- by Owen Morton
There has recently been a historic day in the world of He-Man. I think this day was yesterday, or it could have been the day before, but it wasn’t that long ago. He-Man fans in the UK may be unaware of this, but for a while, there has been a growing re-interest in He-Man in the USA, which has moved through the stage of reissuing all the figures and has now culminated (on this historic day which I refer to) in the launching of a new series.
What? you cry. Or at least you should. If you don’t, you should be ashamed of yourself. How can they launch a new He-Man series without first re-airing the old one, the classic? But the minds of US TV executives are not for us to attempt to fathom.
At any rate, I’m not really in a position to write a great deal about this new series of which I speak. I’m not even entirely sure precisely what it’s called. They already did ‘The New Adventures Of He-Man’ way back in the early 1990s (which was a dreadful programme, by the way, and is rightfully ignored now by all die-hard He-Man fans – or He-Fans as they are referred to by the real die-hards), so it can’t be that – and anyway, from what I can gather, this series is set before the first one (perhaps someone is cashing in on the success of another prequel to a classic series which has recently begun – I am of course referring to Enterprise, which I’m not really enjoying due to its attempts to make Archer very very like Kirk, who in himself wasn’t that great anyway), so it would have to be called something like ‘He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe Before They Were Masters Of The Universe’ or something equally ungainly.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that since this new series hasn’t yet aired in the UK (and probably never will, if you ask me), I haven’t got an awful lot of information about it. I’m not going to read any spoilers, as that would ruin my enjoyment of it if and when I eventually do see it, but this does rather put me at a disadvantage when writing about the thing. However, given that this website is so very obsessed with He-Man, I felt it would be just wrong to let this historic day go by without my marking it in some way. If ever the series does air here, I can start reviewing it (oh, joy). Otherwise, this will probably be the only article to focus on the new He-Man series.
Despite having very little information, I do have a couple of pictures which I took from he-man.org, obviously without asking. So I here display them and ridicule them for not being true to the original.
Okay. As you may have been able to work out, this individual is He-Man, standing outside Castle Grayskull. Or at least, so I assume; I haven’t actually got official confirmation of what either of these pictures is supposed to show. But I think the probability is quite high that this is He-Man, given that – among other things – the filename it saved itself under was ‘he-man.jpg’.
So, this is what He-Man is to look like in the new series. I’ll start off by mentioning that perhaps he’s that little bit too well-muscled. I mean, the other one was ridiculously sized, but this is just pushing the boat out too far into stupidity. Of course, it may be that he’s not actually intended to be that muscled after all; it’s just that the animators made a tragic error when calculating how big the head should be when they drew this particular shot. Think about it: if that head was maybe a third bigger, He-Man would actually look fairly sensibly sized (well, for He-Man anyway).
Next, I’m going to gibber on about the colour of his hair. As any fool knows (even Jonathan Barker knows this, and he hates He-Man), He-Man had neon orange hair. It was one of his trademarks and part of his cunning disguise to make sure he didn’t get mistaken for Prince Adam (you know, they both had the exact same facial features, but He-Man simply ran around in far less clothes and looked like he’d had an accident with a tanning machine and a bleach bottle). Now I would be willing to bet – I don’t know, because I couldn’t find any pictures of the new Prince Adam – that He-Man looks exactly the same, without even the hair being a different colour (unless, of course, Adam has the neon orange hair, which I think is unlikely). And on the subject of the hair – and face in general – it is done in that rather irritating new style of cartooning which seems to have its origins in Pokemon, which means that He-Man has a rather hard face, rather than a kind one. Which just won’t do.
And lastly, before we move on to the other picture, I would like to comment on the sword. How bloody big is it? It was always a mystery to me in the original series where He-Man kept it (oh, wait, actually, he had that blue thing on his back, didn’t he?). Well, okay, where did Adam keep it in the original? It was always right down his back, as far as I could tell, and unsheathed as well. That never struck me as a particularly smart way to keep a sword. But anyway, in the new series, where does He-Man keep it? I can’t see any sheath or anything (though, to be fair, if it’s on his back, we might not be able to because of the angle of the shot). But the point I really want to make is that the sword is so bloody big that it should be really heavy (unless it’s made of aluminium or something, which would make it somewhat less useful as a sword), and thus Adam should be incapable of actually drawing it and shrieking inanities about the Power of Grayskull. Wouldn’t that be funny? In his attempt to save Eternia, Adam stabs himself in the head because he can’t lift his sword up. Not even the Sorceress could sort that one out.
One last thing before we move on. Castle Grayskull in the background there does actually look quite cool. Perhaps in this series we’ll find out why Skeletor is so keen to get in there, since (as Matt on x-entertainment.com has repeatedly pointed out) Castle Grayskull in the original series appeared to be merely a big empty place with nothing particularly exciting there at all.
And speaking of Skeletor …
This wasn’t the only picture of Skeletor on offer, neither was it the best, but it does give a selection of other villains which I can discuss. Had such a picture been available for the goodies, I’d have used that instead of the He-Man one above (I just can’t wait to see what Orko, for example, looks like in this new series).
So, firstly, in the background there we have Snake Mountain. Obviously, we can’t see much of it, because Skeletor and his bunch of nutcases are standing in the way, but it looks fairly true to the original, which is plus points in its favour. One thing I would give a lot for is just a new series of He-Man which was exactly the same format as the old, preferably with the same actors, without the need to update animation. Obviously, you’d never get that in this day and age: something new is always better, but I’d be willing to bet quite a lot of people feel the same as me on this point.
Right, at the middle of this group of unsavoury characters is Skeletor himself, who also doesn’t look all that changed from the original. He looks a little brighter, but I suspect that’s because he’s supposed to be lit up for some reason. He’s not as excessively muscled as He-Man is, and a nice touch is that the creators of this new series remembered to include the staff in his hand, which was a feature of the original action figure, though I don’t recall it ever appearing in the first cartoon. Behind him, he’s got his purple cat, Panthor. It’s good to see that the creators haven’t forsaken the way in which the original series moved beyond the realms of common sense in the colouring of certain characters: the green and yellow striped Cringer and the neon purple Panthor were always particularly stupid.
To the left of Skeletor is Evil-Lyn. I don’t remember ever actually seeing Evil-Lyn in the original cartoon, nor did I ever have her action figure, so I can’t say an awful lot about this. Plus of course, the image quality for her bit of this particular picture isn’t exactly great. But she does appear to be rather thin; nay, even emaciated. Why do cartoon animators always have to portray women as being this ridiculously small size, and give out the impression that it’s desirable? The media has a lot to answer for in the development of anorexia, if you ask me, and also if you ask a number of leading psychologists, though unfortunately I can’t remember their names, and I’m not going to look them up, because it’s completely irrelevant to this article.
Next one down is, I assume, Clawful, whom avid readers of this website may recall from my review of A Trip To Morainia back in February or March or whenever it was. This is where the animators of this new series have begun to go seriously wrong. Okay, the concept of a big red lobster man with a claw instead of one arm as dreamt up by the creators of the original series was never that intelligent in the first place, but it’s been taken to the extreme here. Firstly, look at the expression on his face. Just what emotion is that supposed to convey? As opposed to all the other baddies, who are giving off generally evil auras due to the rather mean looks on their faces, Clawful would appear to be laughing his stupid red lobster head off. Perhaps he’s just so excited about the fact that this time round he appears to have been included in the core group of villains, at the evident expense of Trapjaw, who doesn’t seem to be featured here. Anyway, his face aside, I think Clawful’s arm needs consideration. Is there any way that that massive appendage would a) not drag along the floor if he straightened his elbow, and b) not make him fall over due to the sheer weight of it? He looks like he’s leaning in its direction as it is, and this is just the promotional poster. How much worse for him must it be in real life?
The next one looks like Mer-Man. And actually, he doesn’t look too bad. Mer-Man in the original series was one of the few baddies who I didn’t like at the time (I don’t like any of them now), because he looked too nervous to be evil, and he also had a stupid voice (or, at least, a stupider voice than all the others, except perhaps Buzz-Off). Obviously, I can’t tell what his voice is like now, but he certainly looks a lot better.
I’m not entirely sure who the next one is, though I suspect it’s supposed to be Tri-Klops. I’d perhaps be able to tell better if he didn’t have a large bolt of green energy obscuring the picture of him. I was never entirely sure about Tri-Klops; I only ever saw him the once, in Diamond Ray Of Disappearance, and he didn’t exactly distinguish himself in any way there, so whatever they do with him here is fine with me. So long as they don’t decide to make him into a seal infiltrating Skeletor’s group in order to take it over from within for the Seal Confederation. Or something equally stupid.
And finally, we come to the travesty that is Beast-Man. Beast-Man was always cool in the original; he and Trapjaw were Skeletor’s chief lackeys and were comfortingly dense. Beast-Man in particular looked rather stupid, and was portrayed as such in all the episodes I ever saw. That’s how he should be. But this Beast-Man appears to have more muscles than even the new He-Man does. He also appears to have either an impressive hunchback or a large bank of fur rising off his back, and altogether he looks quite good and perhaps a serious threat to He-Man. He’d better not be portrayed as such in this series, otherwise I’ll be really upset.
So that’s the new He-Man series, or as much of it as I can work out from looking at those pictures. Despite some of the things I’ve said about it here, I would be very eager to watch it if ever I get the chance. I can’t really get a proper feel for it until I’ve seen it, obviously, and I would – maybe – approach it with an open mind and, even if it were different from the original, enjoy it for being its own thing.
Yeah, right.
PS. Shock! Horror! The He-Man And She-Ra Episode Review Website is closing down! In a deeply surprising statement, its maintainers, Busta Toons and Zadoc Angell admitted that they have more important things to do than continue to review episodes of a seriously stupid cartoon series from the 1980s! This is a statement I simply cannot understand.