The Masters of the Universe, 20 Years Later
C October 15, 2005

I wanted to watch the DVD last night. I came in after midnight after another uneventful night, knowing that I had some tension to relieve. I put the DVD in the player, but then my roommate came home. Slightly embarrassed at being caught, I turned the TV off and went to bed.

The next day when I woke up, I knew I wouldn’t be able to wait any longer. The DVD was preoccupying me. I felt almost guilty that my roommate was ten feet away making out with a real girl, and I was reduced to this.

It no longer mattered, though. I turned the volume on my TV way down so that it could only be heard from my bed. I lay back as the DVD began, and almost unconsciously began to mouth the words streaming from my television.

By the power of gray-skull… I HAVE THE POWER!!!

What… oh, I know what you were thinking, you dirty mind. No, this was one of the few times I was not watching porn.

No, I’m talking about He-Man, the cartoon show I was in love with when I was about four years old. I had He-Man bed sheets, He-Man curtains, He-Man action figures, He-Man play sets, a plastic He-Man sword… you get the idea.

The one thing I didn’t have was any He-Man videos, and believe me, I would have bought them. The world loved He-Man, but the world has a short attention span, and gradually He-Man began to age.

It didn’t happen all at once, but slowly I stopped spending so much time with my He-Man action figures. By the time I turned six, the Ghostbusters were all the rage. When I was seven, even that seemed immature, as it was clear Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had by best interests in my mind. When I was eight it was Monster in my Pockets. When I was nine, as you knew would happen, I discovered girls…

By the power of… the castle… thing…

By the big sword…

I’m…

He-Man was relegated to an insignificant memory of childhood, and in the twenty years since I doubt I have ever paused to think about it. Hard to believe I had once been a Master of the Universe. I couldn’t even remember the magic words.

Then, one day while I was innocently cruising amazon.com in search of Hellblazer comics, which may take me through to my 23rd birthday, something cried out to me. It was a very old, vaguely familiar voice, reciting words I no longer knew. I don’t know what it was made me type that particular phrase into the search engine.

But you know how this story ends. Mattel, after 20 years, has finally decided to release He-Man on DVD, just as they are now releasing every TV show you have ever heard of (and some you haven’t). I stared, slack-jawed, upon the box labeled The Best of He-Man. It was the ten best episodes. I knew at once, I had to have it.

Actually, I come to find out, He-Man was fairly revolutionary. It was the first five-day a week children’s cartoon, and it was also the first such show run by a toy company. It was perhaps the most genius marketing idea I’ve ever heard of; design the toys, and then make up a TV series around them. It was little better than having a half-hour long commercial for toys.

But, you see, it worked. I didn’t know this at the time; I didn’t even know the company that had brought you Barbie was trying to get away with doing something for the boys, which might have crushed me when I was four. I just wanted He-Man.

And now, Matel returns with a possibly even greater genius move. The release of these DVD’s was tactful. They knew they had to wait a long time for the generation they had once exploited to stand up and ask to be exploited again, but this time it was even easier. Every Master of the Universe, every single one of us, no longer had to beg our parents to buy us He-Man. Like myself, every single one of us woke up one day to find He-Man staring us in the face, and we remembered what was missing in our lives.

I’m not saying it’s perfect. The character’s lips never match their voices, and watching Battle Cat roar is downright laughable. Considering this was probably the best they could do in the early 80’s, I’m impressed. But the soundtrack, I have to admit, is pretty cool, and that’s something I couldn’t have appreciated back then.

Nor would I have recognized the subdued incestuous themes when Teela hints at her attraction to He-Man, even though Prince Adam is like a brother to her.

That’s not her fault, though. The series also plays host to the classic Superman error, where He-Man wears nothing to conceal his identity, and yet his own parents and sister seem unable to recognize him. In fact, all holding the sword over his head really does is give him less clothes. It would be like me stripping down to my underwear, and suddenly Chris wonders where I went, and why this huge hunk of a man is standing in the room next to him (this has actually happened).

Which isn’t to say there weren’t some very mature themes. In one episode, Prince Adam undergoes an identity crisis when he thinks his father likes He-Man better than him. The 60-second moral at the end of that one is that parents sometimes forget to tell their children they love them, but that really deep down they do. That’s a lesson we needed then as much as 20 years later.

In the episode where they need to convince Skeletor to help them fight the evil Dark Seed (who appears to have a bustle sprout for a head), Skeletor (who, if you don’t remember, is the series’ villain) continually cries “Don’t you ever get tired of being a hero? Don’t you ever feel like doing something evil?” It’s totally ridiculous, and yet when he finally lifts his staff to help explode the giant ice ball, everyone cheers anyway.

It’s also funny to watch the series’ creators speak in deadpan about it, as though it were the most serious thing in the world. And yet, I don’t blame them. I was a series’ creator too, or at least I was part of what made the series work. The fans were what it was all about, and the fans are what it is still about now.

And for just a half-hour, I felt like a Master of the Universe again.