I'll save my thoughts on that show for when I finish it. But as I am watching it, I've become curious to revisit the original show.
Like everyone of my generation, I have tremendous nostalgia for the original He-man and the Masters of the Universe show. But, like every functioning adult, I also find the show hard to sit through now that I'm all grown up. The last time I tried to revisit this show and watch an episode on Youtube, I found it painful to get through. I tried again today, with the same result.
In addition to my general curiosity to revisit the show, I particularly wanted to revisit this episode, because Roboto (W) is one of the major characters in Masters of the Universe: Revelation part 1, and I wanted to check to see if his origin story in the original cartoon syncs with what was in Masters of the Universe: Revelation. (Spoiler alert: It doesn't sync. But hold that for now. We'll come back to this in a few days when I finish and review Masters of the Universe: Revelation.)
Other than that, this episode is a perfect example of why it's impossible to return to He-man and the Masters of the Universe as an adult.
I think the primary thing that kills these episodes is the slow pacing, and the jerky animation.
That being said, it's not any worse than other animated shows from its day. Most animated shows from the early 1980s are unwatchable.
(...although, it's strange, animated shows from the late 1980s, like Ducktales (W), still largely hold up. And I think that's largely true of all the years that followed as well. So animated cartoons made before the late 1980s don't hold up, but animated cartoons made during or after the late 1980s still hold up. What was it that happened in the late 1980s?)
On the positive side, there are some things to like about the original Masters of the Universe cartoon.
Although the animation isn't very good in the sense that the character movements are jerky, the character designs are actually visually appealling. The characters are all bright and colorful, and they look interesting.
The settings for the original Masters of the Universe were always good as well.
The planet Eternia was a bit like the Land of Oz in that it never ran out of exotic new places to go and strange creatures to meet, and the original show always had interesting landscapes for our heroes to wander across.
[Okay, granted, this particular episode isn't a great example of fantastic landscapes. Other episodes were more interesting. Still, I'm going to give it points for some of the interesting rock formations in the terrain, as well as some of the cool futuristic city designs.]
And then, of course, there's the music.
...actually, let's call the music a mixed bag. I think the original theme music is quite good, but as an adult, I can't help but notice how repetitive the soundtrack is. By the end of one 22 minute episode, you're already sick of that theme!
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Despite the limited animation techniques that were used to produce the series, He-Man was notable for breaking the boundaries of censorship that had severely restricted the narrative scope of children's TV programming in the 1970s. For the first time since Ruby-Spears's Thundarr the Barbarian, a cartoon series could feature a muscular superhero who was actually allowed to hit people (although he more typically used wrestling-style moves rather than actually punching enemies), though he still could not use his sword often; more often than not He-Man opted to pick up his opponents and toss them away rather than hit them.
...I never noticed this as a kid, but once you know to look for it, it's super obvious, isn't it? In this episode, He-Man never punches anyone or uses his sword to hit anyone. He uses his sword, but only to hit other objects with, never a person.
I guess you have to give the show credit for all the inventive ways they found to have He-Man fight bad guys, while seldom hitting them.
Also from Wikipedia:
In similar fashion to other shows at the time, notably G.I. Joe, an attempt to mitigate the negative publicity generated by this controversy was made by including a "life lesson" or "moral of the story" at the end of each episode. This moral was usually directly tied to the action or central theme of that episode.[13][14][15]
...I remember those morals from when I was a kid, but watching this episode now as an adult, it strikes me that they really were shameless about it. They produced a story with almost no edifying content at all, and then still found a way to claim it had a moral because it was about helping your friends.
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Update: I googled "Why did animation get better in the late 1980s?" I didn't find a definitive answer, but I did find several sights confirming that animation did indeed get drastically better after the mid-1980s (so it's not just my subjective opinion). See, for example, this article: The Dark Age of Animation.
From the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, the world of animation in the United States experienced a severe quality drought. Television animation was cheaply and quickly produced and loaded with errors. Feature-length animation experienced severe budget cuts, and the number of animated movies being released was drastically reduced. Cartoons that many generations grew up watching were made with “limited animation” - a style that utilized as few frames as possible, which resulted in choppy, simplified character motions.
Etc. Read more at the article.
On the subject of cheap animation, I notice that He-Man's transformation seems to always be the same in every episode. So that's a good few seconds of animating money that they saved every episode.
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Check out He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: The Complete Original Series [DVD] on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/41tJoHd (This is an associate's link. If you buy anything through that link, I get a commission.)
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