Thursday, August 20, 2015

Let's take another trip to the well!

While we, as a species, might rapidly be running out of fossil fuels, water and food, there is one resource that never seems to run dry: 1980's nostalgia. While we can't eat or drink it, we can make forgettable, CGI-laden movies out of it. So why has it taken almost thirty years for someone to try and make another live action He-Man and the Masters of the Universe? I mean, other than the last ones terribleness.
Although incidentally, those other things are probably going to be a problem...
It was the bananas foster of
children's television.
If you're unfamiliar, MOTU was, like many kid's TV shows of the time, a thinly-veiled toy commercial. In fact, it was the first to be based on a line of action figures rather than the other way around. Yup, Mattel came up with a Conan the Barbarian rip-off with a loin cloth and a sword and then hired an animation studio to write a narrative around it. What they came up with was objectively bananas. Bananas on fire. Even for a time in which writers were required by their union to be entirely on cocaine, it was out there.

"Remember kids, violence is never the
answer...except when it totally is. Got it?"
The cartoon was sort of like if someone de-sexualized a cover of Heavy Metal magazine and then animated it. Everyone was in fury briefs or metal halter tops and battling one another with this bizarre combination of medieval swords and sorcery alongside sci-fi technology like lasers and spaceships. And just to keep the parent's groups off their backs, every episode would cap off with a PSA by Orko the wizard who'd try and explain to the kids why they should never resort to violence despite having spent the last 22 minutes watching He-Man do exactly that.

So my question is how are we supposed to take this even a little seriously? No matter who writes, directs or stars in it, it's still a story about a mild-mannered space Prince with a bowl cut who disguises himself by taking off most of his clothes and then rides around on a talking green tiger. I'm not trying to be a nay-sayer here, but this has been tried before and the results were...well, they were this:
Above: Dolph Lundgren getting laser-whipped by a pirate
who's also a cyborg. Not pictured: the aforementioned cocaine. 

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