- by Owen Morton
The day we (well, possibly not ‘we’; probably just me, actually, given the distinct lack of enthusiasm I’ve had from everybody else on the subject) had all been waiting for finally came on Monday 27th October. The fateful day when finally someone realised that He-Man was a true classic of children’s television and deserved to be released on video. Okay, six episodes of it had already been released on DVD a month earlier, but – not having easy access to a DVD player – this was of only academic interest to me. The video was another matter.
I got up at 8.30 on Monday morning and was ready to leave the house an hour later. (Don’t ask me why it took me a whole hour to get ready; I have no idea what I was doing in that hour.) I proceeded merrily into town, eagerly anticipating the purchasement (yes, I know it’s not a word, but I can’t be bothered to think of the real one) of six episodes of He-Man on video, only two of which I’d ever seen before! Sadly, my dreams were not to be fulfilled: HMV did not have any in, as didn’t Virgin (they obviously thought it wasn’t worth ordering, the stupid bastards), while WH Smiths and Woolworths denied that the video even existed at all. Borders seemed at first to be more promising: they claimed they had three copies in, but after a comprehensive search revealed nothing, they changed their story and said that their computer sometimes says they’ve got stock in when they haven’t. Fortunately for their continued existences, when I returned on Tuesday (also bright and early), the mistake had clearly been rectified and I found one of the videos. Admittedly, my troubles weren’t over yet: the video – retailing at £5.99 – had only two episodes, rather than the six which grace the DVD. Each episode being only 20 minutes long, I don’t think it would have been too taxing to put six on a video, really, do you?
At any rate, I proudly took the video home and proceeded to not watch it until Thursday 30th October. I did this in bed, when I was supposed to be getting up to catch a train to see Evanescence play in Manchester. He-Man nearly made me miss Evanescence. But at any rate, I have now had the pleasure of seeing the first episode on this tape, which also happens to be the first episode ever made (whereas Diamond Ray of Disappearance was the first to be aired) – ‘The Cosmic Comet’!
If truth be told, The Cosmic Comet is not very good, even by He-Man’s usually poor standards. Obviously, it’s nice to watch it; it’s good to see He-Man finally released on official video. But really, this story scrapes the barrel. It’s really quite stupid, and not stupid in an amusing way. It’s just dull. It contains only one truly ludicrous moment, though – admittedly – this one moment does make up for the vast majority of the mediocrity of the rest of the episode.
The Cosmic Comet begins in a pretty standard sequence, wherein Beast-Man and Evil-Lyn attempt to break into Castle Grayskull. In a departure from the usual, however, the grappling hook which they use to pull open the jawbridge actually works. It is not, however, a total surprise when – after the jawbridge is pulled down – it is revealed that He-Man is inside, sitting on Battle-Cat, with the ever-useless Man-at-Arms by his side. He-Man uses one of his terribly amusing insults on Beast-Man, referring to him as Furface. This, for some reason, pricks Beast-Man to the quick, and he is provoked into attacking He-Man. This is never a good idea, as the baddies really ought to learn but never do, and in this instance results in Beast-Man being thrown into a puddle of mud. He lands with an exclamation which sounds disturbingly like “Fuck!” but is – as we realised much later – actually “Yuck!” Evil-Lyn then tries something, but the ultimate result is, of course, that she lands in the mud with Beast-Man, who, for some reason, seems to have been quite content to just sit there in the interim. They then head off to Snake Mountain.
He-Man is well satisfied with himself, but then the Sorceress reveals to him that this was just a test. When the Cosmic Comet arrives, then Castle Grayskull will seriously be in peril. She tells him to go to see a wizard called Zodac (or something like that) at some mountain somewhere. Instead of going directly there, He-Man turns back into Adam, and goes and asks permission from King Randor to go. As a result of this miscalculation, he gets landed with Man-at-Arms, Teela and Orko for the rest of the episode, so I shouldn’t imagine he’ll make that mistake again.
Meanwhile, over at Snake Mountain, Skeletor, Beast-Man (who for some reason is in this episode being presented as a reasonably intelligent adversary, rather than the nitwit he is in later outings such as A Trip to Morainia, in which he clearly thinks that putting a white bib on will disguise him sufficiently) and Evil-Lyn perform some form of evil ritual which brings the Cosmic Comet under their control. Skeletor (who is obviously underestimating He-Man once again) then states that as Zodac is the only one who might be able to stop them, they should send the Cosmic Comet to dispose of him.
Adam and his intrepid group of friends have reached Zodac first, of course, but sadly Zodac turns out to be a blithering idiot who gibbers on and on about how he was a stupid wizard who wanted to control all the comets, and when he saw two comets in orbit around each other, he tried to bring them under his control too. Sadly, when he did this, he accidentally destroyed one of the comets, and made the other one’s heart turn evil. This – notwithstanding the stupidity about comets having hearts – became the Cosmic Comet which is now threatening Eternia.
After this material is presented to us, and makes us worry whether He-Man is turning really dull, the Cosmic Comet arrives. It shoots big blobs of energy down at Zodac and the others (let’s just ignore for the moment the fact that comets do not shoot blobs of energy, not even comets with evil hearts that are being controlled by Skeletor and his band of morons), which, when they land, become three big stone warriors. Teela tries to shoot one of them, but it doesn’t have any effect. Man-at-Arms demonstrates his quite exciting usefulness at this juncture by producing a big gun, exclaiming something like, “Let’s see how they like this!” and then shooting them. Since no baddy in this programme is allowed to lose to anyone other than He-Man, the energy from the gun rebounds off the stone warriors and hits Man-at-Arms and Teela, knocking them out. Adam, having exited hastily earlier, now reappears as He-Man, and deals with one of the stone warriors, who is attempting to kidnap Zodac, with a single punch, and then destroys the other two stone warriors by throwing one of them at the other. The goodies then retreat to Castle Grayskull, after Orko picks up some bits of the Comet for no obvious reason (though the reason does, of course, become more than obvious later).
When they get there, Zodac reveals that he has absolutely no idea what to do about the Cosmic Comet. For lack of anything better to do, He-Man decides to go and vent his frustration by breaking into Snake Mountain, and he goes off in the Attack Trak (or whatever that stupid machine is called) with his stupid friends to do so. Skeletor spots him coming and sends Beast-Man out to stop him, which is another of those mistakes which Skeletor makes so frequently: Beast-Man is an incompetent fool and has never, ever, shown himself to be even remotely capable of beating He-Man. Sure enough, when Beast-Man is spotted approaching in a stupid flying machine, He-Man promptly shoots the wings off it, resulting in Beast-Man’s landing in another puddle of mud. On this occasion, he says, “Yuck!” quite clearly, leading us to the conclusion that his previous utterance of “Fuck!” was not what it seemed.
Anyway – this being now almost a week after the viewing of this splendid episode – I can’t quite remember what happens next, but I think Skeletor actually came perilously close to winning at this point. Either he shot at them himself, or got the Cosmic Comet to do it, but the result was that He-Man ended up lying unconscious in the middle of the road. Fortunately, however, and with no readily apparent explanation, He-Man is teleported off the road before he can be captured. The next scene has him back at Castle Grayskull, after what has proved to be a thoroughly pointless excursion (he didn’t even make it into Snake Mountain, so where’s the fun in that?), still trying to get Zodac to tell them something useful.
At this point, Skeletor evidently decides that enough is enough, and he sends the Cosmic Comet off to Castle Grayskull to blow it to kingdom come. He, Beast-Man and Evil-Lyn follow it in another stupid flying machine to watch the proceedings and presumably to laugh about them in that silly way he has. Unfortunately for Skeletor, Zodac has finally had an idea. It’s not a very good idea, in my opinion, but it’s still an idea, and, to be fair, it is an idea that works. His idea is that they’ve got to turn the Cosmic Comet good again by recreating the other comet that used to be in orbit around it. But to do that, he says miserably, they’ll need some bits of the Cosmic Comet, and they don’t have any. “I beg to differ,” says Orko (though not in so many words, obviously, because Orko is an absolute nutcase who isn’t capable of such high-sounding language), and produces the bits of stone he picked up earlier. Everyone is really pleased with him, and Zodac gets to work trying to make a comet by putting all the stones next to each other and channelling all the goodness in everybody present into them.
This procedure is not, however, working quickly enough. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s working at all, but then I am a cynic. Anyway, He-Man spots the Cosmic Comet looming up close and tells Zodac to hurry. Zodac says that he’s going as fast as he can, and (as far as I can remember) Man-at-Arms pops up with the helpful comment that it may not be fast enough, which I’m sure is really encouraging to poor old Zodac. He-Man then decides that he’s going to have to slow the Comet down somehow, and this is where the ludicrous bit of the episode takes place. He jumps out of the window of Castle Grayskull and impacts violently with the Comet, and tries to push it back in the direction it came. Now, he is successful in stopping it, but he can’t push it back, the upshot of which is that both the Comet and He-Man just hang there in midair. Now, when I was little, I have vague recollections of someone telling me about something called ‘gravity’, which (in its simplest terms) is an exciting force kind of thing which makes things fall to the ground. He-Man and the Comet don’t appear to adhere to this principle (neither does Orko, but I really don’t want to go into that), for reasons which – as the case so often is in He-Man – remain unclear. However, the strain of defying gravity gets to He-Man and he falls to the ground, whereupon someone asks him, “Are you all right?” and he replies, in that tone of his which implies that he’s making a really amusing joke, “Yes, but I don’t think I want to wrestle a comet again.”
Meanwhile, the Cosmic Comet is gspeeding towards Castle Grayskull again, but fortunately, Zodac has managed to get his duplicate Comet ready, and he sends it out to meet the Cosmic Comet. There follows a touching scene where the Comets are reunited, and talk in stupid voices (though – sadly – I can’t remember what they say), and then we have the inevitable cut to Skeletor. He is, as can only be expected, cackling manically about how now Castle Grayskull is destroyed, he can be ruler of all Eternia. Beast-Man spoils his special moment by pointing out that Castle Grayskull is, in fact, still there, and (as far as I remember) Skeletor decides that now is not the time to attempt to attack it using more conventional means, and buggers off back to Snake Mountain without even giving He-Man a chance to make a really funny joke at his expense (perhaps calling him ‘Bonehead’ or something like that, as this seems to provoke much hilarity on He-Man’s part).
Then there’s the very funny joke at the end of the episode: back in the Palace, Zodac has taught Prince Adam how to make three comets orbit round his head. Predictably, however, something goes wrong, and Orko ends up being chased round the throneroom by the three comets. It’s really very amusing.
And then there’s the moral segment (which I am told has been abandoned in the new series – the bastards: this was often the funniest bit, though in this case, it’s not that funny at all), which is all about how Zodac had lost confidence in his abilities, and the viewers were counselled not to lose confidence in theirs. The only slightly amusing thing about this little advice is that it’s delivered by Man-at-Arms, who doesn’t actually have any abilities to lose confidence in. Still not that funny, though, is it?
Just like this episode on the whole.