I’m going to try something I’ve never tried before – a review of a She-Ra episode. I don’t have nearly such a familiarity with She-Ra as I do with He-Man. Many people would say this is a good thing, which is of course debateable, but one upshot is that I can’t remember much about any episodes, thus depriving my faithful readers of a She-Ra episode review. Until now.
Now, I’m quite convinced that the episode I chose was called ‘Hordak’s Zoo’. However, on attempting to look it up, I find to my surprise that it was in fact called ‘Zoo Story’. I would be willing to put money on it having been called ‘Hordak’s Zoo’, and I am choosing to claim that it was aired with that name in the UK. I can’t find any evidence to back up this claim, other than the recollections from my own dim and distant past, but trust me.
The reason I chose this episode, ironically, is because I thought it was the only one I could remember the name of, and a basic semblance of plot. As it turns out, I couldn’t remember the name and my grasp of the plot is really rather shaky. On the other hand, chances are that by repeating what I can remember and filling in the gaps by making it up, I’ll probably come up with something marginally more sensible than the original episode.
So, to summarise the episode, She-Ra and Bow are skulking about in a forest, where they see loads of animals disappearing. They track down the missing animals to Hordak’s zoo, and bust them out. That’s basically it. I’m pretty certain that Hordak wasn’t presented as a loving conservationist, trying to save these rare animals from extinction, though that would have been a far more interesting angle to take. She-Ra and Bow let all the rare animals out, and then suddenly a stupid monster comes and eats them. That would have been entertaining.
It’s pretty clear, I suspect, that I don’t really remember much about this story. It’s available on youtube, so I could go and watch it, but I think it would be a waste of my time. So I will simply now make my one and only point about the episode. Pretty much the only scene I remember is when She-Ra and Bow see an animal go missing. She-Ra says, “It’s vanished!” Bow corrects her – “No, She-Ra. It’s disappeared. If something vanishes, it’s gone for ever. If it disappears, it reappears somewhere else.”
Now, there’s two things that stick in my mind from this. Firstly, and less importantly, how the hell does Bow know whether the animal has in fact reappeared somewhere else? There’s no clues to say so. Secondly, I’m almost certain Bow’s stupid definitions are wrong. Here’s how the online Cambridge dictionary defines ‘vanish’: to disappear or stop being present or existing, especially in a sudden, surprising way. And here’s what it has to say about the word ‘disappear’:If people or things disappear, they go somewhere where they cannot be seen or found.
So the definition of ‘vanish’ says it is synonymous with ‘disappear’, and seeing as the animals go missing by being “snatched by a large mysterious black shadow” (thanks to he-man.org for providing that details), I’d say this fits with the “sudden, surprising” aspect of the ‘vanish’ definition. And then the definition of ‘disappear’ states that the missing things “cannot be seen or found”. This is disproved later in the episode, because naturally enough, She-Ra and Bow find (and see) the animals. My point is therefore that Bow is a pedantic tosser, and worse than that, he’s a pedantic tosser who can’t even be bothered to get his facts right.
All well and good, of course. It’s only a stupid cartoon that aired about 25 years ago. There’s no point in getting all worked up about this now. A strongly worded letter to Filmation in 1986 might have been a more appropriate reaction. The problem, of course, is that I didn’t know Bow was wrong in 1986. I accepted Bow’s words as gospel truth, because that’s how it was presented. And I used Bow’s definitions of ‘vanish’ and ‘disappear’ for many years, and corrected my friends on the point (and because I was a nerdy little individual who always got 19/20 on tests, it was generally accepted that I knew what I was talking about). Thanks to an irresponsible bit of writing in 1986, there must be literally thousands of people now who don’t know what ‘vanish’ and ‘disappear’ really mean.
The depth of this problem can be appreciated best, I think, by saying that when I started writing this article, I was still unsure about the definitions. I’d never looked them up. I merely had an inkling that Bow might be a moron, but I wasn’t certain.
I wish Bow would vanish.