With the caveat that I'm eighteen years old, I'll share the story of my first MOTU figure. My first ACTUAL figure was "Detective Batman" from the Kenner series, but my first Master of the Universe was from my Grandma's.
See, my Dad was born in the sixties, but I had a couple older cousins that Grandma had gotten a few eighties toys for, including a Yellow Voltron Lion, a Decepticon (I still don't know which one) and a couple Masters of the Universe.
These were Buzz-Off and Sy-Klone, but I had no way of knowing that at the time, so they were Giant Bee and Captain Saturn respectively.
Giant Bee was a bad guy, and Captain Saturn was a good guy. They led their armies of toys against each other, mostly composed of Civil War Soldiers and Cowboys and Indians that WERE from my Dad's childhood, with the one-armed Dracula and his Giant rubber Snake as the impartial arbiter of the fights, the Decepticon and the Go-Lion as Giant Bee and Captain Saturn's lieutenants, respectively, and a Legion of Batmen that Captain Saturn and Giant Bee had to team up to defeat. Personally, I think that'd make a pretty interesting episode of MOTU, Sy-Klone and Buzz-Off fighting a Legion of Batmen, but I digress.
Good times. It was only years a few years later that the MYP He-Man started airing on Cartoon Network, but I didn't see it very much, and I still never made the connection between Giant Bee and the Buzz-Off, King of Andreenids on the show, because Giant Bee had a much rounder head than the pointy Buzz-Off. During this time, I bought an Orko and a half-hour video tape that came with it. I was enthralled by He-Man and Skeletor and the others.
This lasted as long as it took the show to get canceled, which culminated in the timing of me meeting my first great love, Superman comics, which my Grandmother had in abundance.
A couple years ago I went on a massive archive binge of MOTU minicomics and fanfiction and I recognized my childhood toys from Grandma's then. Sy-Klone and Buzz-Off, though not my favorite Heroic Warriors, will always be my first.
At least as Captain Saturn and Giant Bee, anyway.
