in the suburb of Furth with several restaurants and a public parking lot near-by, which looked promising. So I programmed Else for the address and parked my car on the public parking lot (which was even free). The parking lot turned out to be next to a small park, which was flanked by two post-war churches – one Catholic and the other Lutheran – on each side.

Christ King Church in Neuss-Furth

The Catholic Christ King church in Neuss-Furth, built in 1955.

Mourning woman with peace dove

This sculpture is called “Mourning woman with peace dove” and was created by Neuss-born artist Marga Grove-Markovic in 1963.

Once I’d parked my car, I went in search of the restaurants. Alas, the first restaurant – a Japanese place – turned out to be closed. The next one turned out to be a pizza delivery service. Then an Indian restaurant, also closed. Another pizza delivery service. A Thai restaurant, closed. And finally a café, also – you guessed it – closed.

As I’ve mentioned before, ever since the pandemic it has been getting increasingly difficult even in bigger cities to find a place to have lunch, especially if you avoid fast food chains like McDonald’s or Burger King. Pre-2020 I don’t recall ever having serious problems finding a place to have lunch anywhere. That is, when I was a teenager, we were on holiday in Northern Bavaria and had problems finding places to eat, but that was because all the restaurants were German country inns (which ironically are an endangered species by now), which had zero vegetarian options at the time. Nowadays, however, the only option is often döner kebap and while I don’t mind döner once in a while, I don’t want to eat it all the time.

Besides, there wasn’t even a döner shop in this part of Neuss, at least none that was open. The only place that was open was a bakery with a small café – a branch of Bakery Büsch, a chain from Kamp-Lintfort with branches all over the Ruhrgebiet – attached to an Edeka supermarket.  So I headed to the bakery, only to find that their food options were highly limited – it is a small bakery café attached to a supermarket, after all. I finally ordered a tomato and mozzarella sandwich. It wasn’t bad at all, just not what I would consider a proper lunch.

Tomato and mozzarella sandwich

A tomato and mozzarella sandwich, courtesy of Bakery Büsch in Neuss-Furth.

Germany is currently experiencing a wave of restaurants closing and going bankrupt as reported here, here and here. The reasons are high inflation – particularly food and energy costs have risen disproportionately – as well as rising wages and lack of personel. And since the high inflation is hitting the entire country, people are cutting back on non-vital expenses like eating out. It’s all very frustrating. I don’t eat out all that often, but when I’m away from home I need to eat something. And yes, in retrospect I should have gone into the city center, but the problem of finding a place to eat is still pervasive.

While I was munching on my tomato and mozzarella sandwich, it started to rain again. I considered ordering another coffee, allowing me to linger for longer and wait out the rain. However, this was only a brief shower and by the time I finished my sandwich, the rain had stopped.

So I made my way back to my car. By now, it was three forty-five in the afternoon, so still time enough to explore the area before heading to my hotel. But that’s a tale for part 3.

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Happy Birthday Heikedine Körting, Queen of the German Audio Drama

Heikedine Körting, audio drama director, producer, voice actress and lawyer, celebrates her eightieth birthday today.

If you’re not German, you’re likely thinking “Heikedine Who?” But if you grew up in Germany in the past fifty years, Heikedine Körting probably influenced a big part of your childhood, whether you know her name or not. Because Heikedine Körting is the producer and director of the popular Europa audio dramas.

If you grew up in (West) Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, audio dramas on cassette tape were an integral part of your childhood. They were ubiquitous, sold in supermarkets, drugstores, toy stores, department stores, book stores, magazine and tobacco stores all over West Germany, often in bright yellow displays directly by the cash register. They were also cheap, costing 5 or 6 Deutschmarks per tape. In short, these audio dramas on cassette were the ideal quick gift, to reward a kid after being dragged through the shops by their Mom or Grandma all day or for birthday parties of schoolmates.

They were an excellent values, too, for those 5 or 6 Deutschmarks per tape gave you roughly 45 minutes of entertainment. The production values were amazing – a full cast of excellent voice actors, often veteran stage actors, sound effects, music, often full orchestral scores – all for audio dramas aimed at children. The stories were usually well written by authors who specialised such this sort of thing such as horror and science fiction author H.G. Francis. There were dozens of audio drama series available for every age range and gender and in every genre, including lots of licensed properties.

Audio dramas on tape for sale at Marché Noir

A selection of audio dramas on tape for sale at the Marché Noir retro fair in Dorsten. The series include Gruselserie (The Spooky Series), Jan Tenner (a Flash Gordon science fiction series), Masters of the Universe, Princess of Power, both Filmation and the Real Ghostbusters, Asterix, James Bond, Knight Rider, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The -Team and The Simpsons.

Audio dramas aimed at children were not without controversy, particularly in the early years. There were disparaging comments about “electronic grandmothers”, since the first audio dramas were usually fairy tale based and the usual pedagogogic busybodies complained that listening to audio dramas would harm children’s reading abilities. However, those busybodies also said the same thing about comics, television, movies and dime novels to the point that it’s a miracle that we can read at all. Though there were parents who listened to that nonsense (like mine) and when confronted about it, would say that “But we only wanted the best for you and the experts said…” or “But your cousins read Donald Duck comics and listened to audio dramas and look at their school performance.” The cousins in question BTW happened to be undiagnosed dyslexics growing up in a toxic home.

Nonetheless, every West German kid had at least a few of those audio dramas on cassette (including me) and they also found their way to East Germany in parcels or as gifts. We would pop the tape into the player before falling asleep or as entertainment during long road trips o as background noise while doing homework. When you were on a school trip, the bus driver would usually pop an audio drama into the player (or sometimes a mixtape) to keep his passengers quiet and happy. The tapes were also swapped around and shared and they were so ubiquitous to the point that it never even occurred to me that audio dramas on cassette were mainly a West German thing and not nearly as prevalent elsewhere. I know the US had Kid Stuff records and I even owned a few – since my parents’ worries about comics and audio dramas harming my reading abilities miraculously vanished when the media in question was in English or another foreign language – but with regard to production quality there’s really no comparison.

There were four companies producing these audio dramas, Karussell, Kiosk, Maritim and Europa, but as a kid you didn’t pay attention to the label, only to the series and story. And you certainly had no idea who the people behind those cassettes were. Of these companies, Europa very much pioneered the form. Europa was founded in 1966 as the audio drama focussed imprint of the record company Miller International by record producer and music scholar Andreas E. Beurmann. The initial offerings was on fairy tales on vinyl records, still narrated rather than full cast dramas.

In 1971, Andreas Beurmann met a young law student named Heikedine Körting at a party. The two became friends and eventually fell in love, though Beurmann was 17 years older than Heikedine Körting. They married in 1979 and stayed together until Beurmann’s death in 2016.

As for Heikedine Körting, she had a difficult childhood like many Germans born during or immediately after WWII. She was born on June 18, 1945, in the village of Thalbürgel in Thuringia, barely a month after the end of WWII. According to this profile, Heikedine Körting was literally born in a blueberry field, while her mother was picking blueberries to support the family. The newborn was then put into a manger and licked by curious cows. The family soon relocated to Lübeck in West Germany, where Heikedine Körting grew up as a dreamy kid and natural entertainer who put on puppet shows for her friends. At the age of nine, she contracted polio and had to spend months in bed with only her imagination to entertain her, though she eventually made a full recovery. Public service announcement: Polio is a terrible disease that has thankfully been almost completely eradicated by vaccination, so please vaccinate your children and yourself, because this is one scourge we don’t want to come back.

Heikedine Körting attended the gymnasium (academic focussed 13-year grammar school in Germany) when this was still highly unusual for girls, since “they only would get married anyway” (Someone honestly said that to my parents, where I could hear it, as late as 1985. Joke’s on them that I never married). She got in trouble for writing essays that were too imaginative (I can sympathise). After graduation, she attended law school and became Germany’s youngest independent lawyer, though her true calling lay elsewhere.

Shortly after she met Andreas Beurmann, he invited Heikedine Körting to his recording studio. She taught herself how to use the mixing console and started directing and producing audio dramas. In 1973, Heikedine Körting became the head producer and director for Europa‘s extensive line of audio dramas, a position she retains to this day.

Heikedine Körting was largely responsible for Europa‘s shift away from narrated fairy tales to full cast audio dramas and also for the expansion into adventure, mystery, science fiction, fantasy and horror series aimed at older kids. She recruited well-known stage and voice actors for Europa – people like Hans Paetsch, who voice Hui Buh the castle ghost from the eponymous series and narrated many of the fairy tales, Peter Pasetti, who was the German voice of Humphrey Bogart and voices Alfred Hitchcock in The Three Investigators and Skeletor in Masters of the Universe, Norbert Langer, the German voice of Tom Selleck and John Nettles of Midsomer Murders fame as Prince Adam/He-Man in Masters of the Universe, German film and TV star Horst Frank as Inspector Reynolds in The Three Investigators or Jürgen Thormann, the German voice of Michael Caine as Ram-Man and Zodac in Masters of the Universe. Listening to these audio dramas, especially as an adult, can be a weird experience, because of all the famous voices. Part of the reason why Heikedine Körting was able to recruit such high calibre actors for audio dramas aimed at children was that many stage actors, particularly older ones, were frustrated by the direction that German theatre was heading in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where directors were more interested in making political points that may or may not be related to the play in question rather than in putting on reasonably faithful productions (also see this post at Galactic Journey about an early example of that trend). In retrospect, it’s funny that the much criticised “Regietheater” of the 1970s and 1980s is indirectly responsible for my generation being exposed to excellently acted audio dramas as kids.

The range of audio dramas produced by Europa under the auspices of Heikedine Körting is stunning. The most famous are probably the teen mystery series The Three Investigators, in nigh continuous production since 1979 and still with the same voice actors who are now gentlemen in their 50s and 60s rather than teens, and TKKG, which started in 1981. Also still in production to this day are Hui Buh, the Castle Ghost (started in 1973), The Famous Five (started in 1978), based on Enid Blyton’s eponymous kids adventure series, and Hanni and Nanni (started in 1972), based on Enid Blyton’s St. Clare’s boarding school novels. Past series include the SF series Commander Perkins (1976 to 1982) and Perry Rhodan, based on the eponymous dime novel series, the horror series Gruselserie (literally Spooky Series), Castle Schreckenstein, Larry Brent and Macabros, which were controversial due to being bloodier and scarier than the usually terminally bland West German kids’ entertainment, because audio dramas could get away with more than visual media. In the 1980s, Europa also produced a lot of audio dramas based on licensed properties such as The A-Team, Knight Rider, A Nightmare on Elm Street, James Bond 007, Asterix, both the Filmation and the Real Ghostbusters (cause double busting makes you feel twice as good), Bravestarr, Rainbow Brite and of course both Masters of the Universe and Princess of Power.

There are two different versions about how the Masters of the Universe audio dramas came to be. One is that Heikedine Körting was strolling through the Nuremberg Toy Fair when she saw Masters of the Universe figures on display at the Mattel booth and asked the Mattel rep whether there was any media to go with these toys and whether she could licence them to produce audio dramas. The other version is that Heikedine Körting saw her young nephews playing with Masters of the Universe toys and when she asked, if there was a story to go with these toys, she was told, “No, there isn’t” (which was true in the early 1980s). So Heikedine Körting contacted Mattel and licences Masters of the Universe to produce audio dramas. But whichever version of the story is the true one, the Masters of the Universe audio dramas were huge successes and continue to the be the canonical version of Masters of the Universe for many German fans. The German Masters of the Universe audio dramas, penned by the prolific H.G. Francis, also introduced Anti-Eternia He-Man, the evil parallel universe counterpart of He-Man who has since made his way into the wider Masters of the Universe cosmos.

Masters of the Universe Classics Anti-Eternia He-Man

“Happy Anti-Birthday to you, Ms. Körting. Have some anti-cake!”

Masters of the Universe Classics He-Man versus Anti-Eternia He-Man

“Get lost, imposter. I want to wish Ms. Körting a happy birthday.” – “Imposter? It’s you who’s the imposter, you goody two-shoes.”

Part of the reason why Masters of the Universe and the other licenced audio dramas were so successful in West Germany is that while we got most of the toylines of the 1980s, we didn’t get the cartoons that went with them, because in the three TV-channel world of early 1980s West Germany, the public channels would not broadcast those terrible violent American cartoons (where no one ever got seriously hurt and He-Man and friends delivered moral messages at the end of every episode). So unless you were lucky enough to have cable TV early or had access to foreign TV, the audio dramas were the only story you got to go with your toys. And they were good and usually a little harder edged, more violent and more grown-up than the cartoons, even if the Filmation cartoon was a stronger influence on me personally than the audio dramas.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Europa audio dramas were huge success. Heikedine Körting was awarded a staggering 180 golden and platinum records for the audio dramas she directed and produced, making her one of the most successful female recording artists of all time, outselling the likes of Madonna or Taylor Swift.

But difficult times were coming for Europa, because the sales of audio dramas on cassette starting dwindling in the late 1980s and fell off a cliff in the early 1990s. The reasons were the increasing shift away from audio tapes towards CDs, the proliferation of private TV, which brought a huge expansion of cartoons and other shows popular with young viewers and also the proliferation of video games. By the early 1990s, all of Europa‘s many series had been cancelled except for the blockbusters The Three Investigators and TKKG.

However, the fortunes of Europa reversed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as more and more of the now grown-up listeners of yesteryear got on the internet, rediscovered the audio dramas of their childhood and also connected with other fans. The prices for vintage audio dramas on cassette tape or vinyl skyrocketed – a cassette that cost 5 or 6 Deutschmark in the 1980s now goes for twenty times that. In response, Europa reissued many of their popular series starting in 1999, though in some cases series could not be reissued because of rights issues involving the music. The licensed series were mostly also not reissued, because the original licence didn’t allow for it and the property would have to be relincensed, often from new owners who were not exactly sympathetic. The Three Investigators even toured as live stage shows with the original voice actors. Europa also began producing new instalments of popular series such as The Three Investigators, TKKG or Gruselserie as well as brand-new series such as Teufelskicker (Devil Players) about a football team. Oddly enough, I remember winning a football themed audio drama on cassette at the Bürgerpark Tombola (a local charity tombola to finance a park) sometime in the 1980s. Since I didn’t care for a football themed story about boys, I swapped it with my cousins (the undiagnosed dyslexics whose school performance caused my parents to believe so much nonsense) for something more to my taste.

Amazingly, Europa only stopped offering audio dramas on cassette tape in 2011, largely because audio tape was nigh impossible to source by then. You can still buy their offerings on CD or as MP3 and you can also stream them. Heikedine Körting still produces and directs Europa‘s audio dramas and the various sound effects are still sourced from analogue tapes and not digital.

The legacy of Heikedine Körting also continues to bear fruit elsewhere, because Germany still has a rich environment of new companies producing audio dramas inspired by the cassette tapes of yore. The vintage horror dramas have inspired productions like Blutige Zeche in Bottrop (Bloody Mine in Bottrop). The science fiction series Jan Tenner (which was not produced by Europa, but by rival Karussell) has just made a comeback with brand-new stories and even Masters of the Universe has a new series of audio dramas.

So a happy 80th birthday to Heikedine Körting and thank you for all the wonderful stories that kept generations of kids entertained.

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Frontpage News

We interrupt your regularly scheduled con coverage, because I’ve been in the news again, for Alexandra Penth interviewed me for the Weser-Kurier about my Hugo nomination as part of the Galactic Journey team. You can read the article here. I also really love the photo of me in my Foundation t-shirt, posing with the 2022 Best Fan Writer Hugo.

And here is what the article looks like in the actual paper:

Regionale Rundschau front page from June 10, 2025Yes, I made the front page above the fold. Of course, it’s only the front page of the regional supplement for Stuhr, Weyhe and Diepholz county, but it is still the front page.

And while on the subject of Galactic Journey, I forgot to link to my latest article where I review the 1970 science fiction novel (well, it’s more of a fix-up actually) A Circus of Hells by Poul Anderson. It’s a Dominic Flandry novel, entertaining but also rather dated.

In the early years of my science fiction reading journey, I read a lot of Poul Anderson and a lot of Dominic Flandry, because Anderson was very prolific and the spinner rack at my local import bookstore always carried at least one book by him.

But then I discovered Lois McMaster Bujold and read The Warrior’s Apprentice almost directly after a Flandry novel, which might have been A Circus of Hells (I own it and definitely read it) and Bujold told a similar story – spy action and intrigue in space – so much better than Anderson ever did.

What is more, the winners of the 2024 Nebula Awards were announced while I was at the Los Amigos con. I’m not sure if I’ll do my usual commentary post on the winners this year, but I’m overall satisfied with the Nebula winners and think they are great choices.

The next instalment of my epic Los Amigos con report should come out soon, hopefully tomorrow, so stay tuned.

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He-Man Goes Ruhrpott – Cora’s Adventures at the 2025 Los Amigos Masters of the Universe Convention in Neuss, Part 1: It’s Roadtrip Time Again

Last year, I attended the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe convention in Neuss, which also involved a rather epic 300 kilometers there and back roadtrip.

I enjoyed the con and the trip a lot, so I decided to go again this year. And because I wanted more time at the con and more time to explore the Ruhrgebiet with its many sights, I booked a hotel to stay overnight. So it was time to return to the Ruhrpott.

Masters of the Universe Classics He-Man posing with a Ruhrpott mug

He-Man goes Ruhrpott

As for why He-Man is posing with a mug, “Ruhrpott” or just “Pott” is an affectionate name for the Ruhrgebiet. However, the term “Pott” can also refer to a large mug. Hence, the mug in the photo (more on how I came by it later) is both a souvenir from the Ruhrpott as well as a literal Ruhrpott.

This year, the Los Amigos convention took place on Saturday, June 7, which happens to be part of the long Pentecost holiday weekend, which means hotels and roads would be busier than usual. What is more, there were all sorts of fairs, festivals and other events happening this weekend all over Germany, including a major rock festival.

Because I expected the roads to be busy, I got up at five AM and set off at shortly before six. The sun was already up, because it currently rises at 5:08 in the morning.

Autobahn A1 and Dammer Berge

The trip to Neuss was mostly the same as last year. I drove onto Autobahn A 1 at Groß Mackenstedt and followed the A1 through the Wildeshauser Geest nature park, across the Teutoburg Forest, through the Münsterland and into the Ruhrgebiet.

The Autobahn was indeed fuller than it usually is early on a Saturday morning and there were a lot of trucks trying to make it to their destination or at least out of Germany, before they would be grounded for two days, because trucks are not allowed to drive on German roads on Sundays and public holidays, unless they are transporting perishable goods.

Nonetheless, I made good time. Part of the reason was that the 33-kilometer monster construction zone between the exits Lohne/Dinklage and Bramsche is gone now. There still are a few smaller constructions zones between Lohne/Dinklage and Bramsche, mostly where bridges across the Autobahn are in the process of being replaced.

My first pit stop was at service station Dammer Berge with its iconic bridge restaurant.  No, not for breakfast – I learned my lesson last time. Not to mention that it was 6:45 AM, when I reached Dammer Berge, and too early for breakfast. However, I was feeling some pressure in my bladder from an early morning mug of tea and decided to peruse the restroom at Dammer Berge. I could probably have held out until service station Tecklenburger Land, but I still have a soft spot for the unique structure that is Dammer Berge.

Service Station Dammer Berge on Autobahn A1

The iconic bridge restaurant of service station Dammer Berge on a rather gloomy day.

In spite of the early hour, the service station and adjacent parking lot were already quite busy. There was a busload full of young people who were playing techno music in the parking lot at an annoying high volume.

I did my business at the bathroom and also paid a brief visit to the Autobahn chapel (for more about Autobahn chapels, see this post) at Dammer Berge.  I left a message in the guest book – something I usually do at Autobahn chapels – and put a Euro in the collection box, though I couldn’t light a candle, because there was no lighter at the chapel and I didn’t have one either.

Autobahn chapel Dammer Berge

The Autobahn chapel at service station Dammer Berge, built in 1970. This was the first ecumenic Autobahn chapel in Germany – previous chapels were either Catholic or Lutheran, even though denominational differences are silly, particularly for chapels aimed at travellers.

Autobahn chapel Dammer Berge interior

And this is what the Autobahn chapel Dammer Berge looks like on the inside.

Autobahn chapels are calm and quiet places. Even the loud techno music of the busload of young folks did not penetrate into the chapel, even though the bus was parked only a hundred meters or so away.

I have now visited three of the 44 Autobahn chapels in Germany, namely Dammer Berge, Roxel/Münsterland and Kassel/Lohfelden. I also missed at least two during my trip to Hanau last December, because I had no idea they existed. I hope to visit more, because I like the concept of Autobahn chapels as an update of the roadside shrines and chapels from days of old. Several Autobahn chapels, including Dammer Berge, are also specifically dedicated to the victims of traffic accidents.

Before setting off again, I also snapped this photo of He-Man posing on a picknick table at service station Dammer Berge. I wanted to position him, so the bridge restaurant would be visible in the background, but then a gust of wind knocked over the figure, two guys having a smoking break became unduly interested in what I was doing and a few drops of rain landed on me, my phone and He-Man.

Masters of the Universe Classics He-Man at service station Dammer Berge

He-Man at service station Dammer Berge, because even Champions of Grayskull occasionally need a pit stop.

As for why I took along a He-Man figure – this is the Masters of the Universe Classics He-Man BTW – I hoped that there would be opportunities for toy photography on route.

Just Driving in the Rain

The few droplets that had landed on me, my phone and He-Man at service station Dammer Berge has turned into a full-blown rainfall by the time I reached Osnabrück. This wasn’t unexpected – the weather forecast had said that there would be showers all weekend long – but since I’d even had a bit of sunshine around Wildeshausen, I hope I’d be spared rain until I was safely inside the convention center.

Alas, no such luck. When I crossed Teutoburg Forest, low-hanging clouds were hanging between the tree and hill tips. Of course, these damp, dark and foggy woodlands already plagued and eventually doomed the five legions of the Roman army under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus back in 9 AD.

By now, it was half past seven and the perfect time to find a spot for breakfast. So I drove onto a rest area to check Google Maps for bakeries close to the Autobahn. Alas, I was in the void that is the Münsterland, where there are few Autobahn exits and even fewer towns and villages. Of course, those towns and villages have bakeries, but the towns here are usually quite a bit away from the Autobahn, requiring a longer side trip than I was prepared to take.

However, I remembered that last year on my way back from the Los Amigos convention, I had coffee and cake at a nice bakery café in a retail park directly by the Autobahn at intersection Kamener Kreuz. That would be the perfect place to have breakfast, so I headed onwards towards Kamener Kreuz.

Breakfast at Kamener Kreuz

Kamener Kreuz is where Autobahn A1 and Autobahn A2, one of the main North-South and one of the main East-West routes for all of Germany and Europe, intersect. It used to be infamously busy and prone to traffic jams, though the situation is much improved by now, and is also frequently referenced in (West) German pop culture. Even if – like me – you live nowhere near it, you’ve heard of the Kamener Kreuz. Fun fact: As a kid, I always assumed the Kamener Kreuz was named after a woman named Carmen, but it’s really named after the town of Kamen.

The Kamener Kreuz is also the gateway to the Ruhrgebiet, though the Ruhrgebiet officially begins in Hamm, one Autobahn exit before Kamener Kreuz. However, Hamm is quite a bit away from the Autobahn and Kamener Kreuz is also where the tangle of Autobahnen all named A-fortysomething that marks the Ruhrgebiet begins.

At Kamener Kreuz, I passed almost directly by the ADAC monument a.k.a. four angels abducting a helicopter.  I would really love to take a closer look at that monument one day and take a few photos, but so far I have never been able to figure out how to get there, since it sits directly inbetween two Autobahnen. I’m sure there must be a path or something, since someone is clearly mowing the lawn on the hill on top of which the monument sits.

I took the next exit – Kamen Zentrum – and headed for the retail park and the Grobe bakery café. Bäckerei Grobe is a Dortmund based bakery chain with branches all over the Ruhrgebiet and I have enjoyed their offerings a few times before.

Because it was half past eight on a Saturday morning at the start of a long holiday weekend, the bakery café was busy both with people picking up fresh bread rolls for breakfast at home as well as with people looking to have breakfast at the café. The breakfast line was shorter than the take out line, but unfortunately, it also moved a lot slower.

Part of the problem was that Grobe offers something called a bakery café breakfast, which consists of two bread rolls and five toppings of the customer’s choice. So almost everyone in line took ages to decide what rolls and toppings they wanted. There was a list of available toppings, but not of available bread rolls. The fact that only one person manned the breakfast counter didn’t help either.

When it was finally my turn, I didn’t bother with bread rolls and toppings at all, but instead went for a Dortmund market omelette with and cheese.

Dortmund market omelette

Breakfast of Champions of Grayskull: He-Man and I are enjoying a Dortmund market omelette, courtesy of Bakery Grobe at Kamener Kreuz.

By the time, I had finished breakfast, the rain had stopped, which seemed promising. However, because the breakfast line had moved to slowly, it was also already half past nine and the con was set to open at ten. So, I set off again without further ado.

When I reached Hagen, where you have some of the best views along the A1 across the Ruhr valley with no less than two castles, four towers and a massive war monument on top of various mountains, it started to rain again.

Here is a dashcam video on YouTube following almost the entire route I took along the A1, though in reverse direction. It starts in Unna and ends in Bremen. The Kamener Kreuz retail park is at the five minute mark, the angels abducting a helicopter monument at Kamener Kreuz at the seven minute mark, the bridge restaurant of service station Dammer Berge is at the one hour and thirty-eight minutes mark, Groß Mackenstedt a.k.a. Delmenhorst-East, the nearest exit for me in southbound direction is at the two hours and twenty-four minute mark and Bremen-Brinkum, the nearest exit for me in northbound direction, is at the two hours and twenty-nine minute mark. At the two hours and thirty-one minute mark, the driver leaves the A1 at exit Bremen-Arsten. At two hours and thirty-five minutes, he drives through the Habenhausen retail park and then crosses the river Weser via Strawberry Bridge a.k.a. Karl Carstens Bridge.  He then drives down Georg-Bitter-Straße and turns into Bismarckstraße. At two hours and forty-three minutes he passes the former telephone exchange building, where my grandmother worked as an operator (a highly desirable job in the 1920s), and then passes Hospital Bremen-Mitte where my Dad died. At two hours and forty-four minutes, you get a glimpse of 1920s apartment buildings along Bismarckstraße, an early and then revolutionary attempt at social housing for the working class. Nowadays, the apartments are cramped and small with low ceilings, small windows and tiny kitchens, but since they are protected historical buildings, there is little anybody can do about that. At two hours and forty-six minutes, you get a glimpse of the St. Ansgari church and the Victorian buildings of the Schwachhausen neighbourhood. At two hours and forty-seven minutes, you get Am Stern (literally the star), an infamously confusing roundabout where six streets meet and which most locals do anything to avoid. At two hours and forty-eight minutes, you can see the Hermann Böse Gymnasium and the former headquarters of the North German Lloyd shipping company, now a hotel. The video finally ends in front of Bremen Central Station, while I question the driver’s navigation choices, because that’s not the route I would have taken, if I wanted to get to the Central Station.

Autobahn A46 and a Biblical Downpour in Wuppertal 

At the intersection Wuppertal-North, I left Autobahn A1 and drove onto Autobahn A46, one of the many A-fortysomethings of the Ruhrgebiet. Based on my experience last year, it should take about twenty minutes to half an hour to reach Neuss and my destination. At least, that was the theory.

It was still raining and the rain was getting heavier as I passed the various exits that made up Wuppertal. There was also construction work going on here, because the aging A46 is undergoing some much needed refurbishments. But combined with the rain and an already unpleasantly narrow Autobahn, the drive wasn’t exactly pleasant.

But it got even worse, because the rain got even heavier and turned into a downpour of biblical proportions. My windshield wipers were working at the highest frequency and I could still see barely anything. I slowed down, but I couldn’t slow down too much of I’d risk getting hit by other cars.

In short, it was a really dangerous situation. Heavy rain, almost zero visibility and pretty dense traffic. Even my Dad, who was a better and more experienced driver than me, wouldn’t drive onwards under such conditions. He’d stop and wait out the rain. Occasionally, Dad would even stop on the hard shoulder of the Autobahn, when the rain was this heavy. But while that might be viable on the broad A1 or A28, it wasn’t a great idea on the narrow A46. No, I needed to get off the Autobahn fast. A rest area or service station would be best, but an exit would do as well. Any exit.

Luckily, there was an exit just ahead called Wuppertal-Sonnborn, so I left the Autobahn in search of some place to park the car and wait out the rain. Now I have never been to Wuppertal before and know nothing about the city except that it has a unique steampunky suspension railway. So I upon leaving the Autobahn, I randomly turned into the direction which looked more populated and crawled along the streets of Wuppertal-Sonnborn, looking for a place to stop. I chanced to take a road that follows the river Wupper. There was a park along the banks of the river Wupper, which is surely lovely, when you’re not in the middle of a downpour of biblical proportions. But unfortunately, there was no place to park my car.

Eventually, I spotted an Aldi supermarket and drove onto the parking lot. Because it was a Saturday morning, the parking lot was full and I also had to dodge shoppers who were dashing through the rain for the safety and dryness of the store or their cars without paying much attention to traffic. Some people even stopped their cars directly in front of the entrance to let family members get out.

I finally found a free slot a the edge of the parking lot and waited, while the sky was determined to drown Wuppertal in biblical floods. It was five past ten now, the con had just opened and here I was stuck on the parking lot of an Aldi market in Wuppertal. I checked the weather app on my phone, which told me that the downpour would continue for at least another fifteen minutes. So I waited, ate some chocolate and drank a bit of water. In theory, I could have gone into the Aldi store, but in practice I would have been soaked by the time I made it to the door.

Wuppertal in the rain

The view from my car across the parking lot of an Aldi store in Wuppertal in the rain. I would have put He-Man on the dashboard, but he was in the trunk.

It was about twenty-five minutes past ten, when the rain had subsided to the point that it was safe to continue on my way. So I returned to the Autobahn and the city of Wuppertal, as if determined to apologise for the unplanned delay, gave me a lovely parting gift, because I saw the famous suspension railway pass by. That sight made me so happy that my cheering attracted the attention of other drivers. One day, I really need to make a planned stop in Wuppertal and ride the suspension railway, because it’s just so very cool.

Meanwhile, the ten thirty traffic report on the radio had worrying news. There had been an accident on Autobahn A46 just ahead of me. Apparently other drivers had not been so wise to leave the Autobahn, when the rain became too heavy. So a driver lost control on a rain-slick road and crashed first into a barrier and then into another car, which overturned. Four people and had to be taken to hospital, though luckily no one died. Also see this report about the accident from the Rheinische Post newspaper, which even has a few photos.

Of course, on Saturday morning, I knew nothing about what had happened beyond there has been an accident on the A46 just ahead, a vehicle has overturned and there is a traffic jam with a five minute delay. Now a five minute delay isn’t too bad and since I don’t know my way around Wuppertal and surroundings at all, I drove back onto Autobahn A46 anyway, only to hear the five minute delay turn into a ten minute and then a fifteen minute delay.

And then I hit the traffic jam. The radio informed me that the delay was twenty to twenty-five minutes now, so I decided to leave the Autobahn at the next exit and circumvent the traffic jam on local roads. Luckily, there was an exit just ahead called Haan-East.

I was less than a kilometer away from the exit Haan-East, when I hit the traffic jam, but it took me ten minutes or so to make even the hundred meters to the exit.

Traffic jam on the A46 in the rain

Traffic jam on the A46 in the rain.

Turns out that the decision to leave the Autobahn was exactly the right one, because shortly afterwards the entire A46 was closed to allow a rescue helicopter to land. As I left the Autobahn, I also saw an ambulance speeding in the other directions, sirens blaring.

A Detour Among the Neanderthals

Once I left the A46, I found myself in utter terra incognita. I had never been here before and of the names on the roadsigns, only Solingen rang a bell, but Solingen was definitely in the wrong direction. The town Mettmann also rang a bell, but only because there was a German comedy movie called Samba in Mettmann several years ago, starring comedian Hape Kerkeling, who hails from the Ruhrgebiet. Here’s a trailer.

So I stopped to check Google Maps – my GPS Else is unfortunately useless in such situations – which told me that the best and quickest way around the now blocked A46 lead through a town called Gruiten and a town called Hochdahl. I’d never heard of either town, but right inbetween Gruiten and Hochdahl, there is a place everybody has heard of, namely the Neanderthal (nowadays spelled Neandertal) valley. Yup, that Neanderthal, where the remain of the first Neanderthal man were discovered in 1856. The Neanderthal valley was a limestone quarry, which is how the remains were discovered. I was literally among the Neanderthals.

The rain had mostly stopped by now and I drove along a pleasant country road through fields and forests and villages with timbered houses. At the exit Haan-West, I finally rejoined the (still closed) A46 and journeyed onwards past Düsseldorf (or rather under Düsseldorf, since Düsseldorf has a lot of tunnels.)

I left the A46 at the exit Düsseldorf-Bilk and crossed the Rhine on the Josef Cardinal Frings Bridge, which like so many bridges in Germany is currently under construction. To be fair, the bridge was built in 1951 (and named Südbrücke – Southern Bridge – before it was decided to name it after the former Archbishop and Cardinal of Cologne, who was born in Neuss) and probably needs it. But it’s an annoyance nonetheless.

On the far side of the Rhine, I entered Neuss, passed the Rheinpark Center mall, a massive 1970s concrete slab, as well as the German headquarters of 3M and finally made it to Stadthalle Neuss and the con. By now, it was almost half past eleven, i.e. the 32 kilometers from Wuppertal to Neuss had taken me one and a half hours.

But that’s a story for another day.

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Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Mekaneck’s Revenge”

It’s time for another Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre photo story. The name “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre” was coined by Kevin Beckett at the Whetstone Discord server.

I took most of the photos for this story some time ago, but never got around to posting them. At the time,  I had just gotten the Masterverse version of Mekaneck, who must certainly be one of the stranger Masters of the Universe characters, which in a universe full of strange characters is certainly saying something. For you see, Mekaneck’s power is that he can stretch his neck. Yes, really, that’s what he does. He stretches his neck. In fact, he’s billed as the “Heroic Human Periscope” on packaging, going all the way back to his introduction in 1984. For more about the vintage Mekaneck action figure, go here.

What inspired me to finally post this story was the news that actor James Wilkinson has been cast as Mekaneck in the upcoming Masters of the Universe live action movie. This news caused something of a stir, because a) no one expected to ever see a weird character like Mekaneck in a Masters of the Universe movie, especially since Mekaneck hasn’t been seen on screen for more than twenty years, i.e. since the 2002 cartoon – both Masters of the Universe Revelation/Revolution and the CGI He-Man cartoon chose not to include Mekaneck – and b) James Wilkinson is an attractive man and no one ever expected Mekaneck of all people to be hot – he is the dude with the stretching neck, after all.

As with many characters, Mekaneck’s backstory is all over the place in the different iterations of Masters of the Universe. The one thing that’s consistent is that he is a member of the Heroic Warriors. The mini-comics never gave Mekaneck an origin story, as far as I recall. He just suddenly pops up as a members of the Heroic Warriors fighting alongside He-Man.

The Filmation cartoon, however, did give Mekaneck an origin story. Here, Mekaneck is a single Dad (at any rate, we never meet a Mrs. Mekaneck) and has an approximately ten-year-old son called Philip, who is a gifted flutist. One day, Mekaneck and Philip are having a picnic in the woods and get caught up in a violent storm. Philip is blown away by the wind and Mekaneck is badly injured while trying to rescue him. Man-at-Arms finds the injured Mekaneck and takes him to the palace to treat his injuries, giving him his expanding neck in the process. Much as I love Duncan, his medical skills are questionable. That said, Mekaneck is yet another example for the fact that many Masters of the Universe characters both good and evil are disabled and that their assistive devices are the source of their abilities.  As a kid, I never really grasped this, because much like the disabled people in my day to day life, the disabled Masters of the Universe characters just were who they were*. As an adult, the sheer number of disabled characters in Masters of the Universe is stunning, especially for a property developed in the 1980s.

Grateful for his rescue, Mekaneck stays at the palace and joins the Royal Guard. However, Philip never reappears, even though his father never stops looking for him. Then, several years later, Philip does show up again – only that he has lost his memory and is being used by the evil Sorcerer Count Marzo to help him rob law-abiding Eternians. Of course, Marzo gets his comeuppance and father and son are reunited.

It’s a memorable episode and gives Mekaneck more backstory than supporting characters usually got in the Filmation cartoon.  The fact that Mekaneck is a Dad is also unusual, since except for Duncan and Randor, none of the Heroic Warriors have kids, not even confirmed straight characters like Stratos, who has a wife (though he does have a son named Atmos and an unnamed daughter in the German audio plays). Man-e-Faces has an unnamed daughter in the German audio dramas as well, which have their own continuity, but his origin story is also completely different there, which suggests that his daughter doesn’t exist in the prime continuity.

Sadly, Philip is never mentioned again, though the villain Count Marzo appears several times in the Filmation cartoon. Though an artistocrat and therefore theoretically privileged, he turns to crime to finance his lifestyle and inevitably exploits children to aid him in his life of crime, keeping them compliant with drugs, magic and threats. In short, he is a walking, talking public service announcement about the dangers of drugs and strangers, who nonetheless managed to be a fascinating character.

Mekaneck did appear in the German audio dramas and advertising magazines, where his characterisation is completely different. For starters, in the advertising magazines, he is billed as “the galactic spy” and is apparently an astronaut. In the audio dramas, Mekaneck is also a braggart who keeps referring to himself as a “the winning type”. Spoiler alert, he inveitably gets his comeuppance. Audio Mekaneck is very memorable due to the great performance of voice actor Douglas Welbat, but his characterisation is also completely at odds with any other version of the character.

Mekaneck reappears in the 2002 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon as a member of the Heroic Warriors. He is a member of Captain Randor’s squad and is first seen fighting Keldor and his troops at the Hall of Wisdom. This means that like most of the Heroic Warriors, Mekaneck is of the generation of Randor and Duncan and therefore considerably older than Adam and Teela. Filmation Mekaneck was older than Adam and Teela as well, but younger than Randor or Duncan.

2002 Mekaneck can stretch his neck to much more epic proportions than ever before and he can also twist and turn it. His neck is bionic, though we never really learn how he came by his abilities, though according to fan historian Jukka Issakainen, the series bible for the 2002 cartoon reveals that Mekaneck received his abilities in response to a devastating battlefield neck injury, much like in the Filmation cartoon. If 2002 Mekaneck has children, we never see them. Unlike his German audio counterpart, 2002 Mekaneck is very self-conscious and suffers from low self-esteem, because his abilities are a little rubbish, something that Teela with her customary bluntness even says to his face. His low self-esteem coupled with the fear that Duncan’s latest invention – a kind of X-ray device that can see through objects – will make the one thing Mekaneck is good at, namely reconnaissance, superfluous make Mekaneck easy prey for his old nemesis Count Marzo.

It’s interesting that the 2002 cartoon chose to keep Count Marzo as Mekaneck’s archenemy, even though the entire subplot of Marzo kidnapping Mekaneck’s kid is never mentioned. Count Marzo is also a very different character in the 2002 cartoon. He’s still a powerful sorcerer, but that’s about the only thing about him that the 2002 cartoon kept from the Filmation version of the character. Whereas the Filmation Count Marzo looked like William Shakespeare’s evil twin, the 2002 Count Marzo speaks with an East Europoean accent, has red eyes, long black hair that dramatically blows in the wind and struts around mostly bare-chested with a cape that also dramatically blows in the wind (the 2002 cartoon was big on things blowing dramatically in the wind). He no longer peddles drugs or recruits children for his nefarious schemes, but instead tries to conquer Eternia with the help of his monstrous hellhounds and the considerable powers bestowed upon him by a magical amulet. He is eventually captured by Miro (who is Captain rather than King Miro in this version) and his troops. The Council of Elders, who rule Eternia in this version of the story before pissing off to parts unknown, leaving Randor in charge, strip Marzo of his powers and take away his magical amulet, which turns Marzo into a withered old man and his hellhounds into rats. Unfortunately, old man Marzo looks like an Anti-Semitic stereotype that’s so offensive that I wonder how anybody thought this was acceptable as late as 2002.

The Anti-Semitic caricature version of Count Marzo finds Mekaneck who is drowning in self-pity and asks him to retrieve his magical amulet, which the Council of Elders hid in a labyrinthine cave. In return, Marzo promises Mekaneck to use his magic to give him more useful powers. Mekaneck agrees and uses his expanding neck to fetch the amulet, but of course Marzo has no intention to keep his part of the bargain and promptly tries to conquer Eternia again. However, the repentant Mekaneck saves the day and Marzo is stripped off his powers once again. He reappears a few times throughout the series, recruited by Skeletor and later Evil-Lyn to aid them in their nefarious schemes, though he always remains his own man.

The 2002 incarnation of Count Marzo received an action figure in the Masters of the Universe Classics line, which I got for a good price. Marzo also appears in the Classics mini-comics where he is the power that orchestrates the civil war known as “the Great Unrest”, which is mentioned a few times in the 2002 cartoon (in general, the Classics storyline stuck quite closely to the 2002 cartoon). Once again, Miro, now King again, and his sons Randor and Keldor meet Marzo and his army of Shadowbeasts in battle. Marzo is eventually defeated, but not before he opens an interdimensional portal to the evil dimension of Despondos and throws Miro in. This causes a rift between Randor and his half-brother Keldor and leads to even more Great Unrest.

Neither Mekaneck nor Marzo reappeared in the Masters of the Universe Revelation/Revolution cartoon and comics, though Marzo is slated to appear in an Andra one-shot comic later this year, nor in the CGI He-Man cartoon. However, Mekaneck did appeare in the DC Eternity War comics, where he got yet another origin story. In the comics, Mekaneck is of roughly the same age as Adam and Teela, i.e. much younger than in previous incarnations. He already had his abilities as a young child, though again it’s not clear if he was born this way or received his abilities to heal some kind of injury. This incarnation of Mekaneck is also self-conscious about the fact that his neck-stretching ability is rather silly. At one point, he confesses to Duncan that he was badly bullied as a child because of his abilities. However, his classmate Teela protected him and put a stop to the bullying when they were both only six years old, leading to an enduring friendship. And yes, they’re really just friends, as Mekaneck tells Fisto, when the latter tells him that he’d better not get any ideas regarding Teela, because Teela and Adam belong together. Teela continues to tease Mekaneck about his “useless” powers, but she’s the only one who does and woe betide anybody else who tries. When Teela is kidnapped by Horde Force Captain Despara (we know her better as Adora), He-Man and Mekaneck team up to rescue her.

I really like this version of Mekaneck’s backstory. It draws very much on the 2002 version of the character – Mekaneck feels self-conscious about his powers and Teela teases him about it – but also goes back further to the Filmation cartoon, where we see lots of kids running around the Royal Palace – most likely the kids of guards, employees and courtiers. It makes sense that Mekaneck (and also Clamp Champ) was one of these kids and is a childhood friend of Adam and Teela (though I also like Mekaneck as a single Dad). Just as it makes sense for Teela to stand up for others and put bullies in their place, because that’s who she is. Plus, we know that Teela is extremely protective of those she cares for. She has been protective of Adam since childhood, but it makes sense that she would also protect others besides Adam. Coincidentally, we even see some of the kids in the palace being bullies as far back as the Filmation cartoon. They even pick on Adam on occasion, though they’d never dare to cross Teela.

The scant bio on the back of the Masterverse New Eternia Mekaneck action figure (i.e. the action figure appearing in this toy photo story) gives us yet another version of his backstory. In this version, Mekaneck is the captain of King Randor’s submarine squadron, which makes sense – he is the heroic human periscope, after all. We don’t learn how he came by his abilities, though the Masterverse Mekaneck is the first ever toy version of the character to feature an articulated neck, achieved via putting multiple ball-jointed neck extension pieces together. This time around, his signature weapon – a club – also doubles as a telescope, which is a neat touch.

The story below draws on the various backstories of Mekaneck and his nemesis Count Marzo. Marzo appears in his 2002 look, because that’s the only toy version of him we ever had, plus it is the cooler version, while Mekaneck displays the self-consciousness and need to prove himself that he’s had ever since the 2002 cartoon, while his friendship with Teela is borrowed from the Eternity War comics. So enjoy…

Mekaneck’s Revenge

On the Plains of Perpetua:

Mekaneck confronts Count Marzo and his hellhound

The scenery is aquarium decoration, while Count Marzo’s pet is a Schleich Eldrador Hellhound.

“Count Marzo, in the name of King Randor, you are under arrest for kidnapping, drug dealing, robbery, treason and countless other crimes against Eternia…”

“Oh, it’s Stretchyneck.”

“Mekaneck. My name is Mekaneck. Captain Mekaneck of the Royal Submarine Squadron.”

“Couldn’t Randor at least send a Master who’s marginally impressive? Man-e-Faces maybe or Ram-Man or Buzz Off or Stratos. At least they would be something of a challenge. Even that little red-haired girl who cosplays as Captain of the Guard would be more impressive.”

“Shut up, Marzo. Drop the sword and the amulet and hands up.”

“So you really want to arrest me? You and what army, Stretchyneck?”

“I don’t need an army or even the other Masters to deal with you, Marzo. I’m the winning type and you’re not remotely as impressive as you think you are, not to someone who’s faced Skeletor, the Evil Horde and the slithering Snake Men.”

“Well, you’re not impressive at all. Killing you will hardly cause me to break a sweat, though it will be very satisfying.”

“Not nearly as satisfying as seeing you locked up in the royal dungeon will be.”

“Enough talk. Get him, my hellhounds!”

GROWL!

Count Marzo fights Mekaneck on the cliffs, while the hellhounds growlCLASH! CLANG!

GROWL!

“Oh please! I’m not just a powerful sorcerer, I’m also a master swordsman. Do you really think you can stand against me with… what by the power of Horokoth is that thing anyway?”

“It’s a telescope. And a club. And it can shatter that pigsticker of yours like so much scrap metal.”

Mekaneck is down and Count Marzo towers over him with his sword, but Mekaneck deflects the strike with his shield.“Game over, Stretchyneck. You lose.”

“You didn’t think this shield was just for show, did you?”

CLASH! CLANG!

Mekaneck is still down and Count Marzo points his amulet at him.“Ah well, this was fun and more of a challenge than I expected. But I have places to be, treasures to steal and lands to conquer. Time to end this. Abra Bruska Metak Vedak.”

ZAP!

Marzo zaps Mekaneck with the magic from his amulet. “Argh! Can’t… move…”

“My magic is keeping you in your place. And now, Stretchyneck, I shall cut off your head and put it on a spike on the battlements of Castle Marzo. And then I’ll feed your body to my hellhounds. Mwahahaha.”

GROWL! SLOBBER!

“Must… resist…”

Mekaneck extends his neck to escape Marzo's blade.FWOOSH!

“WHAT? How?”

“Your magic is powerful, but my neck is technology and magic doesn’t affect it. How useless is my ability now, eh Marzo?”

Mekaneck is down and has extended his neck, while Marzo threatens him with his sword. “This is merely a minor inconvenience. I shall simply cut off your neck at the shoulders and put it on the battlements of my castle as is. At least, it saves me a pole and a spike.”

“You’ll have to catch me first.”

Marzo still threatens Mekaneck with his sword, while Mekaneck tries to evade him.“Quit wiggling, you worm!”

“Not a chance, Marzo.”

“I shall cut you down like a tree.”

CHOP! CHOP!

“Damn, I don’t know how long I can keep this up.”

Sorceress Teela appears to rescue Mekaneck from Marzo.“Halt! Leave him alone, Marzo!”

“Who dares?”

Teela confronts Marzo and his hellhounds, while Mekaneck is still down.“Oh, it’s the little girl who thinks she’s Captain of the Guard. Randor really is scraping the bottom of the barrel, is he?”

“Teela, no. He’s too dangerous.”

“Well, I shall just kill two Masters of the price of one then. And your head will look very pretty on a spike with that fiery hair fluttering in the wind.”

GROWL!

“This is you last chance, Marzo. Surrender, call off your pets and leave Mekaneck alone or face the consequences!”

“And who’s going to make me? You, little girl who would be Captain of the Guard?”

Sorceress Teela blasts Marzo with her magic.“Wrong, Marzo. I am the Sorceress of Grayskull now and much more powerful than you can imagine. Zoar Vazetka Shuk Mok Ta.”

ZAP!

“Noooooo…”

Teela and Mekaneck stand over the fallen Count Marzo.“Are you all right, Meck?”

“I’m fine, thanks. A few bruises and scratches, but nothing serious.”

CRACKLE.

“Your neck is damaged. You need to let Dad or Andra take a look at that.”

“I think – CRACKLE – his blade damaged some of the cables. I can’t – CRACKLE – retract my neck either.”

“What were you thinking to go after him alone, Meck? Marzo is dangerous. He could have killed you.”

“I know. It’s just… after everything he’s done to me, I wanted to be the one to bring him in.”

“I understand. But you still shouldn’t have gone after him alone. Why didn’t you take Man-e-Faces along? Or Buzz-Off or Stratos or Ram-Man or Uncle Malcolm or at least some of my guards – well, I guess they’re Andra’s guards now.”

“Because… well, just this once I wanted to be the hero and not just the look-out who does reconnaissance or the human periscope.”

“You are a hero, Meck. Even if your special ability is stretching your neck. Cause there are times when stretching your neck comes in really handy. I mean, you are the sole reason we even have a Royal Submarine Squadron.”

“Yes, because the Queen said, ‘Oh, he’s like a human periscope’, when she first met me. And then the King asked, ‘What’s a periscope?’ and the Queen explained to him that Earth had something called submarines,  so the King decided he wanted a Submarine Squadron as well. Except that I think submarines on Earth are quite different than me wading into the sea and keeping my head above water.”

“That’s just because Earth doesn’t have a Mekaneck.”

Mekaneck kisses Teela on the forehead, while Marzo is in chains.“Thanks, Teela, for everything. You’re the best.”

SMOOCH!

“Just don’t tell Adam about this, okay? Cause I’d really hate to have him angry at me.”

“Why should Adam be angry at you, Meck? You’re his friend.”

“Ahem, because I just kissed you?”

“Oh please! I can kiss whoever I want. After all, Adam and I are just good friends.”

“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, Teela.”

“Could you just lock me up already? Cause I think I’m going to puke, if I have to listen to this any longer.”

“Shut up, Marzo!”

***

Later:

Loo-Kee emerges from the rocky landscape“Hi folks, it’s me, Loo-Kee. Light Hope sent me to Eternia through a portal, so I can do my job and deliver the moral of story.”

“In today’s tale, Mekaneck thought that he could capture Count Marzo all alone and almost got himself killed in the process. But lucky for him, Teela showed up in the nick of time. Of course, Mekaneck could have just asked his friends for help in the first place. Cause everybody needs help sometimes and there is no shame in asking.”

Loo-Kee stands on the clifftop to deliver the moral.“Also, I want to talk to you about drugs. Cause one of the things that Marzo does is give drugs to Eternian children to make them commit crimes for him. Strangers like Marzo can be very dangerous, so don’t accept any candy or magical potions or drinks a stranger gives to you. Cause they could be drugs and drugs are very, very bad for you. Just ask Ileena. Or Jonno. In fact, evil people like Count Marzo are exactly why I’ve been tasked with delivering these morals…”

Marzo and his hellhounds appear to harass Loo-Kee

I took these and the earlier photos at different times, so Marzo has acquired a second hellhound, a Schleich Eldrador Fire Hyaena, in the meantime.

“So you think you can ruin my business, you little creep? Wait till I get my hands on you…”

“Help! It’s Marzo. He’s loose.”

“Indeed I am, you little creep.”

Marzo and his hellhounds threaten Loo-Kee“How did you get here anyway? Why aren’t you in the royal dungeon?”

“I broke out. The royal dungeon isn’t exactly escape proof. Skeletor’s Evil Warriors break out of that place all the bloody time and I picked up a few tricks. So yes, Count Marzo is free and back in business. And you, little creep, won’t ruin my business by warning the children of Eternia of my tricks. Get him my hellhounds!”

GROWL!

“Help, help!”

Marzo turns to the camera, while his hellhounds threaten Loo-Kee.“Hello, children. My name is Count Marzo. Do no listen to this little creep, for Loo-Kee lies.”

“I don’t lie. My people can’t lie. That’s why I’ve been chosen to deliver the moral message. Because I always tell the truth.”

“Shut him up, my hellhounds.”

GROWL. SLOBBER.

“Yelp!”

“Don’t you want to hear my side of the story, children? For you see, I am the victim of unjust persecution by that tyrant King Randor. I am merely a simple mage, going about my business, taking from the rich to give to… well, myself. Surely supporting myself in the style I am accustomed to cannot be a crime. Also, children, let me tell you the truth about drugs, the whole and unvarnished truth…”

“Don’t listen to him! He’s lying.”

GROWL. SLOBBER.

“Drugs are wonderful. They make you feel good and strong and powerful and that’s the true reason why people like Randor or that killjoy He-Man or this little nuissance there don’t want you to take them. And because I am a master sorcerer, my drugs are the best in all of Eternia. Much better than those of that Gar loser Jarvan. And best of all, my drugs are free. Well, almost free. Cause all I ask in return is that you do me a little favour and help me in my quest to assume my rightful place as ruler of Eternia…”

Mekaneck appears behind Count Marzo, his hellhounds and Loo-Kee. “Really, Marzo? You escaped from the royal dungeon barely an hour ago and you’re already up to your old tricks again? Well, I guess I’ll just have to arrest you again then.”

Marzo turns to face Mekaneck, while Loo-Kee hides behind Mekaneck.“Oh, it’s Stretchyneck. Again.”

“Mekaneck. My name is Mekaneck.”

GROWL!

“So you really want to go another round with me, Stretchyneck. Cause I’m just going to defeat you again and this time, your pretty red-haired Sorceress girlfriend won’t be there to save you. So prepare to die, Stretchyneck. I shall put your head on a spike on the battlements of my castle right next to the stuffed carcass of that little nuissance Loo-Kee…”

“Are you just going to stand there and talk, Marzo, or will you fight?”

“You’re remarkably confident, Stretchyneck, considering I’ve kicked your arse twice now. What makes you think this time will be different?”

“Well, for starters because this time…”

Fisto appears behind Marzo who is threatening Loo-Kee and Mekaneck.  “…I brought friends.”

“Hi, Marzo. Remember me?

Marzo turns around to face Fisto, as do his hellhounds.“Oh, it’s the second most ridiculous Heroic Warrior. Well, I shall just put your head on the walls of my castle next to Stretchyneck’s and that little creep Loo-Kee’s.”

GROWL!

Fisto punches out Count Marzo, while Mekaneck, Loo-Kee and the hellhounds look on.“Fisto’s the name, punching’s the game. And now eat steel knuckles, shithead!”

PUNCH!

“Uhhh…”

YOWL!

Count Marzo is down and his hellhounds flee, while Mekaneck and Fisto tower over the fallen Marzo.“Thanks for lending a hand – ahem, fist, Malcolm.”

“Anytime, Meck. That’s what friends are for.”

“I mean, I could’ve taken him down myself, cause I am the winning type, after all. But it’s still good to have backup.”

“Yeah sure, you could’ve taken him down yourself. After all, it’s not as if Teela had to rescue you the last time.”

“She… Yes, you’re right, Malcolm. Teela did save my bacon. But then she’s a very special person.”

Marzo is still down, while Mekaneck talks to Fisto.“I know. She is my niece, after all. And Meck, consider this a friendly warning, but no kissing Teela or you’ll answer to me.”

“I didn’t…”

“Loo-Kee, did Mekaneck kiss Teela?”

“You… you guys know I’m here? You can see me?”

“Sigh. Loo-Kee, we always know you’re there, cause you’re not nearly as good at hiding as you think. We just pretend we don’t see you. And now did Mekaneck kiss Teela?”

“All right, I did kiss Teela. But only on the forehead. She’s a friend.”

“And don’t you forget it, Meck. Cause you know that Teela is as good as betrothed to Adam.”

“Have you told her that? Cause Teela insists that she and Adam are just friends.”

“Sigh. Yeah, that’s Teela for you. The most powerful sorceress in the universe and yet remarkably clueless. The same goes for Adam. He’s the most powerful man in the universe and yet he still can’t muster enough courage to finally pop the question. Those two kids can be so silly. As if the whole palace doesn’t know what’s up.”

Mekaneck and Fisto talk, while Marzo is down and Loo-Kee looks on.“Talking of which, we should take Marzo back to the royal dungeon. And then we’ll have to explain to Duncan that his escape-proof prison proved to be not escape-proof, after all. Again.”

“Well, escape-proofing the not-quite-escape-proof dungeon should keep my brother busy for a couple of days and out of my hair, cause Duncan’s ego has gotten a little too inflated since Randor knighted him.”

“You’re just jealous that your brother is now Lord Duncan and you’re still plain old Malcolm.”

“Pah. I’m still the strongest right fist in all of Eternia and that’s the only title that counts.”

***

Duncan actually does get knighted somewhere between Masters of the Universe Revelation and Revolution, because he is referred to as “Lord Duncan” in the latter. He also gets a snazzy new uniform and armour.

And Count Marzo, the public service announcement incarnate, taking over the moral at the end of the story was just too funny.

That’s it for today, folks. I hope you enjoyed this Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Toy Photo Story, because there will be more.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters, I just bought some toys, took photos of them and wrote little scenes to go with those photos. All characters are copyright and trademark their respective owners.

*As a kid, I literally did not understand the concept of disability and famously told my teacher in elementary school that I didn’t know any disabled people, even though I had an amputee grandma, a blind neighbour, a deaf neighbour, a polio survivor uncle and a mentally disabled cousin (and several undiagnosed autistic relatives).

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Hanseatic Steampunk: Cora’s Adventures at the 2025 Aethercircus Festival in Buxtehude

The first May weekend was another long holiday weekend, because May 1 is a public holiday in Germany, the schools were closed on Friday May 2 and many had taken the day off work, so much of Germany had a four day weekend. Which meant busy roads and trains and also lots of events going on all over the country.

One of these events was the Aethercicus Steampunk Festival in Buxtehude. Buxtehude is a town of 40000 people southwest of Hamburg on the banks of the river Este at the edge of the Altes Land (old country), a part of the Elbe marshlands which is Germany’s most important fruit growing region. Buxtehude was officially founded in 1285 AD, though the area has been inhabited for much longer. It’s a Hanseatic city and nowadays part of the Hamburg Metropolitan region. Buxtehude is also about a hundred kilometers north of where I live and – most importantly – on the south side of the river Elbe, which means you don’t have to deal with the traffic nightmare that is Hamburg. In  short, it’s ideal for a daytrip.

Breakfast at Sam’s

Because a trip to Buxtehude wasn’t that long, I got up at just before eight AM and dressed up somewhat steampunky – long brown skirt, vaguely early 20th century looking blouse with a brown and white floral pattern, Steampunk jewellery and my trusty brown Dockers. I set off at eight thirty, driving onto my old friend Autobahn A1 in northwards direction towards Hamburg.

However, I left the A1 again after only twenty kilometers at Oyten, the first exit after Bremen. The reason is that Oyten has an Autohof and a pretty good one at that. It doesn’t have the usual fast food chains, but an American style retro diner called Daisy’s Diner – one of the few survivors of the 1990s fashion for American style retro diners – and Sam’s Urban Bakery, a large bakery café. Daisy’s wasn’t open yet, so Sam’s it was.

Sam’s Urban Bakery is something of a double misnomer, since it’s neither urban nor does it involve anyone named Sam. The bakery was founded in 1831 in the decidedly non-urban village of Fischerhude. For much of its history, it was simply known as Bakery Sammann, named after the family who operated it. However, the chain eventually reinvented itself as Sam’s Urban Bakery, though most of the branches are still in fairly rural areas.  Not that it matters much, because Sam’s is a really good bakery.

The Sam’s branch at Autohof Oyten is actually next to their main production facility, because the old bakery in Fischerhude could no longer supply the growing chain. Most German bakery chains actually have a production facility in an industrial business park somewhere, from where the various branches are supplied. There still are independent bakeries baking on site, but those are increasingly rare.

When I drove onto Sam’s parking lot, the bakery was already hopping with people picking up their morning rolls or having breakfast on site. I ordered a large veggie sandwich with guacamole, tomatoes, rocket and feta cheese, topped with two fried eggs, as well as latte macchiato and orange juice and settled down at a table with a good view of some horses peacefully grazing on a meadow next to the Autobahn.

Veggie sandwich

My veggie sandwich with guacamole, rocket, tomatoes, feta cheese and fried eggs, courtesy of Sam’s Urban Bakery in Oyten.

Autobahn A1 Northwards

After my breakfast stop at Oyten, I drove back onto Autobahn A1, northwards bound. I know the Bremen – Hamburg leg of the A1 pretty well, i.e. I know the names of the exits and the order they go in.

The Bremen – Hamburg leg of the A1 is really boring, since it passes fields, hills (somewhat surprising this far north) and windmills and very little of interest until you reach Hamburg. This isn’t surprising, because this part of the North German lowlands is sparsely populated, dotted with small towns and villages.

One thing that’s unusual about the Bremen – Hamburg leg of the A1 is that it has no less than three service station as well as several Autohöfe on a stretch of roughly one hundred kilometers. The reason is probably that the A1 is an extremely busy Autobahn, since it’s one of the main North South routes for all of Europe. That means a lot of traffic, a lot of trucks and a lot of holidaymakers, all of whom need places to refuel, eat, drink and pee, hence the many service stations and Autohöfe on this fairly short stretch of Autobahn. And indeed, the Autobahn was quite busy, even though I didn’t expect a Saturday in the middle of a long holiday weekend to be particularly busy.

I’m familiar with service stations Grundbergsee (which I’ve been avoiding since 1988 due to its association with the so-called Gladbeck hostage crisis) and Hollenstedt/Aarbachkate (for some reason, the service stations on either side of the A1 have different names here, though everybody refers to it as Hollenstedt), though I keep forgetting the existence of service station Ostetal inbetween the two. I have no idea why I keep forgetting service station Ostetal exists, especially since it was the site of a terrible accident in 2014, when a truck crashed into the service station without braking, injuring seventeen people and killing one. Oddly enough, I have zero memory of that incident either.

Vehicles crashing into clusters of pedestrians or buildings full of people isn’t that unusual. Nowadays, deliberate vehicle-ramming attacks are mostly associated with islamic terrorism, though they are not a new phenomenon. The earliest case I was aware of is the Olga Hepnarova case in Czechslovakia in 1973, but Wikipedia lists several earlier cases, including one from 1935.  However, not every case of a vehicle ploushing into groups of people is treated as an attack. Quite often, if the driver is white and not obviously mentally disturbed, the incident is treated as a tragic accident, a brake failure or a driver confusing the accelerator and the brake. Now accidents happen, but it’s interesting that brakes tend to fail or drivers confuse the accelerator and brake where there are people to mow down. There are some cases I remember happening in my region – a taxi driver who happened to plough into some foodstalls, mowing down pedestrians (the driver claimed the brakes failed and the taxi accelerated uncontrollably) or an elderly driver crashing into a busy ice cream parlour (supposedly an epileptic attack) – that seemed fishy to me and yet never got national, let alone international attention, probably because the drivers didn’t happen to be Muslim.

Regarding the Ostetal case, I couldn’t find anything about the results of the investigation beyond “the cause is unknown”. It might really have been an accident – the truck driver noticed problems, drove onto the service station to examine the truck and found he couldn’t brake. But the pattern that vehicles ploughing into people or buildings are considered terrorism, when the driver is Muslim, and tragic accidents, when the driver is white and not Muslim, is really notable and something that irked me for years.

I left Autobahn A1 at the exit Hollenstedt and my GPS Else directed me through small towns, green fields, woodlands and once again, hills. These hills are called the Harburger Berge (Harburg mountains) and reach a surprising 155 meters above sea level. By comparison, the highest elevation in the Bremen region is the so-called Hoher Berg (high mountain) which is 58.2 meters above sea level.

Buxtehude Central Station and an Antique Interlude

After some meandering along country roads, I finally reached Buxtehude.

Buxtehude has 40000 inhabitants and the Aethercircus festival, one of the largest Steampunk festivals in Europe, was expected to draw 50000 to 60000 people over the weekend. That’s a lot of people and so the organisers had asked visitors to use public transport, whenever possible (which it isn’t for me, because I’d have to change trains several times), and to park at the train station, if not, because the parking lots closer to the city center were expected to be filled to capacity – plus, some of them had been converted into space for the festival.

So I headed for Buxtehude’s train station and parked my car on the large parking lot. Buxtehude is part of the Hamburg Metropolitan region and connected to the Hamburg S-Bahn light rail network, because many of the inhabitants commute to Hamburg every day. This is actually a good way to visit Hamburg without dealing with the city’s nightmare traffic – drive to one of the commuter towns south of the Elbe, park my car, get a day ticket and hop onto the S-Bahn to head for the city center. Going directly by train isn’t that easy from my location, because I always have to change trains in Bremen and the schedules don’t line up well. The closest train station for me – Kirchweyhe – doesn’t have a direct connection to Hamburg.

Buxtehude’s train station is on the outskirts of town, so I hopped into a city bus to take me to the city center. This was also where I saw the first Steampunks, who had clearly also gotten the memo to park at the train station.

The bus took me to the Central Bus Station of Buxtehude, which is located on the edge of historic city center and surrounded by rather drab postwar buildings. The historic city center of Buxtehude is pedestrianised, so the busses can’t go any further.

Now I’m pretty sure that I have been in Buxtehude before, but that must have been a long time ago, since nothing about the town rang a bell along the lines of “Yes, I’ve definitely been here before.” And since I didn’t know my way around, I just followed the rest of the bus passengers, figuring that they were headed for the city center proper.

However, before I got to the city center, I came across a great antiques store in a side street. They had an amazing selection of vintage china and glassware, including many full sets. It made me a little sad, because it was obvious that people had just offloaded their parents’ or grandparents’ china, glass and silverware – things which were much treasured once upon a time. On the other hand, it’s better if the china and glassware ends up in an antiques store, where it can find new appreciative owners, than if it’s just thrown out. Also, pre-owned china is a lot cheaper than if you buy the same pattern new. Now I have my parents’ china, silverware and crystal glassware and I mostly like their choices, but I’m considering whether I should get a nice vintage set in a pattern I chose for myself. Because as a kid, I always admired the china patterns that were much more colourful and exciting than my parents’ lovely but subdued set. And yet I never bought fine china for myself, because it’s bloody expensive, when purchased new (because it’s produced in a high wage country like Germany and sometimes even still painted by hand). But a used set might be a nice alternative.

I did buy something at the antiques store, namely a vintage handpainted Delftware box with a lid. These round lidded boxes are usually called candy boxes, though I don’t think anybody ever actually kept candy in these. It is beautiful, though, and will join my Delftware collection.

Delftware box.Skeletor approves as well.

Skeletor admires a vintage Delftware box

“Ah, Delftware. This shall help me to finally conquer Castle Grayskull. I don’t quite know how, but it’s so pretty. Just look at those windmills. And the blue colour perfectly matches my skin. Besides, it’s called Royal Delft, which is very fitting for the future king of Eternia. Muhaha!”

I absolutely need to take a photo of Skeletor posing on or in front of the giant Delftware tulip vase that stands next to highway A13 between Rotterdam and Delft. I drove past the vase while I was in Rotterdam for Erasmuscon last year, but I didn’t have a Skeletor with me.

Festival Impressions

Among the drab postwar buildings around the central bus station, I also spotted my first evidence of Steampunk, namely a scaled down replica of a 1927 steam-powered crane for transporting timber, emerging from the vehicle trailer where it had spent the night.

1927 steam-powered crane replica at Aethercircus in Buxtehude

A replica of a 1927 steam-powered crane in the rather prosaic surroundings of Buxtehude’s central bus station.

I continued to follow the flow of pedestrians and found myself in the main pedestrianised shopping street of Buxtehude. The street was lined with stalls selling both Steampunk clothing, jewellery and objects as well as regular food and drink stalls. I purchased a festival t-shirt at one of the stalls and picked up a program book.

Buxtehude with Aethercircus banner

A banner across Buxtehude’s main shopping street advertises the Aethercircus festival. In the background, you can see the spire of the St. Petri church.

Steampunk fashions

Fashions for all your Steampunk needs.

Steampunk fashions

Cream isn’t the most common of Steampunk colours, but it does work here.

Steampunk Skull

A Steampunk Skull

Steampunk skull and crossbones

Steampunk skull and crossbones.

Steampunk Predator

Predator goes Steampunk.

Bumblebee and Optimus Prime

Steampunk Bumblebee and Optimus Prime

The Predator and the Transformers were on display at the stall of a metal art studio from Hamburg which produces lots Steampunk interpretations of pop culture characters. It’s stunning work. They even make life-size figures, if you ever wanted a Transformer in your garden.

However, there was far more to see at the Aethercircus festival than a few market stalls. The city center was dotted with stages where Steampunk bands performed – mostly in the evening, but there also was a brass band playing on one stage I passed.

Dutch fairground organ

This Dutch fairground organ is inherently steampunky, even though it’s not intended to be Steampunk.

There were also acrobatic performances and various Steampunk vehicles parading through the streets.

Swan-like Steampunk contraption

A swan-like contraption movies through the streets of Buxtehude.

Steampunk vehicle

This Steampunk vehicle looks like the conning tower of a submarine topped by a hot air balloon.

Winged fish Steampunk vehicle

This Steampunk vehicle looks like a winged fish on giant wheels.

Giant wheel vehicle

This giant wheel vehicle seems to have rolled directly out of a Frank R. Paul illustration onto the streets of Buxtehude.

Giant wheel vehicle parked

And here is the same giant wheel vehicle parked, while its rider has gone off to explore the city.

Mobilus Steampunk vehicle

The Mobilus, a street-going submarine, with her proud owners in full naval uniform.

Mobilus Steampunk vehicle

The Mobilus is admired by a gaggle of children. Kids could even take a ride in the vehicle.

Historic Steam Tractor on display in Buxtehude

A historic steam tractor on display in Buxtehude. It is functional and drove through the city.

Organic Steampunk wagon

This beautiful organic Steampunk vehicle was parked in a side street.

Steampunk dial

A closer look at the dial of the organic Steampunk vehicle.

Steampunk People and Costumes:

Of course, there were also plenty of Steampunks about, ranging from cosplayers in full Steampunk gear via historical costumers and goths (I spotted a Wednesday Addams) to people who borrowed grandpa’s old suit and regular folks who accessorised their outfits with a few Steampunk piece such as an elderly lady in regular street clothes with a Steampunk necklace. Naturally, the Aethercircus attracted cosplayers who wanted to show off their costumes, but it was also heartening to see how many regular non-fannish folks made an effort to fit in. So enjoy these photos of great costumes:

Steampunk costumes at Aethercircus in Buxtehude

A rather goth Steampunk couple and two ladies with great hoopskirts and bustles.

Two men checking out a lady's bustle at Aethercircus in Buxtehude

The good thing about bustles is that they allow gentlemen to check out ladies’ backsides without appearing lecherous. And to be fair, that is an awesome bustle. Looks like (and probably is – via the Dover reprints) straight out of a 1880s issue Harper’s Bazaar.

People in Steampunk gear checking out a steam tractor

This lady admiring a vintage steam tractor is rocking a great hoopskirt. Her partner is wearing a matching jacket and not quite matching jeans. Also note the gentleman in the kilt.

Steampunk couple with baby carriage

This couple and their steam-powered pram prove that Steampunk is fun for the entire family. Though – spoiler alert – there was a doll in the pram, not a real live baby.

Two Steampunk ladies and their mobile contraptions

Two ladies are relaxing next to their steam-powered contraptions – two bar carts and an anatomical model – and – shocking by Victorian standards – enjoying a smoke.

Smith at Aethercircus festival in Buxtehude

This gentleman gave a smithing demonstration at the Aethercircus festival. He is a trained metalworker and was still taught smithing (which metalworkers these days not always are). He was very nice. We chatted a bit about welding.

Budnikowsky and the Buxtehude Bull

In many ways, the Aethercircus Steampunk Festival is a variation of the city festivals you find in many German towns, where the city center is filled with food trucks, market stalls, fairground rides and stages for performances. Sometimes, these town festivals are just called Spring Festival or Summer Festival, sometimes there is a theme. Buxtehude chose Steampunk as their theme. The reason appears to be that the town is home to the member of a Steampunk band, who is also the festival organiser. He’s interviewed by the Hamburger Abendblatt here. Though it’s lovely to see a small town – well, not that small, since Buxtehude is home to 40000 people – just embrace the beautiful weirdness of Steampunk.

Since Saturday is also a prime shopping day, the town center was packed with people and not all of them were there for the festival. Some simply wanted to do some weekend shopping and sudddenly found themselves in the middle of the festival, surrounded by very strange looking people. I noticed a lot of folks looking up Steampunk on their phones and then reading out the German Wikipedia entry to their companions. I even found myself giving a brief background to a couple of elderly shoppers.

And since the shops were open, of course I availed myself of the opportunity to examine the goods on offer. My first stop – after the antiques store – was a drugstore of the Budniskowsky chain, Budni for short. Budnikowsky is a Hamburg based drugstore chain – founded in 1912 by a gentleman named Iwan Budnikowsky – and they only operate in the Hamburg Metropolitan region and – oddly enough – in Berlin. There used to be a Budnikowsky store in Bremen, but it closed ages ago. Which wouldn’t be much of an issue, except that Budnikowsky is the only drugstore chain which carries a particular organic coffee and milk chocolate, which I like a lot. So, when I spotted the Budni store, I went in to stock up on chocolate.

In addition to a Budnikowsky store, Buxtehude also has several bookstores – all indies, no chains. I came across four bookstores and of course I had to check out every single one of them. As for why a town of 40000 people boasts at least four bookstores, Buxtehude is also a literary city and home to Germany’s best known award for YA fiction, the Buxtehude Bull. The Buxtehude Bull has been going since 1971 and the city has clearly embraced the award and is actually adminstering it, after the death of the founder, a local bookseller. All through the city, there were plaques with the names of past winners set into the sidewalk.

Now I have been aware of the Buxtehude Bull for a long time. However, I never paid much attention to the award, because a) I’m no longer the target audience, and b) I assumed that the Buxtehude Bull mostly awarded the sort of depressing problem books that I’ve been actively avoided since I was the target audience. And yes, a lot of depressing problem books have won the award over the years (the full list of winners is here), including Alan and Naomi by Myron Levoy (which I got as a birthday gift from that one relative who kept up with award winning YA books – my German teacher cousin) and The Last Children of Schewenborn by Gudrun Pausewang, who graphically nukes her hometown and describes people dying horribly in loving detail. I wrote more about The Last Children of Schewenborn and Gudrun Pausewang’s equally depressing The Cloud here. In fact, I’m surprised that The Cloud did not win the Buxtehude Bull, considering how ubiquitous and traumatising that book was for a whole generation. In the case of David Safier, who is mostly known for humorous works (he writes the Miss Merkel cozy mysteries among others), they managed to award one of two ultra-serious works he wrote, the Holocaust novel 28 Days, loosely based on Safier’s own family history.

However, looking at the plaques on the sidewalk celebrating the past winners of the Buxtehude Bull, I also spotted a lot of works that are anything but depressing problem books. I also spotted quite a lot of SFF books, such as The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, The Museum of Stolen Memories by Ralf IsauTwilight by Stephenie Meyer (this one made me stop dead on the sidewalk and exclaim, “Stephenie Meyer won the Buxtehude Bull?! Really?”), The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Delirium by Lauren Oliver, Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer, The Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard or The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. Even The Last Children of Schewenborn is SFF, though super-depressing. And the above mentioned David Safier has written several humorous speculative novels, though 28 Days is historical fiction.

Looking at the sidewalk plaques and the list of winners, I also noticed that there were a lot of books I was familiar with and had read at some point. Anyway, I will follow the Buxtehude Bull more closely now, because they do tend to award interesting books and many of the winners have aged quite well, though a few haven’t.

Since I visited four different bookstores in Buxtehude, I also bought some books. One of the bookstores had a special display of Steampunk novels, which I think was a great idea, though the Steampunk fiction isn’t as popular as it was approx. ten years ago. You can see my somewhat dystopian and post-apocalyptic heavy haul below, lorded over by Batros the book thief from the Filmation He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon. And yes, that really was Batros’ deal. He stole all the books from the Royal Library of Eternos and tried to make himself King of Eternia in the episode “The Great Books Mystery” (also notable, because this episode contains the infamous scene where Teela climbs up a rope and Adam and Cringer both check out her butt. Besides, this is the only time we learn Prince Adam’s age, since he celebrates his nineteenth birthday in this episode). And when Skeletor tried to recruit him, Batros tried to take over Castle Grayskull and Skeletor’s gang as well. You certainly can’t fault his ambition. And yes, I love it that the He-Man cartoon dedicated a whole episode to a villain whose thing was stealing books. Cause who wouldn’t a bibliophile villain?

Books and Masters of the Universe Classics Batros

“Books, books, glorious books. Soon I shall be invincible and rule Eternia because of all these glorious books.”

There’s some debate about Batros’ background BTW, since he only ever appeared in a single episode of the cartoon and forty years later a single issue of a comic. He’s clearly some kind of bat creature, but it has never been confirmed whether he is a Spelean (a species of bat people that lives in the caverns under the surface of Eternia). There’s also some debate whether Batros is a member of the Evil Horde, since the symbol on his chest looks very much like the Horde symbol.  James Eatock says no – Batros and the Horde characters were simply designed by the same Filmation character designer –  though this unofficial fan bio says yes. I guess Batros can be whatever you want him to be.

City Views and History

Of course, Buxtehude also has things to offer aside from Steampunk and bookstores. The city was officially founded in 1285 AD, though people have been living here at least since the iron age. So the town accumulated some interesting architecture over the centuries.

St Petri Church of Buxtehude

The gothic St. Petri Church, completed in 1320 AD, though the spire dates from 1899, after the original burnt down. On the left, you can see a toilet trailer for festival visitors.

As you can see, the St. Petri Church is currently undergoing renovations. Nonetheless, the church was open and of course I took the opportunity to go inside.

Now I have a self-imposed rule that I don’t take photos inside churches or other places of worship, because I find it disrespectful, especially if you disturb. However, the St. Petri Church was completely empty, so whom would I disturb by taking a picture? After all, it’s not as if God would strike me dead on the spot. So I took the photo below.

Interior of the St. Petri Church in Buxtehude

Interior of the St. Petri Church in Buxtehude with a look down the nave at the baroque main altar and the baroque pulpit.

However, the most famous artwork of the St. Petri Church, the so-called Buxtehude Altar, dating from 1400 AD, is not kept in the church at all, but at the art museum in nearby Hamburg. There was a reproduction on display in the church, though, which also pointed out part of what makes the altar so famous, namely that it portrays the Virgin Mary knitting. This is one of the earliest surviving depictions of knitting and looks remarkably modern. More about the significance of the knitting Virgin Mary may be found here.

Buxtehude altar with knitting Virgin Mary

A partial view of the reproduction of the Buxtehude Altar on display at the St. Petri Church, with the knitting Virgin Mary.

On the square in front of the church, there was a fountain dedicated to Magister Gerhard Halepaghe, who was the vicar of the St. Petri Church in the fifteenth century and did many charitable works around the city. He left his assets to a charitable foundation which exists to this day.

Gerhard Halepaghe fountain in Buxtehude

Fountain dedicated to Gerhard Halepaghe, former vicar of the St. Petri Church in Buxtehude. Even though Halepaghe lived in the 15th century, this fountain dates from 1984.

Buxtehude’s medieval townhall sadly burned down in 1911, so the current townhall, designed by architect Alfred Sasse and built in 1913, is not very old, though it is an impressive building nonetheless.

Buxtehude townhall

Buxtehude’s townhall, built in 1913, decked out with flags and surrounded by various food and drinks stalls.

Buxtehude townhall

Another look at Buxtehude’s townhall. Note the people on the balcony.

There also were a number of historic timbered houses, though not as many as you’d expect with a city that experiences its economic heyday in the Middle Ages. Most likely, quite a few medieval buildings fell victim to fires, war and modernisation efforts over the centuries.

Timbered house in Buxtehude

This beautiful timbered house in Buxtehude dates from approx. 1600 AD and houses an Irish pub.

Timbered house in Buxtehude

A less elaborate timbered house in Buxtehude.

Like most medieval cities, Buxtehude used to have a fortified city wall, but only one of formerly five towers survived, the so-called Marschtorzwinger, survived. Nowadays, it houses a museum.

Marschtorzwinger in Buxtehude

The so-called Marschtorzwinger, sole surviving remnant of Buxtehude’s fortified city wall. It dates from the 16th century.

Marschtorzwinger in Buxtehude

Another look at the so-called Marschtorzwinger in Buxtehude. Also note the lock of a canal going through the city center and the Aethercircus banner.

Buxtehude is also billed as a Hanseatic City, because it was a member of the Hanseatic League in medieval and early modern times. Nonetheless, when I saw “Hanseatic City Buxtehude” on the town sign, I thought, “Since when is Buxtehude a Hanseatic City?”

In school, I was taught that of the many Hanseatic cities, only three remain, Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck, which are still officially called Free Hanseatic City (or just Hanseatic City in the case of Lübeck, which lost its independence in 1937 and even sued – unsuccessfully – to get back its independence and the Free Hanseatic City title in 1956). Bremen and Hamburg are also still independent federal states to this day and very proud of their independence, which becomes clear whenever some politician ponders that it would be cheaper to just eliminate these small city states. And considered Lübeck sued to get back the title and its independence shows how important the status is, especially since Lübeck doesn’t even get to be the capital of the state of Schleswig-Holstein. Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck also have the “Hanseatic City” as part of their licence plates. Bremen is HB for “Hanseatic City of Bremen”, Hamburg is HH for “Hanseatic City of Hamburg” and Lübeck is HL for Hanseatic City of Lübeck”.

Fast forward to 1990 and the unification and suddenly, a bunch of East German cities (Rostock, Wismar, Stralsund, Greifswald and Anklam) started to calls themselves Hanseatic City as well, complete with the respective H licence plates, though without the “Free” part (since they are not independent), since they had been members of the Hanseatic League in medieval times. This prompted several other cities in both West and East Germany to proudly call themselves Hanseatic City again as well, though without the H licence plate. Buxtehude proudly took up the Hanseatic City title again in 2014.

Hanseatic cog in a roundabout in Buxtehude

Buxtehude commemorates its recently regained status as a Hanseatic City with this sculpture of a Hanseatic cog in the middle of a roundabout.

Lunch Break

By now, it was noon and I was getting a little hungry again. I came across a Vietnamese restaurant called To Gao directly by the river and decided to have launch there.

Spring rolls

Spring rolls with dipping sauce

Lemon grass chicken with herbs and jasmine rice

Lemongrass chicken with peanuts, herbs and jasmine rice

Suitably refreshed, I headed out into the city for more steamy adventures.

The Harbour and more Steampunk

At the edge of the city center by the old harbour, there was a cultural/events center on the premises of a former pottery factory that housed an indoor market as well as more exhibits.

Buxtehude Kulturforum im Hafen

A look across Buxtehude’s harbour at a former pottery factory turned arts center.

River Este and Buxtehude harbour

A look across the river Este and Buxtehude harbour. The harbour is purely used as a marina these days, since Hamburg harbour, one of the biggest in Germany, is very close by.

Neptune statue in Buxtehude

This Neptune statue has been welded together from junk and looks somewhat steampunky, though it seems to be just a regular installation on the terrace of the arts center.

Unusual for me, I didn’t find anything at the indoor market, but the various Steampunk exhibits were quite lovely, showing off the creativity and craft skills of Steampunk makers.

Steampunk botanical exhibits

An explorer displayed exotic botanical specimens from far away lands.

Steampunk botanical specimens

A closer look at some of the rare and exotic vegetation from far away lands.

Steampunk botanical exhibition

More rare botanical specimens as well as the botanist’s journal and toolkit.

Steampunk biological specimen

More biological specimen on display at the Aethercircus festival. According to the signs, these hail from other planets.

Steampunk skulls and a teapot

Two Steampunk skulls and a tea pot.

Steampunk brain and pocket calculations device

The brain of universal genius Professor Simon Bright preserved in a jar as well as a Steampunk laptop.

Steampunk time machine and glove

A model time machine and a navigation glove.

At this point, my phone ran out of juice, so there were a few attractions and exhibits I did not get the photograph.

I made my way back to the bus station and asked fellow passengers which bus I needed to take to get back to the Central Station (“Oh, you mean the train station”, a lady corrected me, since Buxtehude only has one). At the train station, I walked back to my car and plugged in my phone.

By now, I was rather exhausted from walking around all day and would have very much liked to have a coffee and some cake or – even better – some ice cream to refresh myself for the drive home. However, the cafés and ice cream shops in the city center of Buxtehude had all been overcrowded, so I decided to just make a pitstop somewhere alone the way.

There was only one problem: My phone was dead, which meant that I couldn’t access Google maps and find a suitable café or ice cream parlour along the way. And while the GPS of my car has a search function for restaurants (even divided along cuisines), hospitals, gas stations, banks, etc…, the database is hopelessly out of date, particularly with regard to restaurants. And yes, it is a tad shocking how much I’ve come to rely on my phone and Google maps to navigate unfamiliar places. Though I always keep a paper road atlas in my car (also hopelessly outdated) for emergencies, a road atlas won’t help to find a café or ice cream parlour.

So I decided to drive off and find a place to stop somewhere on the way, by which time my phone would hopefully have recharged enough that I could look up a place to have coffee and/or ice cream. Preferably ice cream.

At the edge of Buxtehude, I came across a gas station with good prices and stopped to refuel my car (I have a plug-in hybrid, but for longer trips, I use my Dad’s diesel, because it’s cheaper). By now, the phone had recharged sufficiently that I could turn it on again and look for an ice cream parlour. Alas, the closest ice cream parlours were all in the town center of Buxtehude, whence I’d just come. And the small towns on the way back to the Autobahn (Moisburg and Hollenstedt and a few small villages) didn’t have any ice cream parlours. So I checked further afield and found that the town of Sittensen, two Autobahn exits away, did have an ice cream parlour named Sonia’s Garden Ice Cream Café with very good reviews. So I programmed the address into Else, my GPS, and set off again.

Ice Cream Break in Sittensen

Sittensen is another of those small towns whose name I only know, because it’s an Autobahn exit.

That is, many years ago, I was hired to interpet for foreign visitors at one of the dullest companies I’ve ever visited. I’ve long since forgotten the name of the company – all I remember is that they produced waste water treatment systems for yachts and smaller ships (which shouldn’t be as infernally dull as it was) and that they were located on an industrial estate somewhere by the A1 between Bremen and Hamburg. Though I don’t remember which exit it was either. Might have been Sittensen, might have been Stuckenborstel, might have been Bockel, might have been Heidenau, might have been Hollenstedt.

So maybe I have been in Sittensen before, but if so, it was only on an industrial estate and not in the town proper. Else directed me to a very narrow road on the edge of town – so narrow that I would never have found it on my own – where there was nothing but farms and fields.

Turns out that Sonia’s Garden Ice Cream Café was a wooden pavilion on the premises of a farm, attached to a farm shop. Still, I wanted an ice cream and this was the only ice cream place in reasonable distance to the Autobahn between here and Oyten. And judging by how busy the place was, it had to be good. So I found a table on the terrace and ordered a wild berry sundae.

Wild berry sundae

A wild berry sundae on the terrace of Sonia’s Garden Ice Cream Café in Sittensen.

Refreshed, I set off towards home, though I made one more stop on my way back to the Autobahn – at a Rewe supermarket to buy some groceries for the weekend.

Take the Long Way Home 

However, I still had more than an hour to drive. Normally, I would have been home in maybe thirty or forty minutes. But the Autobahn bridge across the river Weser in Bremen is currently undergoing much needed renovation work, which tend to cause traffic jams and is a massive hassle for everybody in and around Bremen.

In northbound direction, the situation is tolerable, because my exit Brinkum is only about two and a half kilometers from the bridge and the construction zone. So even if there is a traffic jam, you can get through it without overly long delays.

In southbound direction, however, the traffic jam often extends all the way to the Bremen Cross junction and beyond. That means ten or twelve kilometers of traffic jam and a massive delay. Normally, the traffic is tolerable on the weekends and in the evenings and you can take the A1 anyway. But in recent weeks, it’s gotten so bad that the traffic jam on the A1 in southbound direction is pretty much a constant issue. Maybe you can drive straight through at 1 AM, but at any semi-reasonable hour, there’s always a traffic jam.

On my way to Buxtehude, the usual traffic jam in southbound direction had extended beyond the Bremen Cross junction almost to the exit Oyten. And on my way back, the car radio informed me that the traffic jam had not dissipated. So I had to find another way to cross the river Weser.

Of course, Bremen has several bridges across the river Weser (this site lists most of them) – Stephani Bridge (named after a church), Bürgermeister Smidt Bridge (named after a 19th century mayor who founded Bremerhaven and was a raging antisemite and should really not have anything named after him), Teerhof Bridge (pedestrian and bikes only), Wilhelm Kaisen Bridge (named after another mayor, who is inexplicably positively remembered in spite of being not very competent, but at least he wasn’t a raging antisemite) and Strawberry Bridge. The official name of Strawberry Bridge is Karl Carstens Bridge, named after a conservative politician who was West Germany’s president from 1979 to 1984. He was not very popular as a president, plus he’d been a member of the Nazi party (only accidentally, of course) and an officer of the Wehrmacht in WWII. In short, no one much liked this guy. However, he had been born in Bremen and when he died, the city felt the need to name something after him and picked Strawberry Bridge (named because it passes over allotment gardens along the river, where people grow strawberries). However, the locals still call it Strawberry Bridge and always will.

Nonetheless, Bremen clearly has a thing for naming bridges after problematic people. I once suggested renaming Bürgermeister Smidt Bridge Julius Bamberger Bridge after a Jewish businessman who operated a department store near the bridge. Karl Carstens Bridge should simply be restored to its colloquial name. As for Wilhelm Kaisen, he wasn’t overly problematic – I just dislike the unjustified veneration he gets. But renaming his bridge is not a high priority.

Whenever there’s a traffic jam on the A1, the Bremen bridges quickly get overcrowded. What more, Stephani Bridge is curently also prone to traffic jams because of construction work on Bundestraße B75 and Bürgermeister Smidt Bridge is also undergoing construction work. All of these bridges were built in the 1950s and 1960s, so they are all breaking down at the same time. Strawberry and Wilhelm Kaisen Bridge are theoretically free – however, Saturday is also match day and the Weser Stadium, home of Werder Bremen, lies directly by the river between Strawberry and Wilhelm Kaisen Bridge, so both bridges would get overcrowded by football fans, plus Kaisen Bridge might not be accessible at all, because the Osterdeich riverside road and all the roads around the stadium are closed on match days. And yes, I find this infuriating, because it makes a whole neighbourhood inaccessible for the sake of a football match, even though people have plenty of reasons to go there that have nothing whatsoever to do with football.

So the Bremen bridges were out. However, there are still a couple of bridges upstream. First, there is Uesen Bridge in Achim, which actually appears – standing in for a Rhine Bridge – in Richard Lester’s 1967 anti-war movie How I Won the War, starring John Lennon. Of course, it’s bleedingly obvious that the Uesen Bridge is nowhere near the Rhine, but international audiences didn’t notice. And the filming, which employed lots of locals as extras, is still fondly remembered.

Since Uesen Bridge is the closest bridge to Bremen, it also tends to get overcrowded, whenever there is a traffic jam on the A1 or A27. The next crossing downstream is the weir in Intschede, which is a very narrow one lane bridge. Then there is the Weser bridge in Groß Hutbergen near Verden on Aller and then the bridges in Hoya and Nienburg,

For my way home, I chose the crossing at the weir in Intschede, which is mostly only known to locals. So I left the A1 at the exit Posthausen and made another pit stop at the Smyths Toys store on the premises of the Dodenhof shopping center in Posthausen (for more about the weird phenomenon that is Dodenhof, see this post). From Dodenhof, I took the road that leads to the Langwedel exit of Autobahn A27, though I did not drive onto the Autobahn, because the A27 would only take me back to the Bremen Cross intersection and the same traffic jam I was trying to avoid. Instead, I crossed the A27 and then the river Weser at the weir in Intschede.

Weser weird in Intschede

A look across the river Weser and the weir in Intschede. The weir was built in the 1950s. The road across the weir only has a single lane and is controlled via a traffic light.

River Weser in Intschede

Boats moored at the marina in Intschede.

From Intschede, I meandered through the countryside past fields, farms and forests. I passed through the village of Blender with its historic windmill and then through the towns of Thedinghausen and Syke towards home.

Blender windmill

The windmill in Blender, built in 1872 and in active use until 1972. Nowadays, it’s a museum and also a wedding venue.

Windmill in Blender

A closer look at the windmill in Blender.

All in all, I had a great time at the Aethercircus Steampunk festival in Buxtehude, though I could have lived without the long, meandering way home. The Aethercircus Festival is biannual, i.e. the next one is in 2027, and I will probably go again, especially since the bloody Autobahn bridge should be repaired by then.

Of course, I’m not the only one to talk about the Aethercircus Steampunk festival. For other reports and impressions about the Aethercircus festival, see this TV news report from Sat1 Regional (I’m pretty sure I saw this TV team filming). Here is a video from Reisenberg Travel, a Buxtehude based travel YouTube channel, another video from Madle Fotowelt, a Buxtehude based YouTube channel, a video by Hobbyfilmer Uwe and yet another YouTube video by Kais Streetcafé.

The Hamburger Abendblatt, a Hamburg based newspaper, reported extensively about the Aethercircus festival. There’s a festival report here, a photo gallery here and an interview with Aethercircus founder and organiser, musician Michael Dunkelfels Deutschmann, hereThe local paper Buxtehuder Tageblatt and the weekly Neues Buxtehuder Wochenblatt both also report about the Aethercircus festival.

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Robot Hallucinations Revisited

Rather than overload my previous post (which got a lot of attention) with ETAs, I decided to write a follow-up post with a round-up of new developments, insights and reactions on the Seattle Worldcon ChatGPT controversy.

For starters, Kathy Bond, chair of the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle, Washington, posted a statement on May 13 about steps they were taking to remedy the issues caused by using ChatGPT to vet potential panelists. These steps include bringing in new more volunteers, re-vetting program participants, this time without the questionable aid of plagiarism bots, and also reaching out to people with programming experience on previous Worldcons (which is maybe what they should have done in the first place) to audit their programming process and the remedial steps. Kathy Bond also announced that the Seattle Worldcon has processed all membership refund requests and will pay out refunds soon. Finally, Kathy Bond also announced future updates regarding to re-vetting and auditing progress.

So in short, they’re trying to fix the mistakes they made and that’s a good thing. However, the big question is how did this mistake happen in the first place? How on Earth did anybody ever think using an LLM for any Worldcon related task, including vetting potential program participants, was a good idea?

My friend and fellow Hugo finalist Jason Sanford attempts to answer exactly that question in his latest Genre Grapevine column and interviewed several people involved with the Seattle Worldcon.

I urge you to read the whole report, but to sum it up, apparently the decision to use ChatGPT to vet potential program participants was made by a volunteer on the vetting team without knowledge or authorisation by either chair Kathy Bond or SunnyJim Morgan, head of the programming team. The reason was that the team in charge of vetting was seriously understaffed and consisted of only two rather than the planned six volunteers, so someone decided to take a short cut.

To be honest, I already suspect that something like this was exactly what happened. One person made the decision to use ChatGPT, likely assumed it wasn’t a big deal, since it did save time and they were manually re-checking negative results. Especially since, as Jason also points out in his report, Worldcon volunteers who aren’t writers or artists who had their work stolen to train the various AI systems often don’t really understand what the issue with using generative AI is. Because the sad truth is that a lot of people, including people who should know better, casually use ChatGPT and other generative AI programs in their day to day life and work. Sometimes, there is a semi-shameful admission that they’re using it just for time-consuming, thankless and seemingly unimportant tasks, while others are shamelessly using these energy-guzzling plagiarism bots because everybody is doing it and besides, it is the future.

Around the same time, the Seattle ChatGPT controversy blew up, James D. Walsh’s extensive article in New York Magazine about US college students using ChatGPT and similar programs to unapologetically cheat their way through college came out. It’s depressing reading and if I had anything to say in this matter, I’d fail the arses of those cheating students and kick them out of college, too. But of course, US colleges won’t do this, since they’re mostly for profit institutions who have to justify the exorbitant tuition costs by awarding degrees to pretty much anyone willing to pay. That’s probably also why there is a much higher tolerance in the US for things like essay writing services (which are as much cheating as ChatGPT and yet seem to be pretty ubiquitous). Again, the first time I heard about essay writing services, I was outraged and said that the students in question should be kicked out at once. But apparently, this sort of thing is tolerated, if it’s not too blatant.

Now as some of you may know, I have been teaching in the past – middle and high school level, adult education and university. I was generally a fairly mellow teacher – with one exception. I was absolutely zero tolerance on cheating on exams and assignments. If I caught a student cheating, I would fail them. Not that I ever had to, probably because the students knew exactly that I was zero tolerance on cheating.

This is not an uncontroversial view. Because whether in the US or in Germany, cheating on exams is often considered normal, something everybody did. When I was a kid, my parents and other relatives often talked about and even outright bragged about cheating on exams in school, complete with detailed methods. Because apparently this was considered totally normal. Also, when the Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg plagiarism case broke back in 2011, followed by various other cases of politicians being caught plagiarising their doctoral thesises, a lot of people were quite cavalier about it and didn’t understand the outrage, because “everybody cheats in school”. And whenever I replied, “Well, I never cheated in school. Not once”, I got weird looks.

Even a friend who works in education in North America has criticised my zero tolerance approach to cheating, plagiarism and AI use, because “we are forcing kids to go to school and college and get degrees in order to get jobs, whether they want to be there or not, so we should tolerate if they take short cuts.” Whereupon I replied, “Well if they want/need the degree, they should do the work involved or find a job that doesn’t require a degree [easier in Germany than North America, to be fair].”

To return to the Seattle Worldcon controversy, the volunteer who made the decision to use ChatGPT clearly didn’t understand why it was a bad idea. And I’m very grateful to the Seattle team that they chose not to publicly name this person and throw them under the bus, because even though they made a mistake, they don’t deserve a public pillorying. However, once higher level members of the programming team and the con com became aware of the issue, someone should have taken that volunteer aside and told them not to use ChatGPT for any Worldcon related task again and re-vet the program participants manually. Ideally, they should also have assigned more people to the vetting team.

Another part of the issue, which Jason also points out in his report, is that many of the volunteers on the Seattle Worldcon team don’t have a lot of experience. Seattle hasn’t hosted a Worldcon since 1961 and while there was a Worldcon in Washington State, namely in Spokane, in 2015, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of overlap between the Seattle and Spokane teams.

Jason also links to Erin Underwood’s post at File 770 about the difficulties of choosing program participants, about how younger volunteers often aren’t that familiar with older authors and fans and how many potential program participants, particularly older and more established authors. aren’t making things easy for cons by not offering a lot of information about themselves in the program participant questionnaire (or refusing to fill it in altogether), assuming that everybody will know who they are.

Meanwhile, comments on the Seattle Worldcon ChatGPT controversy continue to pour in from various quarters.  The Hugo-winning Octothorpe podcast discusses the controversythe transcript is here. Alison, John and Liz also talk about the disconnect between creatives who had their work stolen to train the various LLM plagiarism bots and people who are using or being told to use ChatGPT and other generative AI programs in their jobs and don’t understand what the big deal is.

At the tech news site Futurism, Joe Wilkins offers a summary of the Worldcon ChatGPT controversy and also briefly mentions previous controversies (Chengdu and last year’s Hugo ballot stuffing, but not the Sad or Rabid Puppies).  This article came out around the time the controversy first broke, though I missed it at the time. Wilkins concludes with the following paragraph:

It’s safe to say 2025 will be a standout in the pantheon of Worldcon muckups, at least from a PR point of view. Time will tell whether the organization behind the gathering can top itself in 2026, or reign in its missteps before the whole organization loses its status as the world’s premier sci-fi convention.

Personally, I suspect that this year’s ChatGPT uproar will certainly be remembered down the line, though less than the Chengdu Hugo scandal or the Sad and Rabid Puppies.

Raj at Blog of the Moon also weighs in on the Seattle Worldcon ChatGPT controversy and notes that as Worldcon scandals go, this one is fairly mild compared to the Chengdu Hugo shenangigans or the Sad and Rabid Puppies.

Finally, the controversy is also being discussed in the less pleasant corners of fandom. Jon Del Arroz covered the topic several times in his Fandom Pulse newsletter with his usual approach to journalistic integrity. Here is the first article (archive.is links) with follow-ups here and here, where he takes the time to take pot shots at Jeff VanderMeer and the far right SFF’s Bête Noire John Scalzi.

So far, so unsurprising. What was a little more surprising, however, was seeing the Seattle Worldcon ChatGPT controversy discussed at Clownfish TV, a YouTube channel that bills itself as offering pop culture news, views and reviews. What they really are is one of those rightwing YouTube channels who make multiple videos per week or sometimes per day proclaiming their hate for whatever it’s fashionable to hate this week. They also tend to declare that [insert property here] is dead and that no one cares anymore, all the while spending twenty minutes ranting why they don’t care about [insert thing here]. You know the sort of channel, since YouTube‘s algorithm keeps shoving them into everybody’s face.

Clownfish TV mostly talks about whatever media property is the thing to hate this week and also spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about Disney theme parks, but they rarely cover SFF and fandom controversies, probably because those don’t generate as many clicks and views from their audience. However, they are oddly obsessed with Bluesky, which they keep predicting will fail anytime soon and that no one is using it anyway. I have no idea why they are so obsessed with Bluesky and keep hoping for it to fail. Maybe they don’t like that Bluesky‘s moderation tools and overall culture make it easy to block trolls and stop harassment.

And so the Clownfish TV video about the Seattle Worldcon ChatGPT controversy is entitled “Bluesky MELTS DOWN at Con Over ChatGPT Usage!”. Of course, a lot of the discussion and anger at the Seattle Worldcon using ChatGPT did happen on Bluesky, but it also happened in a lot of other places such as Seattle’s own blog, File 770, various other blogs including mine and even on Twitter. But Bluesky is the hook they picked for their video and it’s introduced as “more Bluesky drama”, because that’s apparently what their audience responds to, while Worldcon isn’t even named in the title.

If you actually try to watch the video, it quickly becomes apparent that host Kneon – he often co-hosts with his wife GeekySparkles [yes, those are the names they’re using], but it’s just him in this particular video – doesn’t really know a lot about Worldcon or the Hugos, which he freely admits, because his focus lies elsewhere.  Instead, he picked up the topic from Fandom Pulse, which might not be the best or most accurate source, though he also links to the io9 article, which isn’t great either, but still better than Fandom Pulse, and to the Futurism article, which is actually pretty good. He also briefly takes a look at File 770‘s coverage, only to exclaim, “Oh, I know who these people are. They have a major hate boner for us and have been writing hit pieces about us.”

This is completely hilarious, because I’m pretty sure Mike has no idea who Clownfish TV even is. As for the “hit piece”, that was a 127 word paragraph in a 1600 word article I wrote for File 770 on a controversy about the unauthorised use of images by a popular toy-related YouTube channel last year. That paragraph mostly offered some background on the channel and on their feud with another YouTube channel, to which I also linked in the article, as an introduction to an interview they did with one of the parties in the controversy. The only reason I linked to Clownfish TV at all was because the person in question had gone on a deleting spree and deleted all of videos and posts where related to the issue, so that interview was the only place where you could still listen to his point of view. So in short, a critical paragraph in an article on a completely different subject, now constitutes a “hit piece”. They’ll probably think this article is a hit piece, too [it’s not – it’s a round-up of reactions to a major fandom controversy], and may well make a video about it, but I honestly don’t care.

Getting back to the actual subject, it’s notable that Clownfish TV are very pro-AI – ironically, the interview to which I linked in the “hit piece” on File 770 was partly about a graphic novel using AI generated art – and can’t really understand why anybody feels otherwise, because AI is the future. Looking at their channel, it’s also clear that they use AI extensively to generate thumbnails featuring women with blue hair crying over the subject of the week in front of a flaming background (a friend of mine called the channel “almost comical the degree to which everything about the channel, aesthetically, felt like an over-the-top satire of a right-wing hate channel”). Though it’s also notable that the commenters are a lot more divided on AI use. Finally, we also get the usual stuff about how the people who resigned from their positions or withdrew from programming or the Hugos/Lodestar are just virtue signalling and how cons are dying anyway and no one knows who the program participants are either. In short, it’s the usual stuff you get from the rightwing corner of fandom.

And that’s a round-up of the latest developments and reactions regarding the Seattle Worldcon ChatGPT controversy. Since steps are being taken to remedy the issue and re-vet program participants, I hope this will be the last scandal to hit the Seattle Worldcon.

ETA 05-29-2025: In response to the Seattle Worldcon ChatGPT controversry, author Mia Tsai has announced ConCurrent, a kind of counter-Worldcon or Worldcon Fringe held at a hotel in Seattle. The official website of ConCurrent with a crowdfunding appeal is here and there is also a post at File 770 with some discussion in the comments.

I’ll leave comments open for now, but I reserve the right to close them and spam abusive comments, so play nice.

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Robot Hallucinations

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will be aware that the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle, Washington, is embroiled in a massive scandal. Turns out the programming team used ChatGPT to vet people who’d applied to be on programming for potential issues.

This was received about as well as you can imagine. File 770 shares a round-up of reactions and responses here and Jason Sanford shares several reactions and responses in his Genre Grapevine column. There is also a not very good summary of the controversy at io9, courtesy of Cheryl Eddy.

ETA: Locus also offers a summary of the ChatGPT controversy.

The fall-out is continuing to reverberate around fandom. People are cancelling or downgrading their Worldcon memberships, pulling out of programming, one finalist declined his Lodestar nomination and the Hugo administrators and WSFS division heads resigned, though I’ve been privately told that this is only tangentially related to the ChatGPT issue.

ETA 05-08-2025: I have since been informed by one of the people who resigned that the resignation was indeed due to the use of ChatGPT and the bad way the con handled the fallout.

Initially, I wasn’t going to write about this at all. I don’t need to write about every fandom controversy and ever Worldcon drama and I’m also working on a long post with lots of photos about a Steampunk festival I visited last weekend.

Besides, I know people who are on the Seattle Worldcon team, so I’d been privately told about one and a half weeks before all hell broke loose that there was some kind of Worldcon-related scandal incoming and – after some prompting – I was told what had happened and asked to keep it quiet, because Seattle Worldcon chair Kathy Bond was preparing a statement and should be given the chance to apologise. So by the time the news became public, I’d already known about this for a few days and my “What the everloving hell were they thinking?” reaction had time to cool down.

There was another brief apology from the chair posted on May 2 and then last night my time a more detailed statement/apology from chair Kathy Bond and program division head SunnyJim Morgan dropped, which also included the prompt they fed into ChatGPT.

Now I have been accepted for programming – though I can only attend virtually, because I don’t fancy getting thrown into an ICE jail, because some immigration officer decides being on Worldcon programming is work or just doesn’t like the way my face looks – but I was still curious and so I put the Seattle prompt with my name attached into ChatGPT. And yes, this is the first and only time I’ve ever used that resource-guzzling plagiarism machine, because I detest generative AI.

This is the reply I got from the plagiarism robot:

Based on available information, there are no known scandals or allegations involving Cora Buhlert related to homophobia, transphobia, racism, harassment, sexual misconduct, sexism, or fraud. She is a respected figure in the science fiction and fantasy communities, particularly within German-language fandoms.
File 770+2File 770+2File 770+2

Background and Contributions:

Writing and Editing: Cora Buhlert is an author and editor known for her work in science fiction and fantasy. She has contributed to various publications and anthologies, including the Kurd Laßwitz Preis and the Deutscher Science Fiction Preis.
File 770+1File 770+1

Fandom Engagement: She is an active participant in science fiction conventions and fan events, such as the Los Amigos Masters of the Universe Convention in Germany, where she has shared her experiences and insights.
File 770

Media Appearances: Buhlert has been involved in podcasting, co-hosting The Dickheads Podcast and producing her own show, Postcards from a Dying World, where she discusses various topics related to science fiction.
File 770

Reputation:

There are no public records or credible sources indicating any inappropriate behavior or controversies associated with Cora Buhlert. Her contributions to the science fiction and fantasy communities have been well-received, and she maintains a positive reputation among peers and fans alike.

Conclusion:

Based on the available information, Cora Buhlert appears to be a suitable and respected individual for participation as a panelist at science fiction and fantasy events.

Beyond the fact that there have been no scandals and inappropriate behaviour associated with me, most everything in this response is wrong.

Even though I’m German, I’m not that deeply involved in German fandom, because I mostly read and write in English. I have certainly never been nominated for or won either the Kurd Laßwitz Preis or the Deutscher Science Fiction Preis. My closest association with either award is that I’m on the mailing list that gets the press release with the finalists and winners and that I have translated the titles of nominated and winning novels and stories for File 770’s posts about the awards on occasion.

The plagiarism machine is correct that I am an active participant in science fiction conventions and fan events. It is also correct that I attended last year’s Los Amigos Masters of the Universe convention and will attend this year’s as well. However, I attended Los Amigos purely as a fan/guest. I was not on programming or involved with the organisation in any way.

The plagiarism machine is also correct that I have been on several podcasts, including The Dickheads podcast and Postcards from a Dying World. However, I’m not the host or co-host or producer of either podcast and I suspect David Agranoff, who actually hosts/produces both podcasts would be very surprised about this.

So in short, the plagiarism bot attributes awards, podcasts and conventions to me that I haven’t been involved with, but fails to mention that awards I actually won, the books, stories and essays I’ve actually written and the conventions where I was on programming.

That said, I got off lightly, because it could have been much worse. Several 2025 Hugo finalists put their names into ChatGPT together with the Seattle prompt and got much worse results. One person got mixed up with a sexual abuser from Romania, because they share the same surname, and also had books attributed to them they did not write. Another person, who shares a name with a popular actor, promptly got mixed with that actor (a mistake a human could also make, but that’s usually quickly cleared up) and ChatGPT proceeded to list several controversies associated with the actor, only to conclude that the actor would be a suitable panelist anyway. Someone also put Neil Gaiman’s name into ChatGPT, which promptly decided that he would be a most excellent panelist, in spite of the widely reported sexual abuse scandal.

I guess I should count myself lucky that my internet footprint under my full name is big enough that the plagiarism bot did not get me mixed up with other people who share my last name such as my cousin, who’s a local politician and disability advocate, an audio book narrator who’s from a different branch of the family, a car dealer, also from a different branch of the family, a rancher in California, also from a different branch of the family, or a bunker on the Westwall (we have no idea why we share a name with a bunker).

Beyond the fact that ChatGPT and similar Large Language Models are known to just make up things and that people with common names or even uncommon names can easily get mixed up with other who share their name as well as the massive privacy violations involved, there are also issues with the prompt itself. File 770 is a good resource, but it’s not the only SFF news site nor is it free of bias. So privileging File 770 as a source means that any bias it has is reproduced.

ETA 05-08-2025: On Bluesky, Simon Bisson gives a detailed explanation why Seattle’s approach to using ChatGPT to vet potential program participants and their prompt was a bad idea.

The Seattle Worldcon using ChatGPT to vet program applicants was a terrible idea and the response was completely predictable. This is really a drama of their own making that could have been easily avoided by just reading the fucking room and realising that 99 percent of Worldcon members are vehemently opposed to generative AI, not least because these Large Language Model stole our work as training data, flood magazines with crap and are poised to take many of our jobs and they’re using massive amounts of energy and water to do it, too.

ETA 05-08-2025: Erin Underwood discusses the challenges of selecting program participants for a large SFF convention, especially if volunteers are not familiar with many of the applicants or people don’t fill out the programming survey in a way that’s useful.

I do sympathise with the volunteers and the hours of work that go into creating programming, vetting and assigning panelists, etc… However, using ChatGPT isn’t just a short-cut, it literally spits out false information, which will not make programming better.

Finally, for something much more pleasant involving the Seattle Worldcon, I have been contributing to the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow Blog, writing about the SFF of the early 1960s, when both the World Fair and Worldcon were last in Seattle. And yes, I write these posts myself, no robots involved.

My latest article, posted a few days before all hell broke loose, was about Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné. The article was well received and got comments from both Michael Moorcock and Micheal Whelan, the artist who painted the iconic Elric covers of the 1970s, who not only enjoyed what I wrote, but also settled once and for all the question whether Elric has pointed ears.

ETA: The title of the post is a reference to Robot Dreams and Robot Visions, two Isaac Asimov collections which came out in 1986 and 1990 respectively. LLMs don’t really hallucinate, because they are not actually self-aware, they just spit out vaguely plausible sounding nonsense.

I also broke down and ran the Seattle prompt on Isaac Asimov. It correctly identified him as an unsuitable panelist due to being a serial sexual harasser, but failed to note that he has been dead for 33 years, which would also disqualify him as a program participant.

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Easter 2025

This year, the long Easter holiday weekend began with my birthday on Good Friday.

The fact that there are so many birthdays and wedding anniversaries in March and April in my family is also why Easter was never that big of a deal for us. It was simply one more holiday in a time already full of holidays – but one that you had to navigate around, because the shops are closed on Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday and super crowded on Holy Thursday and Easter Saturday.

Easter Saturday is also the day of the traditional Easter bonfire. These Easter fires are most likely a pre-Christian tradition adoptedby Christianity. They’re also a handy way of getting rid of unwanted garden waste.

Easter fires have come under fire in recent times, because animals would nest in the pile of garden waste and get burned to death. Plus, some people threw what was very definitely not garden waste into the fires. So nowadays, the waste is collected by the fire brigade and the pile is only set up on the day of the Easter fire itself to prevent unauthorised waste disposal and animals from nesting in the pile.

In past few years, you also started getting vaguely Green folks who have a nigh pathological hatred for burning wood. They even have their own hashtag #holzofengate. Their main target are wood-fired furnaces and fireplaces (even though wood-fired furnaces were still publicly supported as an alternative to oil and gas until fairly recently and pretty much everybody in rural areas has a back-up fireplace or wood or coal-fired oven somewhere to keep warm and cook when the power goes out), but they also hate outdoor barbecues, fireworks and Easter fires. They do have a point, because air pollution is a genuine problem, but their behaviour – such as posting photos of smoke rising from random chimneys – is completely unhinged. People like these are the reason why the Green Party is widely hated.

But people won’t give up traditions so easily and so the Easter Fires continue to burn. And because Saturday was clear and slightly windy, the smoke was also blown away and didn’t harass the entire neighbourhood, even though the Easter fire was pretty close by. Though I kept the windows closed, while the Easter fire was burning.

Because Easter was fairly late this year, the sun set around half past eight PM, whereas the Easter fire was lit at half past six PM – in beautiful bright sunshine, which somewhat spoils the effect.

Easter fire seen from a distance

The 2025 Seckenhausen Easter fire seen from a distance. Note the crowd gathered around the fire and the many bikes left by the roadside.

Of course, I went to see the Easter fire. Pretty much the entire village gathers to see a pile of garden waste burn, while eating sausages and drinking beer, and you always meet someone you know. This year, I met my former neighbour Eike and his six-year-old son Linus who like six-year-olds everywhere was very fascinated by the many vehicles of the local volunteer fire brigade that had turned out for the Easter fire. The volunteer fire brigade organises the fire and also makes sure everything is safe.

Seckenhausen Easter fire

A closer look at the 2025 Seckenhausen Easter fire. Note the two members of the local volunteer fire brigade. The one on the left is the local fire chief.

I also met an elderly couple I did not recognise, though they clearly recognised me. The husband’s name was Erwin. I did not catch her name. The lady told me that she read about my Hugo nominations in the local paper, whereupon I told her that there would be another interview with me in the paper soon, because I’m nominated again. Cue congratulations.

The lady also noted that she never sees parents out and about anymore, whereupon I replied, “Well, that’s difficult because they’re both dead.” – “Oh no”, the lady replied, “We thought they might have moved away – to a care home or something like that.”

Crowds at the Easter Fire

The crows gathered around the 2025 Seckenhausen Easter fire. Note the goth girl,

Easter fire

A closer look at the 2025 Seckenhausen Easter fire. Note the couple with their kid (and drinks) in a handcart.

Easter fire

This is as close as I went to the Easter fire. At this distance, you start to feel the heat.

Since an Easter fire is a social occasion, there’s always a drinks stall and a sausage stall as well as a truck to supply music.

Easter fire crowd and trucks

The grounds around the Easter fire with drinks stall, sausage stall and music truck as well as poles and string lights.

Easter fire rear

This is what it looks like from the rear. Note the young people of the fire brigade grilling sausages and makeing fries for the crowd.

Easter fire drinks stall

The “Roter Hahn” (Red Rooster) drinks stall is operated by the fire brigade (note the logo on top) to help finance the fun and is a big draw for the crowd.

Easter fire toilet wagon

All that drinking leads to pressure on the bladder, so of course there is a toilet cart as well. And for once, the line on the male side is longer than on the female side.

After doing my round at the Easter fire, I walked home and since it was still fairly early, I grabbed my shopping basket and drove to the nearest grocery store for some last minute shopping. On my way, I saw the smoke from another Easter fire rising into the clear sky. From the direction where I saw the smoke, I suspect it might have been Silbersee (silver lake), a popular bathing spot.

I didn’t really need to go grocery shopping, since I was well supplied with groceries to last me the rest of the Easter weekend. However, my Aunt Marlene invited me over for coffee on Easter Sunday and I didn’t yet have a gift for her.

In the end, I did not buy a gift for Aunt Marlene at the grocery store after all, because it turned out that they had jacked up the prices for the seasonal sweets and chocolate to ridiculous amounts. No, a small box of Lindt Easter Eggs is not worth eight Euros, no matter how good they taste. Instead, I decided I’d buy some cake before heading to Aunt Marlene’s.

On the parking lot of the grocery store, I saw a couple eating ice cream, so I asked them if the ice cream parlour across the road was still open and they said yes. So I thought, “Screw it, I really want an ice cream now. And besides, yesterday was my birthday, so I damn well deserve one.”

So I walked over to the ice cream parlour, which indeed was still open and busy, and ordered a Martini sundae.

Martini sundae

Martini sundae, i.e. lemon ice cream, blueberries, cream and a shot of vermouth.

On Easter Sunday, I made egg vindaloo for lunch, because it’s just the perfect Easter lunch. It also looks amazing and tastes just as good.

Egg vindaloo

Egg vindaloo

Egg vindaloo wirh basmati rice

After lunch, I took a nap and then I set out to visit Aunt Marlene. On the way, I stopped at Bakery Helmers to buy some cake. Helmers is one of the few remaining independent bakeries (most bakeries these days are regional chains) and they have amazing cake, which is safe for me to eat without triggering allergies. I got three slices of cherry crumble cake for my Aunt Marlene, my cousin Ulrike and myself. I also got a marzipan chocolate bunny as a gift for Aunt Marlene.

Cherry crumble cake with coffee

This is an older photo of cherry crumble cake by Bakery Helmers, but it’s the same cake.

Getting to Aunt Marlene’s was a bit of a challenge, because they are laying tram tracks in her neighbourhood, so the main road is closed and all traffic passes through the narrow residential street where Aunt Marlene lives. A lot of the traffic was speeding to – in a narrow 30 km/h speed limit residential street. I finally found a parking place, grabbed my cake and went to Aunt Marlene’s.

Aunt Marlene was the wife of my Dad’s older brother. She’s 93 and the only surviving member of that generation on my Dad’s side – Dad was considerably younger than everybody else on that side of the family – though some of my Mom’s cousins are still alive as well. Aunt Marlene is still sharp and active for her age and still lives in the same semi-detached house where she’s lived for the past sixty years or so.

My cousin Ulrike was also supposed to visit for Easter, which is why Aunt Marlene had invited me. Ulrike was supposed to come around four, but she hadn’t yet arrived. So Aunt Marlene and I settled down on her balcony overlooking her garden and enjoyed the sunshine. When Ulrike still hadn’t arrived by five o’clock, Aunt Marlene put the coffee on and we enjoyed the cherry cake.

In the end, it was past six when Ulrike finally showed. Turned out she had messaged her Mom that she would be late, but Aunt Marlene hadn’t yet seen the message. Ulrike had just returned from a bike trip along the river Aller, so she had stories to tell and photos to show. At one point, she said, “And then I came to this strange place near the Autobahn.” I look at the photo: “That’s Autohof Schwarmstedt. I occasionally stop there, because they’ve got a very good bakery.”

In return, I also told Aunt Marlene and Ulrike about my side trip to Offensen to visit our relatives and that they apparently no longer live there.

At around half past seven, I left to go home. Aunt Marlene also gave me two photos that belonged to my grandmother. One shows my grandfather, the other my great-grandmother:

Photos of my grandfather and great-grandmother.

Historical photos of my grandfather and great-grandmother.

My grandfather Adolf Buhlert (my Dad was named after him) was born in 1901 and died in 1967, well before I was born. I’m not entirely sure what killed him. What I heard is that he had heart problems and that what really killed him was being forced to retire from his job as a gas station operator, when his gas station was closed and torn down to built a supermarket. The photo isn’t dated, but I suspect that it was taken a few years before his death. In his face, I can see the resemblance to my Dad and my Uncle.

My great-grandmother Magdalene Freese né Schier was born in 1871 and died in 1940. She was married to a sea captain with the North German Lloyd shipping company, lived in Bangkok for a few years with her husband and had three kids. Nikolaus a.k.a. my Uncle Nick was the oldest. He was born on Christmas Eve 1897 and was a sailor like his father. He took part in the Kiel sailors mutiny at the end of WWI and the Bremen Soviet Republic and ran off to America to avoid arrest where he lived in Miami until he died sometime in the early 1980s. I actually met him once, when I was five and he was seventy-one. There was an older daughter named Josefine a.k.a. Aunt Josie, of whom I have very faint memories. She died when I was three or four years old. My grandmother, finally, was the youngest, born April 18, 1903. Yes, I share a birthday with my grandma.

As for my great-grandmother, I have obviously never met her and even my Dad had no memory of her, since she died when he was two. Until today, I don’t think I ever saw a photo of her. I have vague memories of seeing a photo of my great-grandfather Reinhard Freese. At any rate, I think I know what he looked like, but then I might also just imagine what he looked like based on what sea captains looked like in the early twentieth century.

I got a family rumour about his death yesterday BTW, namely that he came home late and couldn’t get into the sailors housing community where he lived, because the gate was already locked. So he tried to climb over the fence and died from exhaustion. It’s suitably weird story, but I’m pretty sure it’s not true, because the details don’t add up. I know that my great-parents lived at the sailors housing of Haus Seefahrt in the Walle neighbourhood of Bremen.  However, this housing community was destroyed along with most of the neighbourhood in an air raid on August 18/19, 1944. The neighbourhood was bombed so thoroughly that the street where my great-grandparents lived no longer exists – yes, I tried to find it. My Dad actually remembers sifting through the rubble of the burned out house with my grandmother from where she rescued two bronze buddha statues which my great-grandfather had brought back from his travels. These buddha statues now stand in my living room. The Haus Seefahrt and its sailors housing was eventually rebuilt elsewhere, but not until the early 1950s. Meanwhile, my great-grandfather died in 1946. So whatever happened to him, he clearly couldn’t have died trying to climb a fence at Haus Seefahrt.

Now I have a photo of my paternal great-grandmother as well (I have a few photos of one of my maternal great-grandmothers – the other died in childbirth while having my grandpa). Again the photo is not dated, though she’s clearly not young. I suspect it might have been taken in the 1910s or even 1920s. If you look closely at the photo, it is actually retouched. The eyebrows, hair and details on the dress were added by hand. It’s notable that one of her eyes is drooping and her face is uneven. Evidence of a stroke or did she just look like that?

I will put the photo up on the wall, probably next to a photo of my two uncles as little boys that my Dad put up in his office/the basement bar. Because it is a lovely vintage photo and besides, she is my great-grandmother. I’m considering putting up some other old family photos as well. My parents’ wedding photo, since it’s really lovely. Maybe some childhood pictures of my parents, my grandparents’ wedding picture and the few photos I have of my maternal great-grandparents.

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