 Castle of Grayskull was one of the most popular play sets sold in the 1980s and reappeared on web-based store shelves in a brand-new, much larger scale in 2002 with the release of the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe 2000X toyline and TV series. Centuries ago, during the Great Wars, Grayskull was built by Titus and the Giants from the mountains of Perpetua, the most powerful wizard in the universe Hiro, the paternity and people, the council of elders who ruled over Eternia at that time, and the descendants of King Gerard, which included the later King Devon Grayskull. At the recommendation of the Sorceress, who eventually became Queen Vienna, the council of elders concentrated their power in the Hall of Wisdom and reshaped it into a terrifying castle that saw anyone from plundering it until a champion would arise to defend the forces of good. According to the map of Eternia, Castle Grayskull resides on the exact opposite side of the planet as Snake Mountain, just south of the Evergreen Forest and northwest of the Eternian Palace and the capital city of Eternus. Sands of time and the Sands of Fire separate the Evergreen Forest at Grayskull's northern border from the Evil Horde to the east, with the Ocean of Naural separating it from the Evil Horde on the western side. Castle Grayskull was once home to King Grayskull, an ancestor of Prince Adam and He-Man who died defending his kingdom and Eternia as a whole from Horde. Upon his death, King Grayskull transferred his power into his sword, which originally belonged to the powerful wizard Hero. Originally named the Sword of Life by the overlords of the timeless dimension of Trollah that now forms the basis of He-Man's power. His wife, Vienna, became the first sorceress and his advisors became the council of elders. He also had an enormous green lion as a mount, bearing the same armor as Battlecat and as presumably where Battlecat gains his powers. King Grayskull lived 500 years before his descendants, King Randor, He-Man, and She-Ra. When the council of elders reached the end of their rule, during Keldor's invasion they made Captain Randor, King of Eternia. Castle Grayskull was released by Mattel for inclusion in their Masters of the Universe Classics action figure line mid to late November 2013. And a new character named Castle Grayskull Man, described as the heroic embodiment of Castle Grayskull, was created by Daniel Benedict and was the winner of the 30th anniversary created character contest. The figure of Castle Grayskull Man was released in November of 2012. Classics Castle Grayskull Man, as you can see this thing is massive and I'm going to play it now. When I first got this, when it was first released, I had to do a comparison to the original vintage and you can fact place the vintage castle inside this thing. It won't shut where you could put it in here. It's amazing. So let's go ahead and get started. This is going to be amazing. So first off, we have the outside here. Really cool. Now the guys who did this was a four horseman. They were the ones that were responsible for the re-sculpt of the 2000 X Masters of the Universe line. They went ahead to the Masters of the Universe Classics line. So first off, okay, I mean this thing is filled with detail. You have nicks, you have cracks, the stone looks stone. Maybe a little bit more black wash would have been nice, but I mean the most part of this thing looks awesome. The wooden door here looks just amazing. The metal, the plate on here you can see it even has some rust on it. Nice touches with the wood paint. The eyes just look so sunken. You don't want to go near this thing. So, and this thing has some action features too that we go over in the review. We're going to go over the main details and sculpt it first. Of course, like the original, you got the cannon that sits up here and the flag. They got the good guys for when they had the castle. They got the bad guys for when they got the castle. So you're picking this is just a sit-up there. So you put it here, you put it over here, you put it inside the castle. But still, a nice little knot of the original vintage castle. Moving on to the side here, like I said, when this thing has detail, when I say this thing has detail, it's really neat because look at this. You can have a metal painted, fully metal painted and sculpted metal hook here for whatever reason. That's pretty cool. I mean, they didn't have to paint it, but it's nice. They did add an extra detail. You got the wood paneling here. You got the windows, more wood paneling. This is amazing. And one thing I want to point out is in the original, and this whole castle Grayskull was made from the original prototype version. So those pieces here that they've added that weren't included in the original vintage castle. For instance, we have a hidden door here which does open. And you'll notice it has a little keyhole here. An action figure named Scareglove in the Master Universe Classics line came with the key to open this door. So if you had that figure, you're going to be able to use that key. If not, it will still open on the inside. You just got to give it a point. It's still pretty cool. And again, it really does look like it's part of the castle too. Okay, so as you can see, on the inside of this thing, it's pretty cool. And again, unlike the vintage, this has three levels of play. So let's start here down here at the bottom. Okay, first off, I need to move this because this weapons rack was sold separately about a year before the castle. So let's start from over here. So over here, you'll notice also that the castle has a floor, like an actual floor for play. There's something inside of the add. Again, one didn't need to, but it was really cool because with the original vintage, you know, you had the whatever floor you were playing on. It was your floor for the castle. So this was a kind of a nice addition. You can see the floor very shaded and chipped and very just worn. I love the paint job on this. You'll notice that this is actually used real chains. Okay, real chains, they just click right on. You have the door here, which if you'll notice looks like a real tongue. Now this door does open and I'll go over that feature here in just a little bit. So when I show you all the little action features of this thing. Now you'll remember the original castle had a trap door. It was supposed to, the figure was supposed to fall in a dungeon. This was also supposed to do that. But for whatever reason, they moved the dungeon over here. Unlike the vintage, this one actually has a dungeon before it was just a little sticker down here as they fell. And the door does open. Just give it a little pull and you can actually put action figures inside the door. So looking inside, you'll notice that they kind of redid that same sticker just a little bit more detailed for the dungeon. And if you go a little further up, there is actually manacles right here. And they are of the same as metal chain. You can actually fit a figure in there and attach them to the manacle. And I'll show you kind of that little bit when we go over the features. Moving over this way, you'll notice the door that I showed you earlier. Again this does just open you just kind of push it. There we go. And it opens up. This is another way, one of three ways in the castle grayscale. Little weapons here. They're separate. They do just kind of randomly pull off and sort of sword. And you can put them on pretty much anywhere you want that has those little pegs here in the castle. They just, and it is pretty much the same shield that came with that human figure. It's just unpainted. And again that just can clip right on right there. Like the original vintage, we do have an elevator here. And again part of the features, I'll go over those. Up here we have the second floor with a nice, now the original castle grayscale was known for having a bunch of stickers and cardboard pieces. The horseman decided to get rid of all those in favor of an actual sculpted working computer panel screen, which shows the Atonian galaxy. You have little buttons here. You can figure stand here, operating them. So that's pretty cool. And of course one of the main features of the castle was the little suit of armor. Again that was used to be a cardboard piece as this is a solid hollowed out sculpted kind of like a minifig almost with a little operating computer. We have the trap door right here. Yeah it's just a little sticker right over the door. Nice little flags here indicating good and evil. And of course we have our throne, which is a little dusty, but that's okay. And we'll go from there to the top, which is our third floor. Again we have more some of that awesome wood paneling here. The boards are, they just look amazing. Perfect wash, wash here. And something else that the horseman decided to do is they have the handle. Now this handle is actually a separate piece that you can have the option of putting on. I did just add more to the castle. You can work it off to get it off, but pretty much once it's in there it's in there. So I don't want to risk breaking it to take it off. So there we go. Now let's show you some of the features on this thing. So well, so next up let's go ahead and show you some of the accessories that came with this thing. Okay so you remember the original castle came with a ladder, which if you look at this ladder, this ladder looks amazing. Perfectly painted, nice sculpted, nicely detailed. You got what looks like metal here for the hooks, to where the original castle was pretty much just one solid piece. And of course you could put this ladder anywhere you want in the castle, outside the castle. So just nice little accessory there. Of course if you're on the original vintage castle, we had the practice thing in this. Now something I want to note, this is more detailed, because there's a face up here, you got the fists, you got the dragon head, and of course you got the claw feet. Now the original one's spot. This one does spin, but it doesn't really spin like the other one did. I mean you can make it do that. I kind of get it going a little better, but there's a little bit of toughness there. Still nice little accessory for the castle. This was one of the accessories that was supposed to come with the original castle grace call. It's just a simple little flight pack, and it's supposed to come undone. So you just undo the strap, you place it around your master universe figure that you want to fly, put the strap back in, and they're ready to fly. Little accessories throughout the castle is various different weapons that you can put here. For instance you put a power sword and shearess sword up there. We have various different little weapons that came with it. You can put them here. We have a little change in molecules, you can even switch them out. So of course we have our flag which I pointed out earlier, and of course it also came with the cannon. Now you notice that I didn't include one accessory that came with the original castle, and that is the weapons rack. That's because roughly about a year before it was announced that we were going to do the castle, they brought out the weapons, the weapons rack is a weapons pack. Of course this you can, it has the same type of wood detail and metal detail as the castle grayscale has. We have weapons, shields, stuff for all your master's weapons here, and even these are painted. Look at the rust on the axe. So if you have the weapons rack you can go ahead and add it to your castle grayscale, and it looks really cool. Now I know what you're wanting. You're wanting what does this massive thing do? Well, let's go in and let me show you all the cool special features. This has a working drawbridge. If you remember you put the two power swords together, you put them right here in the keyhole, you pull and the thing was open. That's how this one works. They opted to go more for the mini comic animated series way of opening the door, which is you take the power sword and you put it in the slot like so, and then you just open it up like so. And the drawbridge if you notice, it's got all these awesome teeth, tongue, tan mortar, that gruesome look to the castle, and of course I already showed you the side door, which also is one way into the castle, and this is the third way in and out of the castle. Now like the original castle, this also has a working elevator. So what you would do is you would take your master's universe figure, you got pegs here, and you just plug them in like so. Then you can just take it and he can go to the next floor. Can you tell I didn't have it use this before? Very and then the figure can just go on. Yeah and the elevator does go, I would have preferred the elevator to be a little bit more loose, because you can tell it's a little tough, maybe if we work it out a bit. Up here we actually have two gold skulls which are removable. They are on a bold joint and it's mostly for decoration, but if you wanted to put these on one of your master's universe classic figures, you can. I'll show you how to do that real quick. You simply take the figure, pop his head off, and then just doesn't look all that great, but that's something you have the option of doing. And then you can just pop the head. You tell them once these heads are on the ground. Okay, so another feature that they kept from the original vintage line was the awesome trap door. So the trap door works exactly like the original. You just go to the throne, you move it from the side, and he man falls. Now in the original, now again this was supposed to be, it's even on the box, where he's supposed to fall into the dungeon, but for whatever reason they decided to go vintage. Let's say for instance, he man didn't fall for that trick. Now Skeletor is in trouble. He needs to make a quick escape. He man's blocking the way, or is he? Castle Grayskull has a third way in and out and that's a hidden door right here in the throne room that was not available in the vintage. And then Skeletor just makes his escape, like so, falls off the cliff because they did, you know, really compensate for that. But anyway, let's say he did, and then he can escape out the side here and down the ladder. Yeah, I'll get you next time, he man, next time. This is again one of those features like the door where if you have a specific action figure that came with an accessory, this option here is good for that. We have a little hidden door here, not really hidden. And then inside we have this little altar here, which is to fit an orb that I believe came with King Grayskull. It was the orb of Grayskull, you would put it right in there, and then you just fit it right in here, and that is where the power of Grayskull is stored. Now if you don't have the orb, it's no big deal, you can still put that in here, it's still a true pull. You can see also that it has a nice, almost translucent blue plastic, nicely painted. This is also good, you can actually store extra weapons in here, extra heads if you have those. So one more feature this thing has, and I say it's this one for last because it really is kind of a bad feature, and you'll notice this little hole right here. This is if you had bought the Mass Universe Classics Wind Raider, it came with a stand, and the stand could fit right in this hole, and the wind raider would basically literally sit right about here, and take up a lot in place base. It was something that the fans didn't, that they saw early on, and expressed distaste for, and many collected for whatever reason decided to keep it in here. I kind of wish they would have added a cover for this, so we didn't have this ugly hole here, if you didn't want the option. But that's just another feature that they did, whether we wanted it or not, they did add. Okay, so now for my thoughts on this. First the cons, the cons being, one of my big cons is the fact that it has the hole for the wind raider. Even if they couldn't change that sculpt before the production, which I think they could, they should have at least offered those who bought it later on, like a little manhole cover or a grate to put over that, because it really is just ugly, it's just there, so that would have been something nice, especially for the price, which leads me to my second con. Now as cool as this thing is, the price tag on this when it was available on pre-order at MaddyClub.com was around 300 dollars. I was lucky enough to get this from my birthday slash Christmas present, so it didn't cost me 300 dollars, but it did cost my dad 300 dollars, which if a PS4 was available at that time, I probably would have chosen, until I actually got this. I'll go over that in a minute. My third being that on the box, I should have brought the box, it specifically said that on the box that the trapdoor went to the dungeon, it would have been nice if they somehow managed, would have been able to figure out how to do that. That would have been really cool. There's also supposed to be some extra accessories that was supposed to come with this when we were originally told that it was for pre-order, because we were pre-ordering the castle blind and based on artwork and drawings. Originally it was supposed to be a play mat to go around the castle. It was supposed to be a moat right here, and that dated back to the original prototype for the vintage castle. This was also supposed to come with a torture rack. The vintage one didn't come with it. Obviously it was a kid's play toy. This is an adult collector toy, so the torture rack probably would have been kind of cool. Some other accessories were also supposed to be included. It would have been nice if they didn't make them available now, then they could have maybe made them and available to purchase later on. So those are probably my biggest issues with this thing. Other than that, and those are nitpicks. Honestly, those are just nitpicks. The pros, I'm going to tell you right now, I have owned and I still own so many play sets. I own The Turtle's Lair, The Technodrome, I have the original 77 Death Star Star Wars play set. This is by far my favorite play set. I own the original vintage. This kicks this one right off the shelf. The detail on this thing, the play value, the fact that they added three layers instead of two. It's a lot of fun. And I love it when I first got this in the mail and I took it out of the box and put it together. I immediately took my keyman figures out and I started playing with the thing. I hadn't done that in years. Now I want to say I went didn't do all that, but maybe a little bit. I did pose them, you know. And when this is on my shelf, Man in Arms is up here. He's manning the cannon, and you know, he and his bottom battle cat down here fight the Skeletor Evil in. Your man is fighting Trapjaw. So I mean, the thing, I'd love to have this displayed on my shelf openly like this. Unfortunately, as you can see, it's really huge. Not a lot of shelf space. It's probably one of the cons, actually. The sculpting on this thing is beautiful. The paint job, the deco, the fact that they went instead of like stickers and cardboard, they actually did sculpts into the place that was just wonderful. So Kudos to the horsemen. They did an amazing job on this thing. And yeah, I mean, percent, I mean, scale, let me look at this thing. This thing is huge. Like I said earlier, with the original Castle Grayskull. So on a scale of one to 10, for me, this thing is a, it's a nine. It's a nine. The thing that did make it a 10, of course, was the rule that picks it I made. But if you, this is a no longer available on MediClick.com is now available on the third market. You can actually get this. I found these for around $152, $300 on eBay, on Amazon. So these are still available from collectors who have bought multiples and are trying to get rid of them. So if you're a He-Man fan, you're a Mesla University Classics fan, by all means, pick this up. I mean, it's definitely worth it. You might have to close it up to display it on yourself unless you have, you know, these kind of tables or, you know, floor space to display them on. Grab one. This is an amazing, amazing piece, an amazing backdrop for your figures. And again, the playability of this thing is so awesome. In fact, I'm going to go off here and I'm going to start playing it now because this thing is really cool. So, hey, John, something I thought would be neat that the Four Horsemen could do is for display purposes only, and maybe some gameplay, sell separately the other two sides to it, back in the display or just playing. You know, kind of open it up. I was, that's, I was kind of hoping that's what they were, I was kind of hoping that they would offer like furniture pieces, kind of. Like I said, it would have been nice if later on they had brought us the playmat mode to put this on. Yeah. The torture rack. We, I think we have a few other accessories. That would have been nice. Madi, the Master Universe Classics line has been taken over by Super 7. Madi Collector is closed down its site now. Super 7 has taken over the Master Universe Classics. So, hopefully, we can get some of the figures that we never got. Like we were, Fistol was one of them. They underproduced Fistol. There were people who subscribed to him that never got their figure. So, hopefully, we can get some of those figures. And maybe we can get some of those awesome other accessories to it. Kind of a big take and offer. Quick, quick! Let me in, let me in. Ah, ah, good kitty, good kitty. Maybe Skull 4 has some y'all makes. I'll get you for this human someday. Of course, if you like this video, make sure to hit that subscribe button. Make sure you hit the like button.