Muscle Men

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · September 29, 2026

On page 538 of the 1986 Sears Wish Book, one Hulk Hogan cost $7.99. A few inches below him, $6.99 bought twenty-eight pink wrestlers from a Japanese comic that most American children had never read.

What page 538 of the 1986 Wish Book sold

The page opens under an italic headline, “The mightiest guys of all,” and a roll call of four toy lines: Wrestling Superstars, M.U.S.C.L.E.s, Rock Lords and Rulers of the Sun. Every order number on it begins with 49, the prefix Sears gave its catalog toys in those years; J.C. Penney and Montgomery Ward each numbered their own goods differently. A loose page with that prefix belongs to a Sears book, cover or no cover. (Our guide to the Sears Wish Book covers the catalog itself.)

The upper half belongs to LJN’s Wrestling Superstars, thirteen vinyl figures 8½ inches tall, from Hulk Hogan and Mean Gene to Corporal Kirchner, each with a bio card and a mini-poster and each $7.99. Their Sling ’Em-Fling ’Em ring, with spring-action ropes, ran $17.99. Down the right side sit Tonka’s Rock Lords, stones that open into warriors, sold in pairs at $9.99 and $19.99, and Sun-Man and his foe Pig-Head, poseable figures packed with mini-comics, at $6.99 each.

M.U.S.C.L.E. took the lower left, and its copy runs four lines. Item 16 describes figures made to collect and trade, “over 225” of them in all, with 28 different characters to a box, for $6.99. The copy calls them four-inch figures. A M.U.S.C.L.E. wrestler stands closer to two. Item 17, at $9.99, is the Hard Knockin’ Rockin’ Ring, a plastic ring about ten inches long with a control stick for knocking figures down and two figures in the box.

Laid out that way, the page makes an argument about scale. LJN sold one large wrestler with a name, a face from television and a poster for the bedroom wall. Mattel sold a crowd of small ones with no names at all, priced so a child could buy an army with birthday money.

Where M.U.S.C.L.E. came from: a Japanese comic and a vending machine

The figures began as Kinnikuman, a comic by the two-man team that signs itself Yudetamago: the writer Takashi Shimada and the artist Yoshinori Nakai. It first ran in the weekly magazine Shōnen Jump in 1979 as a parody of superhero stories, with a bumbling hero whose name translates to Muscleman, and over time it became a long saga of interplanetary professional wrestling. Readers mailed in their own character designs and the authors adopted many of them, which accounts for a cast that includes a wrestler built from oil cans and another with a toilet set into his chest.

An animated series followed in 1983, produced by Toei Animation for Nippon Television, and ran for 137 episodes through 1986. Bandai began selling the characters the same year as keshi, small single-color figures molded in the manner of Japanese erasers and dispensed from coin-operated machines for pocket change. Kinkeshi, as the line came to be called, had run to 418 different figures by the time it faded in 1988.

Mattel licensed the line for the United States and Canada in 1985, with professional wrestling at a high on American television, and gave it an acronym in place of a comic its customers would never see: Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere. The cartoon was never adapted for American television. Only two figures received names on this side of the Pacific. Muscleman captained the heroic Thug Busters, and Terri-Bull, a renamed Buffaloman, led the villainous Cosmic Crunchers. The rest went by number. Several sculpts were modeled on wrestlers who had worked in Japan, among them Terry Funk, Dusty Rhodes and Abdullah the Butcher.

How Mattel sold them: by the four, the ten and the twenty-eight

Bandai sold through vending machines. Mattel built for the toy aisle. A blister card of four random figures went for about a dollar. A semi-clear plastic trash can held ten for about three, and one sealed can that came to auction in 2012 still wore a $2.49 Woolworth price tag. The 28-figure boxes, the size Sears carried, held set assortments and were numbered, beginning with No. 1, the Thug Busters, and running through sets such as No. 4, the Cosmic Showdown.

Around the figures came the furnishings of a franchise: the ring; a Battlin’ Belt case shaped like a championship belt that held ten figures and buckled around a child’s waist; a Mega-Match board game played with a cardboard spinner; a Nintendo cartridge called Tag Team Match: M.U.S.C.L.E.; and, for a short stretch, figures packed as a bonus in cans of Nestlé Quik. A Clicks store advertisement printed in the Akron Beacon Journal on March 25, 1986, shows the four-pack, the trash can and the ring on sale that spring, months before the Wish Book arrived in mailboxes.

The trade magazine Playthings named M.U.S.C.L.E. one of the ten best-selling toy lines of 1986. The run was short. According to Martin Arriola, a former lead designer at Mattel, the company owed Bandai a share of the revenue and treated the line as second tier behind properties it owned outright, such as Masters of the Universe. By 1988 the figures were gone.

The ring on the page, and the two figures only it contained

The Hard Knockin’ Rockin’ Ring borrowed its premise from Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. Two figures clamp into place and are driven at each other with the control stick until one goes down. (Our guide to the Rocky Rock ’em Sock ’em playset follows another toy built on the same idea, three years earlier.)

For a collector, the box matters more than the mechanism. The ring’s two figures, a Muscleman and a Terri-Bull, were exclusive to it. The Muscleman is a slightly smaller version of the figure collectors number 141, and neither sculpt was sold in the four-, ten- or 28-packs; the board game later reused the Terri-Bull in lime green. A ring without its pair has lost the only part a loose lot cannot replace.

How many figures there are: 233, 236 and the ones nobody listed

The only checklist Mattel published was a mail-away poster, 23 by 35 inches, sent for two proofs of purchase. It pictured 233 figures. Most references now put the American line at 236. Figures the poster never showed kept turning up in old packs, and collectors were still recording new ones as late as 2009. They call them non-poster figures. The best known is a four-armed wrestler nicknamed Satan Cross, sold here without the second pair of legs its Japanese counterpart could attach at the back.

One of the pink wrestlers sits in the collection of the Grand Rapids Public Museum here in Michigan, acquired by purchase and shown in its 2018 to 2020 exhibition TOYS! The museum’s record follows the poster’s count of 233 and dates the figure to about 1980, several years before the line existed in the United States. The poster’s number still circulates as the official one, even in institutional records.

The ten colors, and which ones are scarce

Mattel made M.U.S.C.L.E. in ten colors: the original flesh and nine others. The collector record summarized on Wikipedia gives the order in which they reached stores.

Not every figure came in every color, though collectors assumed for years that they did. Two longtime members of the LittleRubberGuys forum, known there as Soupie and Universal Ruler Supreme, traced the American figures back to the Japanese molding trees they were cut from, and the result, called the Color Code, shows which sculpts were made in which colors. It settles arguments quickly. Figure 153, the giant hand collectors call the Claw, was made in every color except magenta, so a magenta Claw is a fake however sincere the seller.

Collectors also sort each figure’s colors into classes by scarcity, with Class A the hardest to find. The purple Claw is Class A, with fewer than twenty known, and it is the line’s most famous prize: one auctioned on the LittleRubberGuys forum in 2011 closed early at $1,300, and singles have rarely sold for less than $600 since. Salmon and red are the Claw’s Class B colors and bring a steady premium; light blue turns up far more often. MuscleFigures.com suggests most purple Claws are in and around Canada, where many Class A figures have surfaced. A common sculpt in a scarce color can bring far more than a scarce sculpt in flesh.

How to tell a real M.U.S.C.L.E. figure from a Kinkeshi or a copy

Bandai’s Japanese figures, Mattel’s American ones and the bootlegs that followed can look alike in a photograph. In the hand, they separate quickly.

• Look for the stamp. Genuine M.U.S.C.L.E. figures carry Y/S*N*T on the back, a copyright code for Yudetamago, the publisher Shueisha, Nippon Television and Toei.
• Press a thumbnail into it. M.U.S.C.L.E. figures are hard plastic. Japanese Kinkeshi and most bootlegs are softer and rubbery, closer to the erasers they imitate.
• Measure it. About two inches. The ring’s Muscleman runs slightly small by design.
• Check the color. One solid color, never painted, and one of the ten Mattel used. A figure in a color its sculpt was never made in, such as a magenta Claw, is a fake.
• Read the detail. Knockoffs soften the sculpt. A 2004 copy of the figure collectors call Alien Wrestler, sold as Future Man in pink and in mixed colors, is blurrier than the original.

What M.U.S.C.L.E. figures sell for now

The supply is enormous. Children bought random packs by the handful and kept every duplicate, and those shoeboxes are still coming out of closets and attics. Loose flesh figures trade by the lot for well under a dollar apiece. The money sits in four places: sealed packaging, the boxed 28-figure sets, the ring, and the colors collectors class as rare.

The most expensive single M.U.S.C.L.E. on public record is that salmon Shouting Geronimo, a figure the poster never showed, in a color no one had seen on it before; Mental Floss reported in 2012 that it sold for more than $3,000. Beyond it sit the super rares, among them Dark Emperor and Drunken Master, each known from a single example. Their value is anyone’s guess. Both were found by collectors who recognized them in ordinary auction lots.

For perspective on the rest of the market, a PWTorch collectibles column in 2012 recorded a complete 236-figure set selling at auction for $300, the sealed Woolworth trash can for $118, and Satan Cross at $50 to $75. The asking prices above are sellers’ figures, and a box listed at $149.95 has not necessarily sold at it.

One comparison survives from 1986. A loose figure today costs about what a four-pack did then. A boxed 28-figure set in its original tray, the object Sears shipped, now asks sixteen to twenty-one times its catalog price.

Twenty-eight for the price of one

Catalog pages are built by merchandisers, and page 538 made its case plainly. A child who circled item 1 would get one wrestler with a name and a poster. A child who circled item 16 would get a crowd: twenty-eight nameless grapplers, pink as pencil erasers, enough to fill the ring, the bedroom carpet and the space under the radiator.

Forty years on, the LJN Hogan is the figure people remember by name. The M.U.S.C.L.E. wrestlers are the ones they recognize when a shoebox comes down from a closet shelf, and they tend to arrive by the dozen. Other catalog pages have had the same close reading here, among them the one that sold the Snorks plush in 1984, and the rest of that childhood is collected in 25 things only 1980s kids remember.

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