Masters of the Universe, Gender, and Cautious Optimism

He-Man has always been about gender.

There are lots of different stories about how the Masters of the Universe toyline came to be, how much credit is owed to Roger Sweet or Mark Taylor or another of He-Man's several dads, but there are a few clear threads: Mattel, a company most notable for conquering the girls' toy market with Barbie, wanted to branch out into the boys' aisle. In particular, they wanted to compete with Kenner and the Star Wars line. Whether they failed to secure the Conan the Barbarian license or just decided not to make a children's toy line based on an R-rated film and instead filed some numbers off and made their own thing, they were inspired by the fantasy art of Frank Frazetta and Arnold Schwarzenegger's bodybuilder physique to make a figure whose musclebound proportions were every bit as unrealistic as Barbie's 36-18-33 figure. He-Man was a Charles Atlas who could kick sand in the face of scrawny Luke Skywalker.

The original story concepts for Masters of the Universe were simplistic, drawing from sword-and-sorcrery and post-apocalypse tropes—a muscular barbarian receives weapons of magic and a lost civilization's technology from a goddess to fight against an evil warlock for dominance of a mysterious castle. But the story evolved, first through the work done by Paul Kupperberg, Gary Cohn, and others at DC when they partnered with Mattel to produce the second wave of minicomics and the first comic book miniseries. These introduced He-Man's secret identity of Prince Adam, who puts on an act in order to hide his true self, particularly from his royal parents. 

Then the cowboy Reagan administration, thumbing its nose at parents' watchdog groups like Action for Children's Television (led, coincidentally I'm sure, by a woman, Peggy Charren), deregulated the FCC and paved the way for thirty-minute toy commercials like G.I. Joe, Transformers, and of course, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The FILMation version of He-Man cemented most of the lore: weak, effete Prince Adam and his cowardly talking pet cat become the heroic He-Man and fight the evil-but-ineffectual Skeletor and his colorful henchmen. Every male character is muscular and wears furry briefs, most of the female characters wear fancied-up swimsuits, everyone is expected to show thigh. 

And you don't exactly have to be Frederic Wertham listening to the Village People to pick up on the queer subtext, intentional or otherwise, in the character concepts and designs. Prince Adam dresses in pastel tights and has a secret he can only share with a few people, among them an older bachelor with a moustache and a reclusive woman who dresses exclusively in feathers. When he says the magic words, a phallic object gives him a full magical girl transformation into a tanned leather-daddy in a harness. His best friend and only love interest is the butch daughter of a single father who is the most competent warrior in the series and wants to be judged based on her skills rather than her age or gender. She's constantly, in not so many words, frustrated that Prince Adam is less of a man than she is. 

In The Toys that Made Us, one of the people involved with the Masters of the Universe franchise blamed the introduction of She-Ra for the line's decline and demise, as if "feminizing" the brand somehow emasculated He-Man. But toylines don't last forever, and by 1985, the He-Man cartoon was in reruns, the toyline was sharing aisle space with Transformers, ThunderCats, and a dozen other toylines that it had paved the way for, the five-year-olds who'd been around for the start of the line were aging out, and the well of ideas was running low. The Horde was introduced to invigorate the brand in '85, then the Snake Men in '86, and by the time that the Motion Picture was ready to flop its way into and out of cinemas, it was pretty clear that He-Man was done. If anything, She-Ra gave He-Man a few more years of relevance, since it gave kids a reason to buy those Horde figures that might otherwise have just cluttered up the clearance shelves. 

And now, almost thirty years later, a new Masters of the Universe movie is making its way into cinemas, with nary a Cannon in sight. My reaction to this film has consistently been "I will believe it exists when I am sitting in the theater," because I remember when news about the forthcoming Masters of the Universe movie was being published in Wizard Magazine. John Woo was going to direct, then McG, then David Goyer. At one point, Noah Centineo was confirmed for the lead role. Two different He-Man cartoons, a She-Ra cartoon, and at least four He-Man toylines (depending on how broadly you want to define them) have happened since they started working on this film. This is my Half-Life 3. 

As more and more news has come out, as we're actually at the trailer stage, I have never been able to get myself above "cautiously optimistic." The Barbie movie was fantastic, and it's clear that Mattel wants to recapture that lightning in a bottle, but He-Man is simply not as big a figure as Barbie (he's only 5.5", that's a full six inches shorter). The fact that there have been so many short-lived attempts to reinvent He-Man while Barbie remains a cornerstone of the toy aisle is an illustration that He-Man is not the same level of cultural icon. 

She-Ra probably could get there, but for some reason they made like five Princesses of Power toys total and yes we are all going to be salty about this until they fix it.

I think there's a lot of ways that He-Man as a character, and a Masters of the Universe movie as a project, could be used to critique toxic masculinity and present a healthy kind of masculine strength. It's something my pal Eric talked about in his newsletter earlier this week, and it's something that I think we saw a lot in the old FILMation cartoon, if not always intentionally. The wariness of watchdog groups (and the limited budget and rotoscope library) meant that FILMation's staff were always wary about the level of violence in their program. While He-Man often got criticized for its violence, you'll never see a character hitting another living thing. More often, the violence is in the form of grappling and throws, or against nonliving rock monsters and robots. When He-Man throws a punch at a character, it's framed as him hitting the screen: you never see a fist connect with a face or a body. That was deliberate. Those limitations also meant finding more creative ways to solve violent conflicts. The violence in He-Man often has more in common with something like Scooby-Doo than an action movie, with characters getting tied up or trapped in nets.  

And then there's He-Man as a character, who spends multiple episodes (of a show not known for its deep writing) grappling with the stress of his dual identity, the way that playing weak and irresponsible as Prince Adam makes his friends respect him less, the way he wants his father's approval, the way he wishes he could just be out about who he really is and know that the people in his life would be proud of him, and his identity wouldn't put them in further danger. 

(Though the usual superhero secret identity thing doesn't hold quite as much water here; Adam's parents are the literal king and queen of the planet, they are the immediate first targets for any villain, they are already in constant danger, but tropes is tropes).

Eric sourced some interesting quotes from Nicholas Gallantzine about He-Man and gender in that newsletter piece, and I think those provide some interesting context for the screenshot that's been putting right-wing chuds in a tizzy since the trailer released. Some saw the "He/Him" nameplate as further evidence of Hollywood Wokeness ruining their childhoods—now He-Man has pronouns?—others saw a cheeky wink at the audience about his secret identity. Still others saw a joke about that same "Woke" culture, that Adam's life in our world is emasculating, that he's supposed to be He-Man, not "he/him."

Personally, I saw that his name was "Adam Glenn," which means they gave him his mom's last name because his mom is canonically from Earth, and I thought that was neat.  

But in a film that would cast Jared Leto in the main supporting role, despite everything, despite it being a role loaded with so much makeup and CGI that it could have been anyone, I kind of suspect that the emasculation thing is right. I mean, it's literally a nameplate positioning him as a mama's boy on top of having to put his pronouns out there, like you couldn't tell from his muscles. 

Gallantzine's comments, though, make me hopeful that there's more to it. This is a different version of Adam than the ones we've seen before; one who's been assigned a role that he knows doesn't fit him, who knows he doesn't belong where he is, and who has known that since he was a child. What seems like certainty about his identity to him comes across as fantasy to others, and we see society literally telling him he has to conform to fit the box he's been assigned. 

It's not exactly I Saw the TV Glow, but it also doesn't take much to see an allegory there. 

There's one other complicating factor, and again, there's only so much we can glean from the trailer, but this much is explicit: We see Eternos being attacked. We hear Queen Marlena tell Adam that she's sending him away to another world so that he won't be found, so that he'll be safe. It's very Superman, for sure (cribbing from the Man of Steel is a MOTU tradition going back to 1982), but boy, it sure is similar to another character in the mythos. 

 

Oh right, Skeletor and Hordak attacked the royal family, and Hordak managed to abduct one of the infant twins to raise on another world, where she didn't belong and had to be constantly gaslit and brainwashed to keep from knowing who she was supposed to be. 

Maybe they'll address this, but knowing the complex tangle that the She-Ra license tends to be for no good reason, probably not. Still, there's something about taking some of the defining characteristics of She-Ra's concept and giving them back to her brother.  

I don't know. I hope the movie is good. The trailer didn't convince me, but it didn't give me any, like, serious ick. I just wish they'd done something about Leto. Would really be nice to have a He-Man movie without a sex pest involved.