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Masters of the Universe

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Film Review: Masters of the Universe (1987)@drax1538d

(source: tmdb.org)

If you wanted to create enmity among 1980s film critics, one of the easier ways was to release science fiction epic not produced by Steven Spielberg. Your chances for achieving that goal increased a lot if the said film was based on toy line. And success in enraging the critics was all but guaranteed if the film was produced by firm (in)famous for making cheap exploitation films. Masters of the Universe, 1987 science fantasy film directed by Gary Goddard, met all required criteria.

The film is based on the characters created for the line of action-figure toys produced by Mattel. Toys were popular enough to spawn comic books, video games, animated television series and, finally, live action adaptation produced by The Cannon Group. The plot begins on distant planet of Eternia where forces of evil Skeletor (played by Frank Langella) capture Castle Grayskull and take Sorcerer of Grayskull (played by Christina Pickles) prisoner whose powers he would start to syphon in order to become master of universe. Heroic warrior He-Man (played by Dolph Lundgren) wonders how Skeletor’s forces managed to suddenly overcome Grayskull’s defences and the answer comes in form of Gwildor (played by Billy Barty), Thenorian inventor who made Cosmic Key, multi-dimensional portal which was ultimately stolen by Skeletor’s cunning henchwoman Evil-Lyn (played by Meg Foster). Gwildor has remaining prototype and, when He-Man’s attempt to free Sorceresss fails, uses it to transport He-Man, Man-at-Arms (played by Jon Cypher) and his daughter Teela (played by Chelsea Field) and himself to planet which is later revealed to be Earth. There, recently orphaned teenage girl Julie Winston (played by Courtney Cox) and her boyfriend, aspiring musician Kevin Corrigan (played by Robert Duncan McNeill) accidentally discover Cosmic Key and begin to toy with it, inadvertently giving away its location to Skeletor and his hordes.

The Masters of the Universe was made during Cannon’s brief and ultimately fatal attempt to transform into first tier Hollywood studio with their own summer blockbusters (first being abysmal Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Although ambitiously promoted as “Star Wars of 1980s”, production was affected by Cannon’s financial woes and penny-pinching ways of its executives Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. This reflected in script by David Odell removing large number of popular franchise characters and most of the plot taking place on Earth in order to save budget. Despite those limitations, The Masters of the Universe, mostly due to skilful direction of Gary Goddard and excellent work by experienced editor Anne V. Coates, functions as solid family entertainment. Budget, which was still very high for Cannon standards, is reflected in good production design, interesting costumes and special effects that are quite effective for 1980s standards, and some look decent even now. Highly respected composer Bill Conti delivers an adequate music score.

The most noticeable flaw of the film is the casting. He-Man was first starring role for Swedish martial artist Dolph Lundgren, cast on the account of his physique. Lundgren in this film still lacks proper acting experience and this was later admitted by actor himself, who often blamed this role for the rest of his career being relegated to star of low budget action films. Lundgren is easily overshadowed by the rest of cast. Frank Langella is much more enthusiastic about his role of the film, accepted for the sake of his young son who was great fan of the He-Man. He has great fun in playing Skeletor as over-the-top villain, often improvising lines and delivering great performance despite being burdened by heavy makeup. Meg Foster with her expressive icy blue eyes is a formidable villainess and the script even allowed her to build some depth in the character. Future Friends star Courtney Cox, until that time known mostly for Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancin the Dark” video, is good in the role of damsel in distress, and same can be said as Robert Duncan McNeil (who would later become famous as Tom Paris in Star Trek: Voyager). But the most impressive member of the cast is character actor James Tolkan who, in the role of tough police detective Hugh Lubic, almost steals the whole film.

Studio’s budget problem in the affected the ending of Masters of the Universe with rather underwhelming final showdown. Its initial box office release, turned into a flop, often explained with the youngest audience already being out of favour with He-Man and older considering the whole film too silly. It represented another major fiasco for Cannon, which would file for bankruptcy few years later. The franchise, however, survived and most of the cast involved used this film as a springboard for future careers. Those who watch today, unafraid of its initial bad reputation, will be rewarded by solid piece of 1980s family entertainment that proves how good film could be made even out of something originated as line of toys.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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›Masters of the Universe on Netflix: They did a lot of things wrong@netflixr1787d
I already spoke about the things that they did "right" in my last blog entry and that was actually kind of difficult to write because I was really struggling to think of anything to say that was nice about the whole fiasco.

I realize that a lot of this is subjective but the only opinions I have inside my head are my own so we'll just have to run with that. I went into this expecting great things because it was being directed or produced by Kevin Smith who you might know as "Silent Bob" from some pretty epic films from the 90's. He is no PC crusader or at least wasn't back in the day. It was actually the fact that he was brash and the opposite of being PC that saw him rise to the top. This is one of the things that I found so surprising and disappointing about Masters of the Universe: Revelation that recently dropped on Netflix.
[src](https://phantom-marca.unidadeditorial.es/26a2abf54cf8694094693cebab7a24cf/f/jpg/assets/multimedia/imagenes/2021/05/13/16209421937901.jpg)
Things they did wrong

I'll try to focus on broad issues I had with the entire thing rather than nitpick every little thing about it just so that I can keep this under 1000 words or so, but trust me when I say that my list is going to be truncated and I actually have much more to say about it than this.... I'll do so in the comments if there is enough interest.

It has very little to do with He-Man or Skeletor
[src](https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/netflix-masters-of-the-universe-revelation-he-man-skeletor.jpg?resize=768%2C432)
So when you think of Masters of the Universe in a general sense who comes to mind? Well the two guys above, obviously. If you were a huge fan like me you probably remember a few of the other major characters like Merman, Beast Man, Cyclops, Moss Man, Battle Cat and what not but for the most part these two guys are at the center of MOTU's entire existence. These two are barely even in the entire series thus far. For the most part their appearances are limited to flashbacks and this simply doesn't make sense to me.

It's fine if they are going to get to that eventually and drag this thing out for as long as possible - which would be what they kind of do with a lot of series on Netflix and elsewhere, but we were sold this in the trailers as being He-Man and Skeletor centric. Hell, they went really out of their way to let us know that Mark Hamill voices Skeletor yet he spends about as much time on screen as he did in The Force Awakens.

It's a "girl power" series now
[src](https://www.pluggedin.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Masters-of-the-Universe-Revelation.jpg)
Call me a misogynist if you want to, but I am dead tired of Netflix having some sort of agenda to make women the brains and brawn behind just about anything they produce. Teela, who was a somewhat important character in the original Masters of the Universe cartoon and comic books, is basically the main character now. Evil-Lyn is also a master of all things big and small and I don't even know who the other girl is. In fact, other than brief appearances from Man at Arms, there are no male protagonists in the series at all. The ones that are on screen are all fantasy males like Merman and Beast Man... which brings me to my next point

Everyone is on the good side?

The He-Man cartoons of the 80's were for kids, and for the most part so is this series. However, there was always a stark and easy to identify divide between who the "good guys" were and who the "bad guys" were. In Revelation, everyone is on the same team fighting against an enemy that hasn't really been defined yet. The struggle between the usual suspects doesn't really exist anymore and the only thing we have is randomly appearing canon-fodder enemies that are lead by Cyclops... who is presented as a religious fanatic. Great job Netflix, you had to plant religion in there as well...

Orko as a main character?

src

I don't think anyone actually liked Orko in the cartoon days and while his collectibles may have sold decently because they sold the absolute hell out of all the toys, He was merely comic relief in the shows way back when. In Revelation he plays a major role and is also very poorly voiced by someone named Griffin Newman, whoever that is. Also, he is a majorly powerful mage which just goes against everything that his character was ever all about. I realize that this is very subjective, but I would have preferred if he had just stayed back in the castle and only said a few things here and there rather than be in on the action at all times.

Tons and tons of dialogue
[src](https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/screen-shot-2021-07-23-at-11-59-39-am-1627055990.png?crop=0.8361216730038022xw:1xh;center,top&resize=640:*)
You know what people watch action anime stuff for? Lots of emotion-filled talking about just whatever of course right? That should be obvious sarcasm because of course people don't watch it for that. There are 5, around 40 minute episodes and that adds up to 200 minutes. I didn't run a stopwatch or anything but I don't think that I would be too off the mark if i were to suggest that 160 minutes of it is really long and drawn out dialogue much of which doesn't really even have anything to do with what is going on at the time. I expect filler in a series that is obligated by a TV network to produce 22 episodes a year, but this project's length was kind of left up to Kevin In a cartoon man! Why are we spending 80% of each episode doing a bunch of talking?

I found myself walking around my apartment and making food or staring at my phone for a great deal of it because I simply didn't care what they were talking about.

The new Masters of the Universe series is exactly what I had hoped it definitely wouldn't be: A watered down, PC reflection of the current state of woke-ism primarily in the United States. Because of this, professional critics are probably terrified to say anything nasty about it out of fear of being labeled a bigot, an anti-feminist, or racist somehow.

The general public has no such hangup though and I think that a vast majority of the people that have watched this feel the same way that I do: Kevin Smith and his team have done a massive disservice to my childhood memories here. Of course the media was quick to call the 1 star scores a "review-bomb" in an attempt to discredit the fact that viewers generally speaking are very upset with what has been done with this.

I don't recommend that you watch this if you were alive and a fan of the original cartoon, because it is likely just going to make you mad. I certainly hope there are plans in the 2nd half of this series that is yet to be released to repair the damage that has been done but unless they are going to refilm all of them, I don't really see that happening.

1200 words and I could have gone on for another 1200. Did you see this series? What did you think of it?

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›Masters of the Universe on Netflix: A few good things and a lot of bad... unfortunately@netflixr1789d
When I found out that Kevin Smith, who is a Star Wars nerd and kind of a nerd across the board, was going to be writing and directing a new series based on the wildly popular kids cartoon from the 80's. I got kind of thrilled. When I saw the trailer and noticed that while they were improving the animation they were still sticking to the show's roots (as far as art is concerned) I was more thrilled. My only hope was that they not modernize it too much and for the love of god please keep the politics and PC culture of today out of it. Well, there are no politics but it is also VERY different from the original and most of that is in a bad way.

I started out making this a one part story but it got too long and now I have split it into two sections. In this one we will start out on a positive note.
[src](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/51b3dc8ee4b051b96ceb10de/1613495639664-X0BGIUCK7S53OMPZ72QV/kevin-smiths-masters-of-the-universe-revelation-series-has-inspired-a-new-line-of-action-figures.jpg) _{Surprise, surprise... there is a new line of action figures being released along with this series}
Things they did right
Unfortunately this section is going to be very short because I don't feel as though they did a great deal correctly in this series but let's try to start off on a positive note anyway.
[src](https://occ-0-2794-2219.1.nflxso.net/dnm/api/v6/9pS1daC2n6UGc3dUogvWIPMR_OU/AAAABd9zvJNtd0yqos-M7ZLlgtFaDIQ6RizMea-ivQtaOSvGXdTFk0UnQNqU160av3nX3TxnudVxlBRAiq2CQJTzX9Ke4W9ONlfIXZF9rS0U1tQczQG5.jpg?r=940)
They throw in references to the plastic toys from the 80's
One thing that I enjoyed is something that unless you were alive and a kid in the 80's when the show was popular you probably wont understand and that is a lot of classic characters and vehicles are features in the show. You need to understand that the He-Man toys were extremely popular in the 80's and just about everyone I knew had at least a dozen items from the lineup.
There are certain things that you probably wont "get" if you were not alive when the cartoon first came out or if you didn't have any of the toys. For example, there is one point where at the entrance of Snake Mountain Teela falls into a net trap right at the door. This makes very little sense that there would be a net in the trap because the net actually saves you from falling to your death in lava below and it is also easily escaped. This was a silly "feature" of the original toy castle and I for one appreciate Easter Eggs like this.
[src](https://www.he-man.org/assets/images/collect_toy/motucsnakemountain02_full.jpg)

They didn't update the animation too much

Back in the days of original He-Man, everything was hand drawn because there were only 22 computers on Earth and Nasa owned 11 of them.

src - edited

Completely made up computer ownership statistics aside, I was concerned they were gonna Pixar the hell out of this and make it too modern. In my opinion they did it just the right amount. It is certainly more modern and now He-Man has nipples (odd that they were missing in the 80s) but they didn't go crazy with it and because of that it still has a nostalgic feel to it that I think most fans from the 80's will appreciate.

They made Man at Arms a badass

Man at Arms was a major character in the original series but he was always extremely underpowered and mostly kind of served as the guy that He-Man was eventually going to have to rescue. That was basically all he did. He would try something virtuous and then get overpowered and this necessitated Adam's transformation into He-Man that would happen in every episode. In Revelations, Man at Arms is a hero in his own right.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/heman/images/c/cd/Man-At-Arms_Revelation.png/revision/latest?cb=20210708142858 src

In his retirement, Man at Arms has become a one-man army and even though this is a big step away from the story in the past, it is a welcome one. I remember Man at Arms being one of the only action figures that wasn't a girl that was significantly less "ripped" than the others. He was the toy that you didn't play with but still had for some reason. There were no fans of Man at Arms because he was just weak AF.

They gave Man at Arms his comeuppance and I am happy that they decided to do this.

Unfortunately, this is where the "good points" end and you can go ahead and count me as one of the people that is seriously disappointed and actually struggled to make it all the way through the series. The "Things they did wrong" section is going to be considerably longer than the "right" section and I'll see if I can get that done by tomorrow.

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2 more reviews

Things they did wrong

It has very little to do with He-Man or Skeletor

It's a "girl power" series now

Everyone is on the good side?

Orko as a main character?

Tons and tons of dialogue

Things they did right

They throw in references to the plastic toys from the 80's

They didn't update the animation too much

They made Man at Arms a badass