Fanboys have been complaining for decades about the “necessary” changes made to a famous property when it finally reaches the screen. These have usually ranged from vastly different character designs to plot details that don’t exactly synch up what we all grew up with – behold the outrage to the CGI design of Sonic the Hedgehog or the outpouring of despair as the complex lore of the Transformers is simplified for the masses. However, while I personally have always believed that maybe these things shouldn’t be taken quite so seriously, I had to learn this lesson the hard way in 1987 thanks to the Cannon Group’s adaptation to He-Man and the Masters Of The Universe, the toy line turned cartoon series that enraptured many a child back in the day.
Hoping to enter the realms of the blockbuster, Cannon’s cinematic empire was already well on the way to crumbling like a poorly made sandcastle thanks to an impressively unsustainable business model, thus He-Man’s big shot at Hollywood was met with a mixture of derision and disapointment as vicious budget cuts knee-capped the production. However, is it really all that bad? Well, yes actually, but that doesn’t mean that He-Man doesn’t have the power to be enjoyably cheesy as hell.
The planet of Eternia is under new management as the evil, skull-faced Skeletor and his troops have managed to breach the mystical Castle Grayskull and subduded the once all powerful Sorceress. While Skeletor gradually drains her powers like a redneck siphoning gasoline, the heroic, absurdly jacked He-Man and his allies, Man-At-Arms and his daughter Teela, fight to regain control of their beloved planet.
After stumbling upon ginger, gilled inventor Gwildor, He-Man and his cronies discover that it was one of his inventions, the portal creating Cosmic Key, that allowed Skeletor to gain entrance to Greyskull in the first place, but thankfully, the little boffin still has the prototype. However, their counter attack goes bad quicker than unrefrigerated chicken on a summer’s day and as a result, He-Man, Man-At-Arms, Teela and Gwildor all retreat through a hole in space randomly keyed in during the panic.
Their destination ends up being the far cheaper filming location of California and while the displaced Eternians try to acclimate to their new surroundings, the Cosmic Key falls into the hands of recently orphaned Julie Winston and her musician boyfriend, Kevin, whose clueless tinkering of the device clues Skeletor to the location of his enemies. The boney despot sends his right hand woman, Evil-Lyn and a gaggle of inhuman mercenaries to mop up this last gang of resistance and thus this epic battle spills over onto Earth, scooping up Julie and Kevin and the bitter detective Lopec to boot.
If He-Man doesn’t get to flexing those formidable biceps and stop Skeletor cold, the villain’s lust for power will see him become a veritable god with the fashion instincts of Odin drawn by Jack Kirby.
As a massive fan of He-Man back in the day, the ernest results of Gary Goddard’s adaptation horrified me to the core as I was simply too young to grasp not only how tough it was back then to realise such things on an 80s budget even if your studio wasn’t collapsing in on itself like a badly financed white dwarf. Why did everything look different? Where were the majority of the beloved characters like Battle Cat, Orko, Trap-Jaw and Ram Man and who the fuck were these new ones? However, as an adult, it’s clear to see that Masters Of The Universe halfway more problems going on than just being responsible for changing up the way Beast Man looks or ditching the character of Mer-Man, as of all the big budget attempts at realising a cheesy fantasy movie, this could be by far the cheesiest.
Having beings in it with such on-the-nose monikers as He-Man, Evil-Lyn and Skeletor doesn’t exactly help, of course, but in top of that, the strain of budget is obvious (at one point the movie reuses the same establishing shot at least three times) and the plot holes are as glaring as Cosmic Key created portal. Doesn’t anyone spot Skeletor and his minions slowly travelling down a Californian main street in a giant battle craft like some freakish version of the Macy’s Day Parade? If Kevin is the only one who can remember the six notes needed to programme the Cosmic Key, does that mean no one in Eternia can carry a tune? If Skeletor is so evil, why does he insist on sparing everyone? And worst of all, why are we focusing on the insipid sub-plot of Courtney Cox’s dead parents when we have an intergalactic war going on?!
However, while the creatures are rubbery and the sets are limited (why is the lush Eternia portrayed as the sort of rocky wasteland you’d get in a cheaper Star Trek episode?), the years have been exceptionally kind to the film as it’s now such a creaky, guilty pleasure, a lot of the film’s issues have become very questionable plus points.
Not a single one of the Eternian heroes are scripted as actual human beings, delivering their “action-figure” dialogue as if they have a pull string located in the small of their back, and while Dolph Lundgren certainly has the brick shit-house physique and the expansive blond mullet to look the part of the sword waving He-Man, he also delivers his lines as if he has an undiagnosed concussion. The bad guys – aside from a perfectly cast Meg Foster – are all coated in sweaty prosthetics and are designed to within an inch of their lives and while we’re denied a Tri-Klops or a toy-accurate Beast Man, the sight of a bat-faced subordinate sneering from underneath a huge bouffant hair do or a brass-coloured robot lizard with a bulging neck-sac still brings the loveable, crappy coolness.
However, the best thing unsurprisingly turns out to be Frank Langella who, beneath oddly jowly skull prosthetics that makes his face as unresponsive as Nicole Kidman’s botoxed visage in Australia, takes the part of Skeletor. Langella, god bless him, attacks the role of an evil action figure as if he’s tackling King fucking Lear and bellows out his sections of the script with fantastical gusto. Understanding that to acceptably portray a 5 and a half inch toy correctly, you have to put in a performance like you’re the size of a mountain, it’s a rare time the movie actually inhabits what this film actually could have been before the arsehole dropped out of the financing.
While the movie manages to get a taste of the pulpy, hair-metal, Conan meets Star Wars feel if the source material, the fact that we got no Prince Adam, Battle Cat and countless other omissions still spelt disaster to a legion of gutted, young fans back in the late 80s. Yet their loss is the gain of lovers of ropey, overblown, sci-fi fantasy, who will undoubtedly find that it’s blind nostalgia – not He-Man – that truly has the power.
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