SUNDAY MUSINGS - MYP MOTU FTW

There is a particular sort of nostalgia that becomes increasingly dangerous the older you get. It is the nostalgia that tells you that something was better simply because you were smaller when you encountered it. The past becomes an enchanted kingdom, every memory sharpened by distance, and the things that once existed primarily to sell you plastic toys somehow become sacred texts. This is particularly true of Masters of the Universe, a franchise which, when examined with the cold, merciless eye of adulthood, was essentially a collection of extraordinarily imaginative action figures, a few dozen pages of mini-comic mythology and a syndicated animated series which was required to feature the toys while also pretending that it was not primarily there to make you want to buy them.

And yet, somehow, it worked.

The original Masters of the Universe* cartoon remains one of those remarkable pieces of childhood alchemy where the limitations of production became part of the magic. Eternia was a place of impossible contradictions. A medieval castle stood beside a futuristic space fortress. A barbarian warrior rode a giant tiger while being supported by a man with a laser gun, a cyborg with a mechanical neck and a floating wizard who had apparently wandered in from an entirely different franchise. Skeletor was a demonic sorcerer, but he also lived in a giant snake and occasionally employed a fisman. The entire thing should have collapsed under the weight of its own nonsense. Instead, it created a world where nonsense was the governing principle and everything was therefore perfectly logical. The 1980s series was not particularly interested in explaining Eternia. It did not need to. The planet simply existed. The ancient ruins were ancient because they looked ancient. The technology was advanced because it had glowing lights. The magic was magic because someone waved a staff and shouted. The world was assembled from fragments of fantasy, science fiction, mythology, pulp adventure and whatever happened to be in the toy catalogue that week. The genius of the original was not in its consistency but in its confidence. It threw everything into the same pot and never once seemed embarrassed by the result.

And then, in 2002, someone looked at all of this and apparently decided that what Masters of the Universe needed was an actual history. The 2002 reboot, produced by Mike Young Productions, arrived into a very different world from the one that had produced the original cartoon. Animation had changed. The audience had changed. The expectations surrounding fantasy storytelling had changed. This was the age of The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Star Wars prequels and increasingly elaborate animated action series. A new Masters of the Universe could no longer simply have He-Man fight Skeletor over the latest thing Skeletor wanted to steal. It needed a mythology, a history. It needed a reason for Eternia to be the way it was. And, in many ways, the reboot delivered exactly that.

The 2002 series understood that the most interesting thing about He-Man is not necessarily He-Man himself. He-Man is the conclusion of a story. Prince Adam picks up the sword, says the magic words, becomes the most powerful man in the universe and then goes off to punch the forces of evil. The more interesting question is what came before. What was Eternia before Skeletor? Who were the ancient heroes? Why does Castle Grayskull exist? What is the relationship between magic and technology? Why are there so many strange species, cultures and civilisations scattered across this planet? What happened to the old world? The reboot was willing to tackle those questions, if not provide concrete answers.

It opened with a history The Council of Elders. The war waged by Keldor. The transformation of a powerful, ambitious sorcerer into Skeletor. It gave us King Grayskull as a genuine historical figure rather than merely a name attached to an ancient relic. It gave Eternia a past which felt like a past, filled with civilisations that had risen and fallen long before Adam was even born. The ancient world was not simply a collection of convenient ruins waiting for the heroes to explore. It was the foundation upon which the present had been built. This was one of the great strengths it had, where the 1980s cartoon gave us a world of extraordinary things. The 2002 cartoon began to tell us why those things were there.

The Sorceress became more than a woman in a bird suit and occasionally appeared to explain the plot. Teela was given an identity and a destiny that connected her directly to the mythology of Eternia. Man-At-Arms was not simply the bloke who made things for He-Man but was an engineer, a warrior and one of the most important figures in the political and technological structure of the kingdom. King Randor became a character rather than simply the man who sat on the throne. Even Skeletor benefited from the reboot's willingness to give him a history. Keldor was not simply a bad man who had been cursed into becoming a skull-faced wizard. He was someone with ambition, charisma and a relationship with the world he would eventually attempt to destroy. The show also understood that the Masters themselves were more interesting when they were allowed to be people. The relationship between Adam and Duncan, between Randor and his family, gave the series a sense of emotional continuity that the original had rarely needed. The characters were still recognisable, but they had more weight. He-Man could still lift a mountain, but Adam had to deal with being a young man suddenly handed an impossible responsibility. Teela was not simply the female member of the team. She was a warrior with a personal history, a complicated relationship with the Sorceress and a destiny that the series was clearly building towards.

Even the villains benefited enormously from this approach. Skeletor was still Skeletor, naturally. He still had the skull, the laugh and the general attitude of a man who had been told he could not have something and had decided to conquer an entire planet in response. But the reboot gave him a sense of menace that the original series had often been unable to maintain because every episode had to reset itself at the end. His followers were not simply a collection of colourful villains standing around waiting for the inevitable defeat. They were a warband. They had different agendas, different relationships with Skeletor and different reasons for remaining in his service.

The series was also remarkably good at making Eternia feel larger. The original cartoon had given us Eternia as a series of locations. There was Castle Grayskull, Snake Mountain, the Royal Palace and then whatever desert, jungle, mountain or mysterious ruin the plot required that week. The reboot began to connect those places. The world had geography. It had different cultures. It had ancient conflicts and political tensions. The Snake Men were not merely another group of villains who happened to arrive after Skeletor had been defeated. They were a buried civilisation with their own history, their own ambitions and their own connection to Eternia's past.

The strange thing about the 1980s cartoon was that it constantly hinted at a world much bigger than the episodes were able to show us. There were references to ancient warriors, lost civilisations, distant worlds and powerful beings, but the story would generally return to the status quo by the end of the twenty-two minutes. The 2002 series looked at those hints and started pulling on the threads. It was a better world. But it was not always a better-looking world.

The 2002 series was technically more sophisticated. The characters moved better. The action was more dynamic. The animation was sharper, more fluid and more suited to the demands of a modern action cartoon. It had all the visual language of the early 2000s, with angular character designs, exaggerated anatomy and a certain amount of anime influence that had become almost unavoidable by that point. But the original Filmation series had beautiful painted backgrounds. There was a warmth to them. A texture. A slightly dreamlike quality that made Eternia feel like a place that existed somewhere just beyond the television screen. The backgrounds had a strange, storybook quality. The colours could be flat, the animation limited and the reuse of assets obvious, but the world itself often looked as though it had been lifted from the pages of a fantasy illustration. The castles, deserts and forests had an atmosphere that the cleaner, more polished 2002 series sometimes struggled to reproduce. The reboot gave us more world, but sometimes the original gave us more atmosphere.

That is perhaps the central tension between the two series. The 1980s cartoon was a dream of a world. The 2002 cartoon was an attempt to build one. While the second approach is intellectually satisfying, there is something to be said for the dream. The original Eternia could be anything. It was a place where a haunted castle could sit beside a laser cannon and nobody needed to explain the arrangement. The 2002 series began to impose rules. It gave us history, continuity and consequences. It made the world more coherent, but coherence can sometimes be the enemy of wonder. Once you explain everything, some of the mystery inevitably disappears.

The toyline, however, was where the 2002 reboot became particularly fascinating. The Four Horsemen were given the task of reimagining the Masters of the Universe characters for a new generation, and the results were, in many cases, absolutely magnificent. The 2002 figures took the basic silhouettes of the original toys and pushed them into something more detailed, more muscular and more aggressively sculpted. Skeletor became more imposing. Beast Man became more animalistic. Trap Jaw looked like a genuine mechanical monstrosity. Mer-Man became an enormous, armoured aquatic warrior. Teela finally looked like someone who could plausibly stand in a battlefield rather than someone who had wandered in from a particularly muscular version of a fantasy aerobics video. The figures were still recognisably Masters of the Universe, but they were no longer simply reproductions of the 1980s designs.

That was the great success of the line, where it understood that a reboot should not merely copy the past but instead reinterpret it. The original figures had been simple, bold and wonderfully toyetic. The new figures were more detailed and more characterful. They looked like the same characters viewed through the lens of a different era. The line introduced new characters and expanded the visual vocabulary of Eternia. The vehicles and playsets attempted to create a more coherent world around the characters rather than simply offering another brightly coloured object for them to stand beside. And yet, the line also demonstrated the dangers of trying to sell a mythology to a toy market. The 2002 Masters of the Universe line was, in some respects, a collector's dream trapped inside a children's toy aisle.

The sculpts were often superb. The designs were ambitious. The line had an enormous amount of variety. But the business decisions surrounding it were not always as strong as the creative work. The line produced a large number of variant He-Man and Skeletor figures while many other characters were either delayed, difficult to find or never made at all. The very thing that made the line interesting to collectors,the expanded world and the wider cast, was not always reflected in the distribution strategy. You could have a new mythology, a richer cast and a television series desperate to introduce new characters, but if the shops were full of another version of He-Man, then the child walking down the toy aisle was still being offered the same character again. This was a particularly unfortunate problem because the 2002 designs were often at their best when they were allowed to move beyond the most obvious characters.

The new He-Man was good. The new Skeletor was good. But the real joy of the line was seeing what the Four Horsemen could do with characters who had previously been little more than a colour scheme and a gimmick. The 2002 version of Trap Jaw was a spectacular reinterpretation. Beast Man looked like a creature. Tri-Klops was transformed into something genuinely threatening. The line had the opportunity to build an entire modern Masters of the Universe universe, and at times it felt as though the toyline was being dragged backwards towards the safest possible versions of the two characters everyone already knew. It was also a line that perhaps arrived at the wrong moment.

The early 2000s were a difficult time for traditional action figures. The market was changing. Video games were becoming increasingly dominant. Boys' action figures were competing with increasingly sophisticated electronic entertainment. The toy industry was not simply selling a character anymore; it was selling a franchise ecosystem. Masters of the Universe was attempting to revive a brand whose original cultural moment had passed, and it was doing so with a toyline that was, ironically, often more sophisticated and expensive-looking than the toys that had made the original franchise famous. There is a strange tragedy to the 2002 era. The cartoon was trying to build a world. The toyline was trying to sell that world. The toys were often excellent. The show was often excellent. The comics expanded the mythology even further. And yet all of these parts never quite aligned into the unstoppable machine that Mattel had clearly hoped to create.

The reboot was also perhaps a little too serious in places. I do not mean that it was grimdark. It was still a cartoon about a man in a furry harness fighting a blue skeleton who lived in a giant skull. But the 2002 series sometimes seemed to be apologising for the sillier aspects of Masters of the Universe. It wanted us to know that this was serious fantasy. It wanted us to understand the mythology. It wanted to convince us that Eternia was a real place. The original series never needed to convince us of that.

The original cartoon simply assumed that Eternia was real and got on with the business of having a man with a giant battle-axe fight a lobster. There is an argument that the 2002 reboot made Masters of the Universe better. There is also an argument that it made it less magical. I think both arguments are true. The 2002 series was better at storytelling. It was better at character development. It was better at history, mythology and world-building. It took the fragments of Eternia and began arranging them into a genuine setting. It looked at the original franchise and saw not merely a collection of toys but the skeleton of an entire fantasy universe.

But the 1980s series had something that cannot simply be recreated through better writing or more detailed animation, a particular visual soul. Those painted backgrounds, those strange landscapes, those ancient ruins and those enormous, empty spaces gave the original series a feeling of timelessness. The world looked as though it had been waiting for the characters to arrive. The 2002 series was more dynamic, but the original often felt more mysterious. The reboot gave us a map. The original gave us a dream.

It was not a failure because it was bad. In many ways, it was a failure because it was attempting to do something extremely difficult. It was trying to take a franchise whose original appeal was based on limitless imagination and give it a defined mythology without strangling the imagination that made it special in the first place. Sometimes it succeeded spectacularly. The history of Keldor. The rise of Skeletor. King Grayskull. The Snake Men**. Teela's destiny. The relationship between Adam and the people around him. The sense that Eternia had existed long before the first episode and would continue to exist after the credits rolled.

Sometimes it struggled. The visual style could feel too much of its era. The storytelling occasionally became overly serious. The toyline made too many trips back to the well of He-Man and Skeletor when the wider universe was crying out to be explored. And the very mythology that made the reboot so compelling sometimes removed the strange, dreamlike looseness that had made the original cartoon so enchanting. When I was younger, I wanted more He-Man. I wanted more monsters, more castles, more vehicles and more battles. The 2002 reboot gave me something I did not realise I had been waiting for. It looked behind the curtain. It showed me what Eternia might have been before Adam picked up the sword. It suggested that the universe was filled with stories that had nothing to do with He-Man at all.

And that, ultimately, is what makes the 2002 era so interesting. It understood that Masters of the Universe was bigger than its central character. The 1980s series gave us the greatest toybox in the history of fantasy. The 2002 reboot began trying to build a world inside that toybox. It did not always succeed. It did not last long enough. It never quite found the audience it needed. Its toyline was often magnificent but commercially mismanaged, and its animation for all its technical strengths, lacked the strange, painted magic of its predecessor. Eternia felt like it was becoming something more than merely a place where He-Man and Skeletor fought forever but instead a real world with history, with ruins beneath the ruins where every ancient statue suggested another story.

And perhaps that is why, more than twenty years later, the 2002 Masters of the Universe reboot still feels like one of the great missed opportunities of modern fantasy animation***. It had the characters. It had the mythology. It had the toys. It had the ambition. All it really needed was a little more time, a little more confidence in its stranger ideas and perhaps a few more hand-painted backgrounds to remind us that, for all the history we had just been given, Eternia was still supposed to be a place of magic, and beneath the polished animation, the detailed action figures and the carefully constructed mythology, I still miss the old painted forests. The best fantasy worlds are not the ones that explain everything. Instead they are the ones that leave just enough unexplained for a child to believe that the story continues after the television is switched off.

*there's a tabletop game now. I can talk about MOTU here.

** King Hiss ate a person on screen.

***See also the 2010s Thundercats. I'm still bitter about how that was treated.