Culture Corner: More Like Disasters of The Universe
Kevin Smith's woke "He-Man" reboot isn't a sequel, it's a subversion.
One of my earliest memories from my childhood was watching the 2002 remake of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe on TV with my dad. I was only 3 or 4, and it’s only a flash in my mind’s eye, but it’s stuck with me all this time nonetheless. As I’ve grown up I’ve grown in my fondness for He-Man, in memes, in the Death Battle episode where He-Man fought Lion-O of Thundercats, and in watching the original 1983 series. So when Robert Barnes eviscerated Kevin Smith and his He-Man reboot on his Sidebar show with Viva Frei, my morbid curiosity was piqued. Following the controversies, the “woke” criticisms and Kevin Smith’s defensive responses, only made me more curious, to the point where I had to watch it.
The overwhelming majority of the fan criticism can be summed up by the phrase “bait-and-switch,” but I think that’s a downright charitable understatement. The show was promoted by the now-infamous teaser trailer, by Smith himself, and by the myriad puff pieces in Variety magazine and other outlets, on the basis that, because it “looks and feels” like He-Man, it is He-Man. Characters from the original series make “memorable appearances.” The animation “pays loving attention to the design aesthetic of the original… while upgrading it for an adult eye and sensibility (e.g Adam looks scrawny and less like He-Man in a shirt).” And the show features an all-star cast including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Lena Headey, Liam Cunningham, Mark Hamill, Kevin Michael Richardson, Phil LaMarr, Dennis Haysbert, even Alan Oppenheimer, the original voice of Skeletor (albeit in a different role) to give the show that triple-A Netflix flair. But while it maintains the form of the original series, the actual substance of the reboot is fundamentally anti-He Man. What the article champions as a “bold creative decision” bringing “real stakes and real consequences” and “nuanced characters imbued with genuine pathos and psychological maturity,” is in reality, an aggressive attempt to tear down everything that made the original series what it was.
Before I delve into the substantive problems, I will first address the preeminent criticism against the show. I do think the complaints are a little bit overblown, but the show is woke on its face, there’s no getting around that. For starters, the main characters are all women: Teela, Prince Adam’s best friend, Andra, Teela’s adventure partner, and Evil-Lyn, who accompanies the two on their quest. On top of that, it’s heavily implied that Teela and Andra are more than just adventure partners, judging by the way they look at and talk to each other (there’s even a write-up about it at Comic Book Review, and several others at various gay nerd blogs). There’s also Teela’s character design. Our very reluctant heroine (more on that later) bears the hallmarks of the empowered female stereotypes. She sports the stereotypical butch haircut: the shaved sides with cheek-length combover look that your lesbionic freshman year English Composition professor, who was definitely named Andrea, definitely had. And of course she fights and dominates against nearly every villain she comes across.
Andra is only notable because she’s the only black character in the entire show until the last episode, when Teela and He-Man meet (retconned) King Grayskull. Evil-Lyn isn’t immune either. Embittered by the death of Skeletor, she blames “dangerous men” for causing all of the world’s problems. And, as Hollywood is wont to do, the show openly mocks and scorns Christianity, specifically Catholicism. [SPOILERS] There’s a subplot in the second episode where some of the old villains, having lost their sense of purpose and direction, become the leaders of a weird trans-humanist technology cult. Triklops, wearing red and black vestments, a stole, and an oddly-shaped hat, performs an initiation ritual (before Teela and Andra crash it) where an Eternian pilgrim drinks from a chalice filled with black nanobot goop that changes him into a cyborg. Along the way, he delivers a supercilious oration about the weakness and corruption of the flesh that may or may not have been ripped out of Matthew 26:41, leads a self-indulgent “Glory Be” inspired chant, and a collect, before concluding “in the name of robotics, automation, and of the holy sprocket.” The very obvious Catholic symbolism, combined with the cult behavior, and of course, the villainy, make it very clear what the writers think about the Church.
Also, there’s no He-Man. The puff pieces written about the show make a lot of noise about how the show is “LITERALLY all about He-Man,” how he is a major part of the plot and even shows up in flashbacks, but that’s misleading. He shows up briefly in the first episode, fights Skeletor, and dies. He appears in two flashbacks, one in episode 2 (for about 5 seconds) and one in episode 3. The other times he appears as a facsimile made by a bad guy to fight the good guys, the first as a robot and the second as a hallucination that fights Teela. And those crazy action sequences from the teaser trailer that got everyone so hyped up? Yeah, most of that is fake robot He-Man. Prince Adam only appears in the first episode, at the end of the fourth, and the fifth. That’s it.
But the problems run deeper than character models. Revelation stripped away the lighthearted look and feel of the original Masters of the Universe series in order to make something dark and serious. In doing so they did what all woke projects do: they broke down everything that made the original series so lasting.
The first indications of this are present in the first episode [SPOILERS]. Skeletor besieges Castle Grayskull, where the Sorceress about him constantly failing, but he responds by saying his failures were leading to a final victory, which is jarringly out of character but also a strong hint at the show’s direction, if the voice of Mark Hamill wasn’t already a clue. As much as I like Hamill’s voice work, it’s genuinely out of place. The whole point of Skeletor was that for reasons either of circumstance or failure, he wasn’t that good at being a villain. So a threatening, sinister villain is more than a little off-putting.
It’s clear the writers tried to inherit some semblance of the humor of the original series, but the “jokes” are framed within the seriousness of the plot, so they don’t land. The original series had corny jokes but at least they fit. They were natural, subtle even, just little tidbits in the plot that were good for a chuckle. In the reboot, they’re just forced. Also, they’re not funny jokes. There are three or four in the first episode alone that take way too long to develop for no payoff whatsoever. I won’t share them all, but i will share the worst line of heroic dialogue line I have ever heard. In the flashback at the beginning of episode 3, He-Man and Teela are bound up on a ship with Mer-Man and Skeletor. The shot opens on the ship, with Jolly Roger waving in the wind and He-Man says “It makes sense that you resorted to piracy, Skeletor, because your face is on their flag.” The rest of the dialogue in the flashback is stilted and melodramatic, obviously set up for the transition to the present, when an incredulous Andra asks “did he seriously say that?” This one sequence, specifically that tiny moment of complete disconnect from the heroic past, perfectly encapsulates Revelation’s, and all of woke media’s, biggest problem.
Revelation does everything it possibly can to disconnect the main characters, and the viewer, from the world of the original series. The show is saturated with lore but it constantly, deliberately throws you in and out of it. During the second episode, the Sorceress explains the lore behind the Power Sword, how the one sword is actually two swords, one light half and one dark half, and that the two halves exist in the dimensions of Preternia (basically the Fortunate Isles of Eternia), and Subternia (the underworld). But then Andra gasps and says “am I crazy or are they sending us to Heaven and Hell?” This otherwise unnoticeable colloquialism break sticks out like a sore thumb in this instance because Andra’s fourth wall-breaking disconnect ruins the seriousness of the lore. It’s made even worse by Teela’s bitter dismissal of the quest. And this pattern keeps repeating. The characters’ (especially Teela’s) complete dismissal of the world around them totally disconnects the viewer from the lore. Nothing sums this thematic deconstruction more than the following line from episode 2 [SPOILERS]. Teela and Andra return from Snake Mountain and give the chalice to the old lady (Evil-Lyn in disguise), which prompts the old lady to challenge the two to take the cup to Castle Grayskull, asking if Teela wondered what she left behind. Teela snaps back:
“I did find what I was looking for from Snake Mountain. A reminder of why we failed. When you go looking for it, there’s always something to blindly fight against. But what were we ever fighting for? Stories, Lies? I prefer something more tangible.”
*looks at Andra*
It’s utterly jarring, but more than that, it’s aggressive, and undeniably aimed at the original. Teela turns the original series on its head. She demands some kind of philosophical meaning from a universe designed to sell toys. The writers, in Teela’s voice, are deconstructing the MOTU world so they can inject their own views into it. And it seems as if they’re patting themselves on the back for doing it.
All the writers of Revelation had to do was not mess with the formula of the original series. Instead they killed off main characters, made others useless, and tore down the world He-Man fans had built up for almost 40 years. They made something dark just for the sake of being dark. They demanded realism and maturity from a whimsical fantasy designed to sell toys to children. Then when challenged by the fans, the creator of the show callously denigrated them for being fans. Masters of the Universe: Revelation is not a sequel, it’s a subversion. It does what all woke Leftist reboots do: put subservience to ideology ahead of faithfulness to the original work, and then expect to be respected like the original because it’s got similar trim. But you can’t expect what you don’t deserve. The only thing Revelation deserves is to have the scorn with which it regarded fans thrown back in its face. It hasn’t gotten nearly enough of it.