 Should have known that watching a couple good Netflix movies in a row was too good to be true. They had to find a way to course correct. Enter, Masters of the Universe, Revelation. I had more requests to review these five episodes than anything else I think I've done on the channel in a long time. So at least three requests. Hey, I know I'm no spring chicken, but I was actually a bit too young when He-Man first started airing on TV, although I did catch it as a wee child. I remember almost nothing about the show other than He-Man himself and his pet tiger thing, but my mom still remembers very clearly to this day when she took me to church as a wee one. I was probably six years old and during the sermon or whatever the hell it was, I stood up in front of everyone in the congregation and yelled, by the power of grayskull, I have the power! I was trying to do like a six-year-old Adam voice. I think I nailed it. This also took me a little longer to get to because I didn't know it existed. I don't I don't know how people find this shit. I never saw anything about it. I heard nothing about it. It doesn't help that Kevin Smith, I believe, wrote it and you know directed. I don't really like his work. I've done this show on and off for almost a decade, maybe a decade now, and I don't think I've ever in the course of the ten years talked about a single Kevin Smith movie. That's that's the level of appreciation I have for his films. Not that they're all bad. I like a couple of them. Dogma and Jane, Simon, Bob are you know, they're fun characters. I just for the amount of movies he's put out, he has like a 10% hit rate with me. So yeah, I don't see him showing up on my radar much. I don't know if I said this yet, but we're gonna be doing spoilers right away here. So if you're looking for a clean review of this show, I think they're out already. I think people have said their mind and you probably have a good indication whether you'll like it or not. For me, I did not like this show. It absolutely misses the mark. I have no idea who this audience was for. I really don't. I think it was just for Kevin Smith's own personal headcanon. I think I'm gonna begin with just stating why. What was the point of this? So we have He-Man, right? Adam is the name of the character, which is very special to me as that's also the name I have. What a weird run around sentence. Anyway, the original show came out in the 80s. I assume there's been other interpretations over the years, but I think for the most part people look back on the original fondly and by people, I mean men in their 40s or a little bit younger like myself. Not much. Not much. I assume the ladies like the show too. There was stuff to like there, I imagine. I really don't know. I don't remember anything about it, like I said, other than He-Man himself, which is weird because it's the only thing Kevin Smith seems to have no interest in. The titular character. To be fair, this show is called Masters of the Universe. It's not called He-Man, Masters of the Universe. So there's a little bit of misdirection there, I think, for some people going in. But that's the trend now, right? Soverting expectations. That's the thing that people enjoy, right? Why do people keep doing this? No one likes it. Or I shouldn't say no one. That's not fair. But I'd say a large swath of people do not enjoy this bullshit writing tactic of teasing the promise of a fun fan favorite coming back, a return to form, only to shit all over the person, dismiss them entirely, or completely change their character. We've seen this with Luke Skywalker, of course. We saw this with Joel and Last of Us 2. Yeah, a lot of people knew he wasn't going to make it through the game, but to ice him out so early on was, again, just why? Why? Marvel's done this a few times with the villains of their stories, and I don't think anybody's really ever satisfied when they do that. It's just such a shitty writing tactic that really doesn't benefit anyone at the end of the day. So we have five episodes of Masters of the Universe. He-Man shows up for maybe a grand total of six minutes, I'd say. He has a few minutes in the first episode, none in the second, except for maybe a- There's a couple flashbacks throughout these five episodes of He-Man. Now, maybe I'm jumping too far ahead. What happened? Adam, what happened to He-Man? Well, he died. He died within the first episode. He saved the day, kind of, from Skeletor, who's trying to absorb all of the magic in Eternia? I think is what the place is called, Eternia? T-Man ends up getting kind of hoodwinked into killing him, but in the process puts a sword through and it unlocks the Eternia Chamber of Magic or something. I don't know. The whole show's nonsense. There's dinosaurs over here. There's computer programs that are taking over people's bodies on that side. Nothing's really- It doesn't matter. You know, it's based off a kid's toy line, so just nonsense all around. Nonsense all around is fine if you're having some fun with it, but man, the direction Kevin Smith takes us in is a very moody, very brooding, depressing affair. So, Adam, if He-Man's dead right away, then who's the protagonist? I don't know what that voice is that I'm doing, but I'm clearly disrespecting you for the question. Tila. Tila's the main character. She's from the original. I found out after looking it up, because again, adult Adam doesn't retain the childhood memories of He-Man. I guess she was there. Now you know she is, because she's very much the focus of the show. It's up to her and her friend. I don't know her name, but she's basically the character model from Mortal Kombat. Jax's daughter. Don't remember her name either, but it's her. She's that character. They set out on a quest to save the day, save all of Eternia or whatever this place is called, which leads them to recruiting some band of brothers from old. You have washouts. You have people that have gone into hiding. Just a lot of different flavors. None of them are particularly happy. They're all kind of a miserable bunch. Evil Lynn is probably the most interesting character voiced by Lena Headey. There's a star studded cast here. A lot of good actors in this as a matter of fact. Sir Michelle Geller lends her voice to the main character, which, you know, Sir Michelle Geller, she's bubbly, she's fun, she's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. None of that personality shines through in this role. Now, Lena is very much down on her lock, down on herself, just pissed off all around, because she found out that Adam has been lying to her all these years and that he was, in fact, he-man the whole time. He didn't tell her. And he doesn't really do a good job of convincing her like why he didn't. He's just kind of a lame duck all around. And I know Adam, he-man, he's just the squeaky clean guy. It was never really exciting, but here he's even a little bit more pathetic, I think, which is nice. I can only imagine the sheer quantity of videos being pumped out on the daily by man-children mad about this show. They have a right to their opinion. I mean, I don't think I'd put out daily content on it, but I think Run Rant is enough to say that this was a huge disappointment. Granted, this is only the first half of, I believe, a two-parter, and, you know, we know Adam's gonna come back. He did come back at the end, although he died again in episode five. So they killed him. He went to the Garden of Eden, Heaven-ish type of a place. They find out he can get out of there whenever he wants. So he does, comes back to fight, and he's instantly killed again. Just straight up murdered again. He didn't do anything, even. He tried to do the catchphrase, and he couldn't finish it. He's like, I have the pump. Dad, womp, womp, womp. Womp, womp, womp. Womp, womp, womp, womp, womp, womp, womp. Listen, I have two kids, a 12-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy. I watched this show by myself. How pathetic is that? I wanted to first watch an episode to see if it's something Connor would enjoy. I knew Olivia wouldn't be into it. She was watching She-Ra. She's into that. She doesn't want to see some ripply and half-naked dude saving the day that the girls aren't interested in that. My son, however, would eat that up. So I watched it, and when he dies in the first episode, I'm like, oh, God, Connor's gonna hate this shit. He likes shows with the strong females. We watched a lot of seasons of My Little Pony. Friendship is magic. Olivia loved that show, and I thought it was actually kind of good for a while. I really freaking like Korra. I know a lot of people crap on that, but damn good four seasons if you ask me. In season three of Korra, that's up there with Avatar the Last Airbender, in my opinion. Here in He-Man, it feels like a stripped-down version of Korra as far as animation goes, with the characters and everything. It just doesn't have a lot of life to it. It's colorful, but when you're talking about a property from back in the 80s, why not ham it up a bit? Give it an old-school aesthetic. Do something original with the show. It just feels like so many of their shitty Netflix animated series now. Speaking of My Little Pony, imagine if they brought that show back in 20 years after a long hiatus, and they title it My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, Colon Forever, or whatever bullshit title they stream onto it, and they give you the trailer and the promise that Rainbow Dash and the Ganger back, but then when the show starts up, she's instantly like killed. They like stab a horn through her and she dies. And then we instead turn focus to one of the cutie mark crusaders. I watched too many seasons of this show. I'm a man. Hi, sorry to interrupt, but I'm in the middle of editing. Look at this handsome devil. And I realized I made a grave error. When referring to My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, I said Rainbow Dash multiple times as the main protagonist when in fact we all know it's Twilight Sparkle. Rainbow Dash is just one of her many good friends in the series. So I want to apologize to the My Little Pony community. And I realized the grave error, the grave mistake I've made, and I wanted to correct it instantly as soon as I could. So with that said, let's carry on with the Masters of the Universe review. Sorry for your time. Thank you. Think of the outrage though. Think about pissed and disappointed people would be and they have every right to be. What a stupid idea. I'm not even against the thought that they kill He-Man off. But do it on like the fifth episode. Make that the cliffhanger. It's been so many years since we've seen this character. So many people don't know who any of these characters are and they're just being introduced for the first time. Or they're like me and they've completely forgotten. So you can't just quickly throw us back into the fold and then kill off people or change their characters entirely. Let us warm up to them again. Let us see how awesome He-Man is in more than a five second fight scene. I mean, He-Man's like slow and lumbering even when he is fighting here. He's so lame. And then by the fourth or fifth episode you can kill him off and make it a cliffhanger and then we try to get him back, you know, on the next part for a few episodes. The main theme song is pretty baller. Kids still say baller. I don't think anybody says baller. But it's good. I enjoyed that when it was there. Actions and mixed bag. For the most part it's serviceable. Occasionally you get those bizarre CG animated fight scenes that don't look good still. Overall, Masters of the Universe was a huge miss. Another wasted opportunity to bring back a classic for the new generation while also giving fans of the original series something to latch on to again. Because I have to imagine there's a lot of adults that wanted to watch this with their boy and instead they got some garbage thrown at them and it has to be a huge letdown. Thankfully, I was just a tiny bit too little to really get the investment in He-Man. Although my friend, I believe my cousin actually had the Castle Grey skull and I thought that was bad ass. I think I had a He-Man action figure. That's about as far as I went. I was more of a G.I. Joe guy. Those films. Those films. Those films. Man. I didn't see Snake, guys. So don't ask.