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Netflix He-Man is good, actually
🕑 Added 2021-11-17 19:10:41 +0000 UTCMOTU Revelations left me pretty confused and upset about what He-Man could give to the world in 2021, so I catch up with the animated series that the totally trustworthy detractors of Revelations on Youtube point out as the best and most faithful iteration of the franchise: He-Man and the Master of the Universe, the reboot of 2002.
It seemed like a good idea. A series with better animation, sleeker character designs, and a more serious tone that reflects the actual marketing of the toyline, where Skeletor is threatening and He-man a paladin of the forces of good.
And after watching it in its entirety, I must admit that it's good.
Revelations, is good.
The 2002 Reboot is utter crap.
It's the fatal combo of the concept of He-Man that per se it's pretty bad (a prince who is also the chosen one) and the worst cliches of the 90s action cartoons, the ones that today are meme material.
Better animation? Who cares if the only thing that I want to see animated is prince Adam getting kicked in the mouth.
Even the '80s movie is good by comparison.
Let me explain.
The cartoon starts quite promisingly with a flashback, Captain Randor (the future father of Prince Adam) fighting against his brother Keldor for the power of Grayskull, still held by the collectivity of Elders. In the fight, Randor defends himself from an acid projectile from Keldor, that bounces on his face and melts it away. He has to back off.
You already desire the story to be about Keldor and his bromance Duncan, since the protagonist-villain chemistry has already been established between the two brothers, and they also defended the castle of the Elders quite well without any help from Superman in harness.
But those old farts decide that they're done with that job, vaporize, and leave Sorceress alone with the responsibility to protect the Castle of Grayskull and the Sword of Power.
Time skip, Keldor is now the King of the good hemisphere of Eternia and fathered Prince Adam, who isn't just the most privileged person on his planet, but also avoids Duncan's training, downplays their war memories, and laughs at his own jokes.
The Skeletor's crew then emerges from its slumber, and attacks the royal palace. Adam then is brought by Duncan to Castle Grayskull, and Sorceress tells him his destiny is to wield the Sword of Power and become a grown-up bodybuilder with superstrenght protector of innocents.
Prince Adam fucking flees, goes back to the palace, sees that the Skeletor crew has sacked it and imprisoned his parents, and now that the things have become personal, that the king of darkness is specifically threatening his house and family, decides to wield that sword and become He-Man.
In the opening arc, the writers went out of their way to explain how Prince Adam is just a spoiled brat with a power he doesn't earn. It's a pretty common sin of old US animation and its assumption that all male teenagers have to be selfish and arrogant.
But it's worse than usual, because in 50 episodes Prince Adam hasn't proven himself worthy of those powers or demonstrates that the responsibilities change him in a positive way.
He never shows that he can be just and courageous without the Sword, he's just going around with a trinket that replaces him with He-Man, that's not just a different appearance, but a different character.
Prince Brat is already past saving by episode 5, the first "I lost my Power Sword" episode. But in this story, Adam doesn't lose the Sword. He purposefully leaves it at home and heads towards Snake Mountain sure he can face the undead wizard with his own forces.
Obviously, he gets captured and Teela and Duncan have to rescue him.
By now you just wonder why they are eligible wielders for the Sword of Power, or King Randor, or even Queen Marlena. Everyone looks like a worthier holder of that power.
(My theory is that Prince Adam is such a useless warrior that you can only get better from replacing him with He-Man, while all the other characters would have specific skills to sacrifice to become that kind of bruiser combatant.)
What about the Bad Guys?
Do you remember that old chiché about bad guys being more interesting than good guys? Because they're more campy, funny, proactive, and definitely the underdogs of the story?
Well, in this series they're for sure the underdogs, being in no more than a dozen guys against an entire army. They're kind of proactive, kickstarting all the "McGuffin of the Week" episodes, but they're also bad at their jobs, failing more because of their own incompetence than the competence of the good guys.
E.G. in one of the episodes the Power-Up McGuffins has a time limit, and the only reason why the good guys win is that the baddies didn't know and exhausted their time. Literally, take the good guys out of the equation and the result is the same.
Are they funny? From a very ironic point of view yeah. Hearing Skeletor laughing maniacally every time he flees defeated like it was humiliating for He-Man not having caught him, is very pitiful and cringy, some might enjoy this display of human misery.
For sure the effort in the character design was to make the bad guys look more menacing and ominous, then most of the intentional humor of the Filmation series was removed, and some of the scenes picked out of context make cool promos, with Skeletor depicted as a demon out of Hell, but they're not backed up at all by the story, where he's still a bumbling, but way less creative and funny idiot.
His real enemies are himself, and also his minions, out of intentional malice or simple dumbassery.
Sadly, the same thing can be said about Team He-Man.
The "Masters" of the Universe
First things first: Masters of the Universe is now an inadequate title since this series has completely ditched the sci-fi elements of the original. Magitech is a thing, used mostly for scooters and robots, but there's no more space exploration. So sad.
Secondly, I've not been that honest with "Everyone looks like a worthier wielder of the Sword of Power" because there are quite a bunch of characters worse than Adam on the side of good: the Masters of the Universe themselves.
The first season is for a good part dedicated to them, and they're just enraging or embarrassing.
Because this show has this relic-of-the-80s pattern of centering the plot of the episode around a cheesy PSA at the end. So we have to see grown-ass men (because the Masters are drawn that way) making very childish mistakes and learning very basic and patronizing lessons.
Don't be hostile to people that don't look like you, don't be afraid of the dark, don't accept candies from strangers.
Everybody screws up in this series and nobody is held accountable. Nobody has to earn back the trust that they should have lost by being jerkasses that do more harm to their cause with their stupid mistakes than Skeletor himself.
I used to be annoyed by all the reconciliation arcs that populate modern cartoons, but now I realize that the alternative, instant-forgiveness, is much worse.
Even worse for the education of children: if a child could learn something about behaving with other people by watching a cartoon, would he give attention to a one-minute PSA at the end, or at what happens in the entire span of the episode?
And what could he learn by watching a goddamn adult behaving like a rash kid, doing harm to his community, and being forgiven at the end?
That you can screw up and take all the impulsive decisions you want, you will never have to say sorry or earn forgiveness, and you don't even need to mentally grow and become a functional adult, because the masters are adults and still behave like children.
And that's the most white-straight-male thing I can imagine. If 4chan is filled with angry white males that can't accept that everything in their life isn't already given and blame it on women and minorities, I can easily point the finger towards this generation of cartoons as one of the teachers of this mindset.
The Tone
Someone can say "Well, even in the original series they did a lot of stupid mistakes to kickstart the plot of the episode" and I can respond that the tone makes a big difference: He-Man 2002 wants to look cool and edgy, marketed towards teens instead of elementary school children, and in a world that tries to feel more real and grungy than the pastiche of spec-fic that was the Filmation show, there must be consequences for actions and inactions.
People might die under their crumbling houses because you were too busy picking a fight with two orc bullies, and that's not a fallacy that can be wiped out in the span of one episode.
(On the other side, Skeletor 2002 looks like a pathetic loser compared to the original. He poses like a merciless hellspawn, but he fails as much as the original that had no shame in presenting himself as a buffoon.)
Secondly, the Masters weren't that immature in the Filmation series.
Most of the childish mistakes were committed by Orko and Cringer, two characters that were already coded as children.
What happened to them in the 2002 Reboot? Oh well, they're the ones that got screwed the most.
Cringer Meows
Cringer is no more a talking character, but a complete feral. He still transforms in Battle Cat but He-Man will often ditch him in favor of water and air scooters.
When he's just Cringer, he meows like a kitty cat, because that was the only other feline stock sound that they cared to buy.
A 200kg tiger that meows like a 4kg cat. Fuck it.
Orko, well, I don't know how to put it. He's a psychopath.
He keeps misusing his magic, like the original Orko, but now in a story with a different tone, where people can die because you blew up a column, he never repents for that, but sulks because he feels unappreciated, he accepts candies from shady strangers and goofs around when his magic is needed.
He's the worst of Team Good liabilities, and in one of the early episodes, Skeletor says it out loud. Because, you know, lampshading your glaring plot problems is always the best way to solve them.
Fortunately, he's mostly absent in the series and I might point it to two factors, none of them are his narcissistic idiocy:
- His magic is a mood killer. If you want to go for an epic and gloomy tone, a plushie that performs Disney magic is not the character to have around.
- His magic is a game-breaker. He can make appear and disappear objects, and in a story that hinges so much on power-up McGuffins, this could end most of the episodes in the first five minutes.
Ah yeah, the Power-Up McGuffins.
Time Wasted.
If you wonder how they set up these arcs about learning elementary school social skills for all the masters, just imagine the most boring thing imaginable. The Power-Up McGuffin.
Eternia is littered with gemstones and potions that give superpowers, and most of the episodes in the first season are about the Skeletor gang in a quest to search one of those trinkets, and the masters always intercepting them.
Only one of the McGuffins is plot-relevant, in the sense that Skeletor tries a second time to steal it for the season finale, a pitiful "Prince Adam has lost the Power Sword part. 2" cliffhanger.
(So many cliffhanger finales in the early 2000s.)
All the other gemstones of power are just forgotten because they exist only in the personal subuniverses of the freelance writers commissioned with writing filler episodes that waste time.
Seriously, 80% of the episodes of the first season are skippable material that explores the unlikability of characters that won't be used again in the second season.
Some might say that it's the characteristic of most action cartoons, skippable episodes, but Spiderman, The X-Men, had already been a thing. Writers had already proven that you can effectively combine horizontal and episodic plots in a cartoon, avoiding the feeling of time wasted.
Time that will become very precious with the second season.
The second season is… Fine
The second and last season is only half the episodes long. Clearly a miniarc realized to show the producers that this series had still hope after the enraging blandness of the first season. But it was not enough.
The is an apparent change of course: in the first seven minutes of the first episode the "Prince Adam has lost the Power Sword" cliffhanger is resolved with the game-breaking magic of Orko, and by the end of the episode Skeletor's "army" (I mean, they're no more than ten people, they're the underdogs in this story) is already pushed back.
Then it starts the half-season arc about Evil Lynn teaming up with another force of evil, the Snake Men, plotting against Skeletor, and He-Man trying to overcome a group that has the numbers and organization of a proper army.
It's fine, almost good. There has been quite a technical improvement with the color scheme and the background music, bonus points for using more anthros instead of dead-eyes humans.
And there's a sense of progression towards the final battle against the Snake Army, instead of having 80% of the episodes skippable material.
But it's still built on the rotten stinky basis of the first season, and the story can just do control damage: Prince Adam, whose character is beyond saving by now, gets less and less screentime in favor of He-Man (another character by any mean) and same thing for the rest of the masters, that barely have any speaking role while the story focuses on the recruitment of two more reluctant but way more competent allies, Zodac and Fisto.
Even the PSAs at the end of the episodes are mocked and ridiculized, with the one attached at the end of the episode about a flock of dragons breaking havoc being "beware of fire."
If the series started off with this writing it would have been a good enough remake, maybe lasting 3-4 seasons, still not able to make a dent in the He-Man pop culture image like the gloriously campy and imaginative Filmation series did.
What about the animation?
If you ask a fan of this series one of the reasons why they appreciate it, the quality of the animation will be in the top 2, and yeah, the gap between this cartoon and the original, that switched between anime-like stiffness and rotoscoped action gliding on the background, it's pretty stark.
(The original series was made entirely in the Filmation studios and kept the jobs in the country instead of outsourcing them to a Japanese or Korean studio, but I digress.)
I can't deny that the action is pretty fluid, with lots of keyframes, and those sexy muscular bodies are in full display for the kids at home with a muscle fetish already imprinted.
But considering that it was 2002, and anime by then already arrived in the English-speaking countries (a lot earlier for Roman Countries) it was just outmatched, for three reasons:
The dirt pallette
Eternia 2002 is divided into the Dark and bright Hemispheres, (maybe a tidal lock going on, they never delve into that) and while the Dark Hemisphere gets the cool colors like blue and purple, the Bright Hemispheres looks like sulphuric sewage:
The sky is yellow by default and all the pallette is shifted towards oranges, browns, and olive. No character has a signature color and it's pretty difficult to tell them apart at first sight, especially in the intro sequence.
The already kidney-failing palette is then killed in the first season by a grey shadow that applies the same effect to any color, and it's very distracting, especially on reds.
I don't know if it was for technological limitations with layer blend modes or for the effort of looking more "mature", like the edgy PS2 games of the times that couldn't process colors in the shadows.
But in the second season, they started applying colored shadows and the color schemes start looking way less dull.
Sadly, the intro sequence remains unchanged so you can hardly tell who's whom in that assembly of toys you should buy.
In He-Man 2002 you'd want to be a bad guy and dwell in dimly-lit caves just for the nice colors and the purple shadows.
Cringer meows
I will never get over the fact that they applied a whining cat sound effect for a goddamn tiger that in the original cartoon was a talking character, and it's just the more outrageous example of a sound effect department that seems like it picked from a generic library most of its stock. Everything feels very quiet and the noises muffled when compared to what's happening, and the celestial chorus that takes on when Prince Brat transforms into He-Man makes all the music-less silence of the rest of the episode pretty awkward.
I've started paying more attention to the sounds and music of animated media because I've noticed with He-Man 2002 how uneasy can be the feeling of a cartoon with a poor sound design and bland quiet soundtracks.
No directing
This might get very subjective and hard to explain, but having a lot of frames and movement doesn't equal effective animation. Every scene feels like it drags for too long and characters are just idling robots waiting to have their line. The very cheeky voice acting doesn't help in the least.
But that can be boiled down to two factors.
- The character designs of the early 2000s were just a bad compromise between realism and cheapness. Those shapes for the eyes were pretty accurate, but too big and without a thick outline to simulate the eyelashes, they looked just glassy and dead.
- The directing. Any scene shows literally what's written on the script, close-up on the guy who's talking, panning on a new environment, the camera that follows the action scene keeping the guy moving at the center on the screen. No effort to make the shot more evocative or interesting, with the focus on a specific detail, a new palette, or a more daring perspective.
Both factors that anime already got right by that time, because having to work at the same time with lower budgets and realistic anatomies, they had to learn of doing more with less. More stills but very detailed and interesting, characters with big eyes that communicate emotions more easily, dialogue scenes that are just two frames alternating, and budget saved for action with a lot of anticipation and relapse.
As I've already said, He-Man 2002 was born old in the explosion of anime of the early 2000s.
From a technical side, but mostly from a storytelling side. It comes natural to Japanese writers to depict nice and responsible male teenagers.
In conclusion
As average, this series everything that could go wrong with the He-Man concept, and how the worst clichés of 90s cartoon can double down on that.
Prince Adam is extremely privileged? Then make him also an spoiled brat because male teenagers.
He keeping secret his identity doesn't make quite sense? Then show in every episode how detrimental or stupidly obvious are his flights for a concealed place where to transform.
The bad guys come off as the underdogs? Then show how the good guys are jerkasses that don't deserve their powers.
Rumors say that the series was canceled because the toyline had low-quality figures and didn't sell well, but the fact that so many new things were changed in the second season, new characters introduced and the old ones ignored, is telling that also the series had problems selling itself.
So, congratulations Kevin Smith, you might have messed up in some places, but every iteration of He-Man where you don't want to kick Prince Adam in the mouth, Orko isn't a psychopath and Cringer talks instead of meowing, is leagues better than the 2002 Reboot.
And you made upset a lot of 4channers, so that's a plus.
