She-ra: A blast from the past

I've wanted to talk about the He-Man/She-ra franchise for a while now and this seems like as good an excuse as any, so this review will be a little more wide ranging than my usual talks.

He-Man is a media franchise that debuted in 1982 with the "Masters of the Universe" toy line by Mattel. He-Man was originally intended to capitalize on the recent success of Arnold Schwarzenegger's hit movie "Conan the Barbarian" by creating a G-rated toy franchise inspired by the Conan movies. Initially just a movie tie-in, the toy line proved wildly successful and the "Masters of the Universe" franchise spun out to include comics, books, several animated series, and a full length motion picture. The creator of the toy, Roger Sweet always denied that He-Man was based on Conan but Conan Properties International did sue Mattel over the similarities.

He-Man was created right around the time when toy companies were beginning to revise their business models. Hasbro, Mattel's largest competitor was working in 1982 to rebrand G.I. Joe and create the explosively popular Transformers franchise by adding new concepts: story and character.

In the late 1970s, both Mattel and Hasbro had come to the same conclusion: Children buy toys because of the perceived personality of the toy. They make friends with the toy, go on adventures with the toy, and tell themselves stories about the toy. The toy companies realized that the key to serious sales was to get the children to bond with the character behind the toy and let their imagination do the rest. So these companies (more or less independently) launched a full media blitz to promote their toy lines and convince children that they wanted to go on adventures with their characters.

While G.I Joe as a toy goes back to the 1950s, for twenty years it was purely a doll with no characteristics or associated history. G.I. Joe was just a generic soldier and kids were expected to come up with the stories of his adventures themselves. He had no explicit backstory or personality, he was just a World War 2 G.I. soldier.

You can see similar traits (or lack there of) with the modern Barbie doll. Barbie as a character has no personality or history. She has had innumerable careers but by and large Barbie is simply a blank slate on which girls are expected to project themselves. Even her modern media empire has been restricted to Barbie being a generic protagonist who is loved by her friends but never experiencing any unique challenges that could define who she is as a character by her response to the challenge. Barbie is just the pretty popular girl that young girls are expected to want to be.

Mattel has declined to give Barbie personality or history because one person can't be all things to all people. Thus when the original G.I. Joe toy developed a backstory and personality, he was fragmented into many different characters. G.I. Joe became the name of a team rather than a specific character and the individual Joes were given many different names, attributes and backstories such as Duke, Sergeant Slaughter, Snake Eyes, and Shipwreck. Having such a large cast of characters ensured that there would always be at least one that any given child could identify with.

Barbie, being a girls toy, was denied this complexity due to the restrictions of gender roles at the time. Girl children in the early and mid seventies were less encouraged to break out of the confines of gender expectations and Barbie reflects this. Barbie is conventionally attractive but has no strong personality, goals or motivations. Future modifications to the Barbie line over the years were based on permitting the doll to have careers more than a personality or a backstory comparable to boy toy lines.

Hasbro's Transformer and G.I. Joe lines came about as the result of a partnership between Hasbro and Marvel Comics. Marvel contracted some of its creative staff to Habsro to create character descriptions and story ideas which were released in comic form, added as bios to the toys, or later made into cartoons.

Mattel had a similar idea for "Masters of the Universe." However, where Hasbro went to the Marvel corporation, Mattel recruited for chief writer of the franchise a young J. Michael Straczynski, probably the greatest television writer you've never heard of. Straczynski was the original head writer for the "Real Ghostbusters" series who later achieved fame creating the Babylon 5 franchise in addition to writing Marvel's "Thor" screenplay and the screenplay for the upcoming 2020 "Godzilla versus Kong." Straczynski was joined by Paul Dini and Brynne Stephens, who would later write the best episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, Larry DiTillio future story editor of "Transformers: Beast Wars" and David Wise later the head writer for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

He-Man went through many revisions becoming family friendlier and moving away from his barbarian roots. The first version of He-Man had him as a lone barbarian wanderer, battling his way across a vast planet that had been destroyed in some unspecified catastrophe. By the time of the cartoon He-Man had been pacified to the point where he never actually hit anyone with his sword and relied on punches and body throws to overpower his enemies.

Mattel clearly bought the creative talent it needed to set about making America fall in love with He-Man. So why isn't the He-Man franchise remembered as fondly as comparable franchises such as G.I. Joe and Transformers?

Well at the time He-Man was as successful as the others but the series has become dated in ways that the constantly reinventing and rebooting G.I. Joe and Transformer franchises could work their ways around. Over the decades, we've had goofy transformers, dark and edgy transformers, transformers stranded on a strange world in a desperate fight to survive, and transformers hanging out with Japanese school children. The Transformer franchise concept is simple: transforming robots that fight other transforming robots. Within that framework, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted with it but the core concept was unique enough that any offshoot was identifiable as Transformers.

He-Man struggled with this. Although there is a lot of interesting mythos behind the franchise, mostly what is remembered about He-Man is his awesome (if extremely goofy) catchphrase: "By the power of Greyskull! I have the power!" which transforms him into super strong and mostly naked He-Man. The phrase has aged poorly as have the general designs of He-Man as a character. Both the catchphrase and the design remain nostalgically pleasing to fans and can't be gotten rid of without causing old fans to be upset, but they're also too goofy to easily attract new fans. The notable gay overtones from the 80s show also made the content difficult to adapt, as young men in the nineties and 2000s tended to be overly sensitive to any suggestion of homosexuality in their interests.

I think the chief thing I remember about the Masters of the Universe franchise was how expansive and imaginative the world was. You had magic, you had robots, you had starships, you had dragons. It was a really weird stew they cooked up but it was genuinely unique and not something you'd experience outside of the more fantasy oriented Star Wars "Tales of the Jedi" comic series. The episodes of the original Masters of the Universe were weak and unmemorable for the most part. The stakes in the stories were always low and the villains more comedic than threatening, but for a kid in the early eighties looking for sci-fi/fantasy adventure, it wasn't bad.

There have been two major attempts to bring back the He-Man franchise since the 1980s, a fairly goofy and short lived cartoon in the early 90s and a darker edgy cartoon in the early 2000s that ran for two seasons. The 2002 reboot was actually a success ratings wise but the toys weren't selling as well as Mattel expected and the reboot was canned.

There was an attempt at a live action movie in 1987 starting Dolph Lungrend from Rocky IV and Frank Langella. This movie suffers from 80s buget-itis since rather than taking place in the far more interesting world of Eternia, our characters are trapped in suburban New Jersey. This made it far cheaper to shoot but also far more forgettable as a movie. Frank Langella gives an outstanding performance but the movie is completely forgettable and it didn't accrue much of a cult following since it took so many liberties with the source material

Now getting back to She-ra. She-ra was produced about the same time as Masters of the Universe. She-ra, also know as Adora, was the twin sister of He-Man's secret identity Adam. She was stolen by the Evil Hordak as a baby and raised to be a captain in his army. He-Man finds her decades later and convinces her that the Horde is evil. She-ra abandons the Horde to join the great rebellion fighting to free her world from Hordak's army.

She-ra is clearly a distaff counterpart but, to be fair, she has an much more interesting back story than He-Man and a potentially darker plot line overall. Unlike He-Man who is a prince and the son of the ruler of his world, She-ra is a rebel and struggling not to lose a war against a far more powerful foe.

Much of the talent behind the original She-ra was the same as He-Man and for the time She-ra was an impressive example of action television targeting a female demographic. It may not seem very impressive today when we've become accustomed to Xena and Buffy the Vampire Slayer but in the 1980s there just wasn't any action series targeting girls. See, in the eighties and early nineties writers aiming at a young female demographic had a theory about conflict and this theory was: "Chicks don't dig conflict."

As a result of this misguided strategy you wound up with a lot of My Little Pony, Jem, and Rainbow Brite shows where the conflict was usually low stakes and the goal was to educate the enemy or make friends with him. In theory, this isn't a terrible idea but weak conflict makes for weak stories. If the villain can be easily shown the error of his ways simply by being friends with him or encouraging him to become a better person, then the entire plot resolution feels unearned and overblown. This pattern of story telling is likely attributable to the traditional role of women as the peacemakers. Most 1980s and early nineties female protagonist were expected to overcome foes by enduring their abuse and appealing to their better nature rather than openly standing up to them.

While not necessarily a bad idea in theory, this type of plot structure creates extremely passive protagonists. In these stories rather than the hero driving the plot, it's the villain who must make the choice to do better with the protagonist simply cheering him or her on.

Shows like She-ra were an abnormality in that they encouraged girls to imagine themselves as the active hero instead of the damsel in distress needing rescue or school-marm who just needs to appeal to the villain to make the right choice. You can kind of think of it as a rainbow colored proto-Xena.

She-ra is generally considered much less successful than He-Man but they both ran for two full seasons and essentially tied in that regard. Part of the reason for She-ra's perceived failure is that relative to He-Man the toys weren't selling very well, largely because of Mattel's insistence on marketing the toys as if they were Barbie accessories and assuming purchasers of She-ra toys wanted to brush their action figures hair, change their clothes, or imagine them dating. This was a common lapse in toy marketing at the time when marketers frequently approached the female demographic as if trying to appeal to some strange alien culture. Consequentially, Mattel largely sabotaged itself with the She-ra line. Despite all of this however the She-ra and He-Man toy lines long outlived their respective shows with full toy reboots in 2002 and 2017 and they remain one of Mattel's flagship lines.

Since going off the air, He-Man and She-ra have attracted a considered LGBTQ following. Notably, the production company behind both shows (Fillimation) was something of a refuge for gay actors and talent in the 1980s. The voice of She-ra, Melendy Britt, came out as gay some years after the series went off the air. Both animated series are now associated with gay subculture which may well have provided some role in its decline though this appears to becoming less of an issue with the increasing acceptance of LBGTQ in modern America.

Having touched on all that, let's discuss the 2018 She-ra reboot.

Adora is once again a Horde soldier who, after discovering the evil done by her people, abandons the Horde and finds a magic sword which allows her to transform into She-ra, a legendary warrior.

The first thing I noticed about this series was the animation shares a lot in common with Netflix's Voltron reboot. It also stole a few voice actors from that series. The animation isn't spectacular but it is bright and colorful.

He-Man is missing from this reboot which allows the main character to stand on her own rather than constantly being compared to another potentially more popular character.

Adora is a generally likeable if slightly generic female protagonist who meets friends and fights the evil Horde. The first thing I'd tell you if you were thinking of watching this show is that unlike the He-Man and Thundercats reboots, this is unapologetically a children's show. It is a show that deals with war and death and suffering, but all of these things are filtered through G rated violence and kept abstract. The two factions seem more like rival sports teams rather than two armies engaged in a life or death struggle.

Now to be clear there is absolutely nothing wrong with a lighthearted take on the material. Most entertainment these days has been infected with Generation X and Millennial nihilism and gritty violence. A simple children's show is actually refreshing. However owing to the much more sophisticated average child today compared to 20 years ago, I suspect this series will appeal to younger children who don't yet appreciate the lapses in logic the show ignores.

The show takes the war and filters it through a lens which children can relate to. One of the best ideas in the series is Catra, a generic villain in the original show who is now Adora's best friend whom she abandoned when she defected from the Horde. The show lingers heavily on their relationship and how betrayed Catra feels. Catra is like a diet-Zuko from Avatar the Last Airbender. She might be redeemed or she might not but the arc is certainly fun to follow. There is also significant gay subtext in Catra and She-ra's relationship which the show has yet to explore in any kind of depth and given the target demographic, may not explore.

ShadowWeaver was Hordak's sorceress in the original show and here has been promoted to his right hand woman. ShadowWeaver raised Catra and Adora and she's an abusive caregiver archetype, somewhat like Granny Goodness from DC comics. The show is actually quite creative in showing how ShadowWeaver manipulates her charges with both gas-lighting and physical abuse. The show may shy away from the real horrors of war but it captures the horrors of abusive parents very well.

Hordak is largely kept in the background. He's neither as silly as his Filimation incarnation nor as intimidating as in the 2002 He-Man reboot. Thus far he's had little effect on the plot and his goals are unknown.

The show's most impressive offering is in its character design and world building. In addition to being refreshingly colorful, the show embraces many different races, body types, and life styles with open arms. The show never has an episode where it reminds the viewer that girls can be as good as boys. The show doesn't need to say it. The show demonstrates it constantly so anyone questioning that theory would be dismissed as an idiot. It's quite refreshing actually.

The show never takes the time to address the clearly gay characters in its cast. They're just here, they're queer, deal with it. The girls (and boys) have a variety of body types and skin colors. These aren't models, they're people. Adora comes much closer to the 'perfect' body type but even she looks like an actual sixteen year old girl rather than the much more mature and often sexualized designs animated shows usually use for teenagers. The female characters don't conform to some impossible standard, they have curves, they have flaws. Just compare the 1980s show

where the only difference between the female character designs is hair color and clothes, to this

Is the show worth watching?

Well it depends on what you're looking for. It's not for me. It's too light and it's too childish, which is 100% fine. I am a man in his thirties and I am not the target demographic. I need a little more meat to be entertained but the show gave me a few laughs and made me root for the heroes a few times. That's about all that was asked for, and that's about all that was delivered. I really respect the show's overt shows of tolerance and acceptance and would recommend it to children on that basis alone.

She-ra is different. I haven't seen anything like this in a while and anyone who goes off in a different direction and makes it work is worthy of respect.

I still think fondly of the Masters of the Universe franchise and I'm hoping for a more adult gritty reboot of He-Man in the future. There's a ton of interesting material in Eternia to tap, it just needs the right creative team to make it a hit.