In my continuing quest to be the saddest person on the face of this planet, I have this evening logged on to He-Man.org to see if there’s any news on the long-rumoured He-Man film. IMDB, possibly the second least reliable website on the net (Wikipedia taking the much coveted first prize), has for a long time played hard and fast with me by claiming that this film will actually happen. I think it began in 2006, when a project entitled “He-Man” appeared with a tentative release date of 2008. Since then, the release date of the film has moved back with each passing year. It currently stands at 2011, though the film itself is now labelled “Grayskull”, though I fully expect to see this change in the next few weeks to 2012, 2027, or 3042.
Anyway, unless He-Man.org announces it, I refuse to accept it as gospel. Needless to say, He-Man.org hasn’t announced it – if it had, I’d have somehow programmed this website to display the most elaborate animated fireworks the world has ever seen. But He-Man.org did offer me something else to think about.
Towards the bottom of He-Man.org’s front page are three pictures of cassette tapes. I never liked cassette tapes. They unravelled with alarming ease and required some considerable effort to wind them back into place again if the tape came out. (In the case of my tape copy of The Silmarillion, I decided it was best not to bother and just play them – it produced an amusingly wobbly and demented edge to the narrative, especially when the narrator put on an evil voice when Sauron got a line.)
On the other hand, these pictures were of He-Man cassette tapes! And what’s more, He-Man.org has helpfully uploaded the audio file of each of these tapes, so you can listen to a He-Man story online!
Now, two of the tapes are in foreign languages, and have run times of 31 and 40 minutes. I may be a dedicated He-Man disciple, but even I have my limits, and those limits prevent me from wasting half an hour of my life listening to a He-Man story in German or Spanish – although, given the intelligence that goes into writing the average He-Man story, I suspect it would make about as much sense.
On the other hand, the third tape – pictured above, enigmatically entitled “Castle Grayskull” – claims to be both in English and to have a run time of only 7 minutes. I have to say, I don’t know how they dared to produce a tape of such a stingy length, but it suited my purpose this evening. I could listen to the story and review it, and perhaps even set up a petition to get iTunes to add He-Man fiction to their repertoire so I could listen to other He-Man stories on my mp3 player on the way to work. This was going to be a good evening!
He-Man.org further whetted my appetite by including the above picture, which presumably was the tape’s front cover. The tagline “SEE the pictures, HEAR the story, READ the book” gave me a little jolt of disappointment – I can indeed see one of the pictures, and I was about to hear the story, but I can’t read the book, on account of not owning it and all. I concluded, however, that I am past the stage where I can’t understand a work of fiction unless I am simultaneously reading and listening to it, so I assumed that the lack of the book would be no great loss.
But no! He-Man.org have misled me in some way or another, because for the life of me I can’t find any way to actually listen to the story! It says “Listen to the story here!” invitingly, but there’s no way of making it play! Absolute bastards! Promising me auditory adventure and high drama, then not delivering! This is the sort of thing that really gets my goat and will in the morning lead to me writing a furious letter to the Daily Mail.
So instead, based on the picture, I will have to make up what happens in the story. Fortunately, as the run time is only 7 minutes, I think I can take it as a given that the story isn’t terribly complex. I think it’s safe to say that Skeletor comes up with a terribly good idea about how to get into Castle Grayskull, but He-Man and Teela stop him, and somehow contrive for him to be knocked over by a beam of light.
If anyone can come up with further detail – perhaps you yourself owned this tape as a child??? – then please get in touch to correct me if I’m wrong, but I strongly suspect I’m not.
PS. On subsequent closer examination of He-Man.org, I discovered that the fault lay with me, not them – bloody Windows 7 decided that I can’t download the audio file because “it might be dangerous”. Dangerously stupid, I’ll concede, but actually dangerous? The only reason I can think it might be dangerous is if it details Skeletor actually winning, and this might cause mental meltdown in its listeners.