A GoFundMe has been created for 91-year-old Roger Sweet, the original designer of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, to help cover medical expenses.
Sweet’s wife of 40 years, Marlene, created the GoFundMe and shared her husband has dementia. It’s been getting progressively worse and he had an accident after taking a walk by himself. After he returned, later then expected, Marlene shared that she “discovered terrible bruising on his side and much disorientation, and when asked what happened he did not recall falling and getting this injury.”
She took him to the Emergency Room where doctors discovered “he had two brain bleeds along with the massive bruising on his side. He was admitted to the ICU where he stayed for 3 days, then 4 more days in the main hospital, sleeping most of the time and continuing to be very disoriented, along with refusing to stay put and trying to go walking about.”
After leaving the hospital, she was advised by doctors to move Roger into a memory care facility. She has done so, but shared that the facility is “not covered by Medicare, and the cost for a patient in his condition is $10,200 a month, well above our monthly income.”
Thus she created the GoFundMe to help cover these medical expenses for her ailing husband.
The GoFundMe has currently raised $4,331 from 102 people and is aiming to raise $50,000.
Back in 2005, Sweet explained how he created He-Man and originally presented him at a Mattel Product Conference in late 1980. He told He-Man.org, “I originated and named He-Man. Also, I originated the general concept of He-Man, which later was re-named the Masters Of The Universe. This concept was presented and embodied as the three prototype He-Man figures of the He-Man Trio at a Mattel Product Conference in late 1980.”
“Of the Trio, one figure was a past time, ancient barbarian, low tech. One figure was current military-enhanced, medium tech. And, one figure was futuristic space military-enhanced, high tech. These three figures were super-muscular, super-well defined and broad, tanned, in an action pose with a battle action facial expression. They represented combining all themes, all time periods and all degrees of technology into one dynamite male action line.”
“After presenting the He-Man concept Mattel upper management and Marketing decided to pursue it for further development,” he continued. “I then worked with Mattel Visual Design and Marketing to establish the general direction of 1982 first year’s characters. The final names and appearances of those figures, with the help of Marketing, were finalized by Mattel Visual Design. I and members of my Preliminary Design group worked with Visual Design to co-originate the prototype of Castle Grayskull. Its final layout and appearance changed little from the prototype. Visual Design originated and designed the two 1982 first year vehicles, the Battle Ram and the Wind Raider. The Battle Cat was a concept that I originated, using the Big Jim tiger re-vamped. But, its styling was done by Visual Design.”
From there he shared that he “was put in charge at Mattel of managing the creation of the Masters product for Mattel for the 1983 through 1987 lines. This meant that I and my Preliminary Design group did the preliminary design. That is, my group originated each product’s concept at Mattel. It was given a name. Then it did a works-like model and full color illustration. And, my group had a preliminary costing done for the product by Mattel’s Costing department. After my group performed these functions, and management bought into the concept, then the Visual Design group and Engineering did a “takeover” of the product if they agreed with what Preliminary Design had done. Next, Engineering engineered the product for production. And, Visual Design worked with Engineering to arrive at the final styling appearance of the product.”