When I was a wee bairn, I was obsessed with Prince Adam of Eternia aka He-Man, and his fellow Masters of the Universe – not to mention the unsung Mistresses, typical!
I watched the jaunty cartoon show religiously – with its kinda hilarious-in-retrospect, after-school special-style closing messages sparking bizarre, full-bodied chortles. I also gorged the women-centric spin-off series, She-Ra: Princess of Power, in an early rejection of rigid gender expectations for which I occasionally copped flak.
While my nervy parents dissuaded me from buying She-Ra figures to add to my hard-earned pocket money-bought He-Men, it didn’t matter.
Just as the long-lost siblings She-Ra and He-Man would team up, beginning with 1985’s big-screen animation, He-Man and She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword, I joined forces with my next-door neighbour, Alison, to combine our plastic fantastic army. The muddy trenches that were the foundations of new houses stood in for the fantastical realms where these magically buffed-up heroes battled with the hordes of Skeletor and Hordak.
There was something so wholesome about the colourfully adorned champions that made teeny me believe I could stem the forces of darkness simply by holding aloft a weirdly short and stubby sword while hollering, ‘By the power of Greyskull, I have the power!’.
He-Man – quick links
A live-action dead end
I wasn’t yet 10 when a hunky Dolph Lundgren stepped into He-Man’s kink-club adjacent loincloth and armoured harness in Gary Goddard’s 1987 live-action adaptation, written by writer David Odell, but I knew it was a steaming turd.
While Lundgren was passable in the title role, the rest of the cast were forgettable with one major exception. Soon-to-be Oscar nominee (though not for this) Frank Langella was the only cast member who got the assignment. His skull-headed antagonist Skeletor may have dispensed with the character’s traditional blue skin but he was still as camp as a Disney villain, smooshed with Shakespearean gravitas way beyond the material.
Sweetly, Langella only took the role to please his ecstatic young fanboy son, but much as Richard E Grant has likewise noted of the Spice Girls’ 1997 movie Spice World, he ended up having a whale of a time and lists it amongst the roles he most adores.
Unfortunately, the turgid script jettisoned everything else that makes He-Man marvellous. Instead of diving headlong into the mythical realm of Eternia, the action almost entirely plays out on snoozy old Earth. It looked more like a cheap Battlestar Galactica knock-off and He-Man’s trusty steed Battle Cat was nowhere to be seen.
Indeed, it felt like the 1987 film’s creative team were embarrassed by the cartoon’s “Krull for kids’” lore, dispensing with most of the gloriously silly heroes and villains of the series in favour of normcore bores.
On the goodies bench, the only key characters beyond Lundgren’s lump were Jon Cypher’s Man-at-Arms, Chelsea Field as his kick-arse daughter, Teela, and Christina Pickles as the Arthurian-coded Sorceress. Other than Langella’s Skeletor, the wild and wonderful beasties of the original were reduced to Tony Carroll’s hulking Beastman and Meg Foster’s sneering dominatrix, Evil-Lyn. New henchmen, created to sell more toys, were resoundingly blah – as was pretty much everything here, with even Courteney Cox struggling to bring much to the table as a mere mortal.
While my love for the material didn’t die there – I still mourn mum tossing all my action figures – other obsessions took over.
Jolly innuendo
Which brings us to the 2026 reboot. Thankfully, this Masters of the Universe leans into the cartoon’s source material. Helmed by Bumblebee director Travis Knight, working from a screenplay by Chris Butler, Dave Callaham and Aaron and Adam Nee, they’re not trying to pray the bright and gay away.
There’s battle, adventure and japes a-plenty, including the requisite post-modern in-jokes, but less savagely so – a love-in for gentler times.
I needlessly panicked when I learned that He-Man was earthbound again. The prologue sees a helpless young Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) thrust into a sparkly rainbow vortex by Morena Baccarin’s Sorceress, when Jared Leto’s Skeletor (affecting a plummy Ian McKellen accent) and Alison Brie’s arch Evil-Lyn lay waste to his home and banish his parents.
Flash forward to the now-adult Nicholas Galitzine bored out of his greyskull working an HR gig while trying to track down the Sword of Power that’s meant to fix everything. A cute gym-bros heart-to-heart with none other than Lundgren is sweet, as is the fact he’s swiftly whisked back to Eternia, sword in hand, alongside Camila Mendes’ Teela.
What follows may not trouble awards season, but it is adorkably goofy. Props go to the always-reliable Idris Elba as drunkenly gruff-to-be-kind Man-at-Arms, Duncan, a scene-stealer extraordinaire.
There are way more goodies on show, including Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson’s Fisto, who’s elbow-deep in a running gag about how that eyebrow-raising name that works in-universe, plus the vocal talents of Kristen Wiig as the mechanical Roboto. Likewise, it’s fun spotting a bunch of cartoon-correct brutes, including Kojo Attah’s Tri-Klops and Sam C. Wilson’s menacing Trap Jaw. There are even 1987 additions in the ensemble.
But should we trudge ever-backwards towards childhood nostalgia? Is there no IP that’s Sorceress-sacred? Who is this Barbie follow-up meant for? Is it just adults who, like me, once got mucky with the action heroes? Or will a new generation dragged along by their parents also fall for these goofballs?
That remains to be seen, but thankfully this is no disaster like the IP’s last live-action outing. Amiably dumb fun, Masters of the Universe isn’t afraid to play in this powered-up sand pit in a family-friendly way, though it’s certainly smuggling more innuendo than previously.
I will not lie, when a perfectly-cast Galitzine raised the sword and said his bit for the first time, the smile that crept across my 40-something face was five years old again. Is that such a bad thing in these grim times?
