He-Man And Misunderstanding Nostalgia

I have not seen Masters Of The Universe as my income still remains $0.00. Maybe when it hits free streaming I’ll get the chance. I’ve heard mixed reviews even from people usually on the same side of modern media discussion. Some say it’s good, some say it’s garbage, and some are in the middle. For once it’s not split among the usual lines. Not that it matters since the movie itself failed to make back its budget and marketing on opening weekend, which is usually all the studios care about. Which is why it’s strange when Amazon’s MGM is hoping to make it back in merchandising and streaming over the long term. It might be cope but at least it breaks the “opening night or bust” trend.

There’s another argument out there due to how poorly it did, the idea that nostalgia is dead and nobody wants to see this stuff anymore.

Look, I get it. Studios are too afraid to take a risk on new IP, even though YouTubers are starting to show you can do that with three low-budget horror movies based on YouTube content or made by creators with fresh ideas doing well in the box office without an overblown budget, and the current crop of directors and producers and screenwriters couldn’t care less about old stuff. Studios want the big names rather than take a risk on some new guy who might actually care about the show, comic, game, or whatever to do it properly. Studios don’t pay attention so the directors slap something famous onto the movie they really want to make and the studios aren’t paying attention. THAT is the problem. I can point to plenty of old stuff to prove that. Humans really don’t change THAT much without force.

Do these older properties justice and the fans will come, as will new fans. If that wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t have been a series of Star Trek movies, or a Next Generation or anything else existing long enough to find a new audience. There wouldn’t have been a big enough market and the first Motion Picture would have flopped so much that Spock wouldn’t have been the only thing Paramount was searching for. According to financial tracking site The Numbers, Star Trek: The Motion Picture had a budget of $35,000,000, and made $11,926,421 on opening weekend, with $139,000,000 by the time it was done nationally an internationally. Masters Of The Universe could make a case for their future if they get as lucky before it leaves theaters. It was considered good enough to make Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.

Remember the last time we actually liked Teela? I do.

Let’s see its numbers. With a production budget of $12,000,000, it made $14,347,221 on opening weekend alone, $95,800,000 by the time it was done. Looking at the total movie franchise numbers, as far as 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, even movies that didn’t do well on opening weekend managed to make their money back. Top Gun: Maverick from 2022, to go outside of Trek, had $177,000,000 for a budget and made $126,707,459 on opening weekend alone. That’s only four years prior to this writing. While there haven’t been any more Star Trek movies since 2016, the shows have not done well. Starfleet Academy did so badly they canceled it after the second season, and that’s only because it was already recorded and most of the editing done due to how they do seasons these days. The second season hasn’t aired yet.

It’s not that fans tired of Star Trek. Fans don’t do that. Fans like new things when done right. Pluto TV has multiple streaming channels just for Star Trek; one for the original series, one for TNG, one for Deep Space Nine, and one for Voyager, with the other shows airing on their Pluto SciFi, and the shows I listed still airing on Heroes And Icons on television while the original series airs on MeTV and the animated series on MeTV Toons. Comics, novels, and video games are still coming out. If people were sick of Star Trek, that stuff wouldn’t be coming out, with praise for anything that ties in to pre-Abrams or pre-Kurtzman Trek if it’s good. There’s a streaming channel on a couple of freestreaming services (the official term is FAST–Free Ad Supported Television, but I find “freestream”, Sling’s free channels, a better term) that’s just the original He-Man & The Masters Of The Universe. They keep making this stuff because people talk about this stuff.

The old stuff. Or old-ish if you’re talking Doctor Who.

We heard that show has been put out of hiatus, with fans both classic and reboot only saying it was put out of its misery. Or ours, as I went over the other day. People wanted more Doctor Who. Big Finish still puts out a lot of material. There is a huge list of fan films just covering the new Who style that started with the 2005. There are channels dedicated or were dedicated just to discuss the lore of the whole franchise. The problem was that Chris Chibnall and Russell T. Davies both produced bad product whether by ego, agenda, or both. Ncuti Gatwa telling critics to “touch grass” was part of a growing legacy of actors attacking the longtime fans upset that what they loved out of the show was being drained out as showrunners and directors chased their “cool kids”, only for them to not care about the genre in the first place, or have in their minds what Doctor Who is and not looking to see it was allegedly completely altered to what they wanted to see, when they were used to getting it elsewhere. The replacements for classic fans never appeared.

Here’s Teela about to take one for the team. Literally.

What hurt Masters Of The Universe wasn’t that nostalgia is dead. You couldn’t get the older shows if that were the case. It’s that the new stewards didn’t care what made it good. Netflix’s collaboration with Kevin Smith already made fans mad with the focus on Teela as He-Man was killed off, then went nuts because Adam didn’t call the power right, and even fans who were happy with the adultifiying of a 1980s kids show (which the 2003 series never had to do and is probably better than Filmation’s original series due to embracing the nostalgia while trying to be new and edgy without forgetting the “kids” part) hated what Revelation did. I don’t even remember the follow-up’s name because nobody talks about it like a separate show, and they don’t mention the actual kids CG reimagine at all.

With all that in mind came the director and Teela actress both proclaiming the new movie was about fighting “toxic masculinity”, a warning sign that one-sided politics would come into play. That means immediately looking at the history of the other nostalgic sequels, reboots, and reimaginings and seeing a pattern where one-sided political perspectives are the order of the day, writers are scared to have the women struggle like the men, and even supplanting men in their own franchise, making them look weak and useless in the process because they only way they feel they can raise up one group is by tearing down another and replacing them. So when you use one of the buzzwords like “toxic masculinity” or “modern audience”, assumptions are made based on history. At least the actors haven’t made attacks on the source material, but at this point even good natured and well intended ribbing gets taken that way due to how others act when it comes to what they’re adapting. Even Travis Knight’s previous work, Bumblebee, wasn’t carrying him despite being the only really praised live-action Transformers movie due to breaking out one of the trigger terms.

The first trailer, the one that focused on the humor, probably didn’t help. Ever since Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, Marvel Studios creators keep trying–and failing–to mimic his style. Where Whedon knows when to be humorous to break and when to be serious, writers and directors that followed broke the drama by inserting quips that Spider-Man would have groaned at, the so-called “Marvel humor”. You only get one chance at a first impression and that had me concerned. I can’t even find proof I covered it with a quick site search. The second one was more action-oriented but that was the second one. It should have been the first one.

Unfortunately we ended up with this Teela.

If anything these two reasons are probably why fans stayed away, having been burned or faked out in the past. The trailer focuses on the usual lead while the actual movie does a “bait-and-switch” in some fans eyes by focusing on the new replacement character they really wanted to write for whatever reason. It might not even be political, but the creator wanting their original character do not steal to be the new one in charge, like Rey or Ahsoka. Kathleen Kennedy wanted her character, Filoni wanted his creation, and that’s probably the only real battle that was going on prior to her leaving Lucasfilm. At some point you lose trust, and the fact that the usual fan critics that have shown themselves genuine fans and commentators can’t seem to agree on anything besides Jared Leto finally putting in a good performance is probably not helping, either, except for fans who are probably more curious to see which of their heroes is right…and were probably going to go see it anyway, let’s be honest.

This is why these nostalgic properties are failing. Directors doing an end run around the studios by slapping famous names on completely original works is nothing new, but it’s intensified in recent years as the studios are too afraid to take the same risks that got them where they are. Showrunners adding to lore not for the sake of the story but for their own egos. Alex Kurtzman outright admitted to wanting to use the brand to send a message rather than building on what came before. Producers literally telling anyone working on the project to ignore the source material. And a desire to change things to chase a new audience when some of these properties have been around since the 1960s and earlier that somehow managed to attract new audiences each year even when nothing new was being made on TV or in the movies through reruns and licenced media like comics, novels, and video games. Fans brought them to the next generation, but not the new stuff wearing the skin suit of their old favorites.

When Teela could be captured and STILL be badass!

There is a reason all of these YouTube discussion channels are doing so well, and not because they hate the new stuff because it’s new or hitting the bigotry shield Hollywood is now using to attempt to protect themselves from criticism rather than putting in the effort to do it right. It’s because they’re fans of the old material who want to see and promote more of what they like, but they’re not being targeted. It’s not even the casual fans Hollywood’s after, because they would come along anyway if you’re smart enough not to play exclusively to the fans and chase the casuals off. It’s worked fine until 2020, when they slowly stopped doing that. They’re trying to change the demographic to the “cool kids” who were never into that stuff in the first place to get the praise from the people THEY think matter. It’s the high school clique all over again, but those of us who are loyal to a brand for what they liked about it and not the Brand itself find the bullies are taking their entertainment and tossing it down the river and laughing at us again. Only this time the bullies have the legal right to do so…and we have our right not to support their takes. Instead we go back to the old stuff, make our own stuff, and are forced to be relieved our old favorites are off to the glue factory because the horse is already dead. (Although I plan a commentary questioning that as well.)

There are reasons those old stories made us happy and want to share it with the new generation who might also enjoy it. Those reasons are disappearing from the new product, and that’s what’s failing, not nostalgia but the lack of it in a bunch of soulless namesakes.