There is a rule in the science fiction and fantasy milieu – or at least there ought to be – that these types of properties should never, ever set any of the action in our own solar system. With the notable exception of Alien: Earth, which cleverly reframes the franchise’s xenomorphs as little more than fluffy house cats compared with humanity’s own talent for self-destruction, it is almost always a terrible idea. Who remembers Galactica 1980, the early-80s offshoot of Battlestar Galactica that lasted all of one season? Or the later seasons of Lexx, which took one of television’s most glorious space operas and promptly shrank it by parking large chunks of the action in this solar system.
And then there was the 1987 big-screen adaptation of Masters of the Universe, which somehow decided to send Nordic lunk Dolph Lundgren to LA before audiences had even finished adjusting to the idea of him being He-Man at all – as if the true stuff of epic fantasy was not skull-faced castles, cosmic sorcery and men built like exploded anatomy textbooks, but shopping malls, car parks and the vague promise of a California food court.
This was a bad idea for obvious reasons. If you’ve ever watched the early-80s He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, you’ll be well aware that it may be the most psychedelic children’s programme ever smuggled on to afternoon television without a warning label. In one episode, He-Man descends into a surreal underworld of floating platforms, warped gravity and abstract peril, where spatial logic collapses entirely. In another, Skeletor rules a nightmarish shared dreamworld, in which everyone on the planet is trapped, as a sort of bony, mad god. Eternia wasn’t a place so much as a collective hallucination. This is why Lundgren and company are remembered less as mythic heroes than as deeply confused intergalactic exchange students, wandering suburban California in search of a bus stop back to fantasy.
Perhaps it’s this misguided, abstract sense of loss that has inspired Travis Knight’s forthcoming reboot, the first trailer for which dropped online this week. Here, Nicholas Galitzine’s Prince Adam has somehow been exiled (again) to Earth, where he works in a boring office and dreams of a return to Eternia, if only he can get his hands on the famed Power Sword of Castle Grayskull. Remember that? Yes, it’s the sharp and shiny thing that transforms you into He-Man if you’re able to utter the inspirational legend: “By the power of Grayskull, I have the power!”
The new trailer is very, very keen to show us that all the staples of the original TV show are in place, even if our hero is initially bogged down in paper-pushing purgatory. Idris Elba is Man-At-Arms, Alison Brie is Evil-Lyn, and the luminous Morena Baccarin will play the Sorceress of Castle Grayskull. Jared Leto is Skeletor, and they’ve somehow drafted in Kristen Wiig to voice Roboto, a character even I’m struggling to remember from the original show.
It suggests that Knight and his team understand how fragile this property is now, and are responding by piling on familiar names, lore and signifiers. It’s a trailer that desperately wants you to know that all this stuff is important, which is perhaps unsurprising given that He-Man’s most recent high-profile appearances have attracted a distinctly mixed response.
Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Kevin Smith’s well-meaning 2021 small-screen reimagining, was criticised for sidelining the Prince of Eternia altogether in favour of sidekick Teela, while loading the mythology with a level of emotional gravity and metatextual soul-searching that sat uneasily with a franchise whose original appeal lay in its blunt, neon-coloured certainty. The result was a reminder that He-Man, after more than 40 years of existence, remains a paper-thin property that collapses the moment it starts asking questions it was never designed to answer.
The original show worked thanks to its gloriously overblown theme music and its sheer determination to revel in boys’-own excess: enormous muscles, clear moral lines, villains who cackled, and problems that could be solved by hitting them very hard. The minute successor shows tried to apologise for the fact that its central motifs were a magic sword and a volume problem, the whole thing began to fold in on itself.
Knight is said to be a huge fan of the original Masters of the Universe, and it’s hard to imagine anyone more intriguing than the film-maker behind Kubo and the Two Strings to breathe new life into He-Man. And yet there’s a nagging sense here that adding flesh, texture and emotional shading to a property whose most iconic image is a villain who is quite literally made of bones might not be the most natural fit. Masters of the Universe has always thrived on abstraction – on archetypes, silhouettes and the blunt force of myth – and the more you insist on rounding it out, grounding it, or explaining how any of it works, the more you risk discovering that there isn’t actually very much there to explain.
