FULL DISCLOSURE BEFORE YOU GET UP MY BUTT! No, I don’t have a Netflix account and I haven’t seen the show. I have no job and my dad wouldn’t use it, so we can’t afford it. So no, I can’t comment on the OVERALL quality of the show as a cartoon. HOWEVER, between all the reviews, articles, and clips I’ve managed to look into since recovering enough from my surgery to care I am confident I know enough of what it does as an adaptation to make this article. Consider this a semi-review until circumstances allow me to see the whole thing. Okay? Okay!
With that out of the way, when I announced I wanted to talk about Masters Of The Universe: Revelation when I returned I didn’t think it would be the show itself, just the trailers and information we had at that point. I didn’t know at the time when it would premiere because that’s hardly been my priority the past couple of months. I had hernias to get rid of, and yes that is plural. So if I’m late to the party at least I can refresh the donuts.
Further disclosure: While I am not a die-hard fan I have been a huge fan of the He-Man/She-Ra franchise from its earliest incarnation. I got action figures before the cartoon debuted and had the mini-comics to guide me through the world. In fact I was disappointed that Filmation didn’t borrow more from Gary Cohn’s stories, giving us the secret identity angle introduced in DC’s miniseries and Superman crossovers back in the 1980s, dropping the split swords because that gimmick had been used in their previous show Blackstar (and yet they kept Marlena being an Earth astronaut who flew through a portal and landed on an alien planet, which is also part of John Blackstar’s origin) with the Power Sword and Star Sword weapons of that series merging into the Powerstar. I’m too far into this franchise to be called a casual fan I’m not exactly the biggest He-Fan out there.
So if you weren’t here when the show was announced you may think I was thrilled to hear that a new Masters Of The Universe show was coming and that Kevin Smith, someone who supposedly understands geek culture, was attached to work on it. Sorry, no. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt but I had reservations about Revelation, due to the history of how poorly nostalgic properties are treated by Hollywood. Make no mistake, Smith is part of the Hollywood culture. His movies may be independent (or were), he may have run a comic store, and he made have had a podcast called Fatman On Batman, but he is not a fan of the series. That would be fine, except the two people he trusted to keep him on track were a Netflix executive and the Mattel executive who worked on the more recent MOTU comics. You know, the ones where Teela tells Adam they were never friends and trashes Mekaneck for no good reason, Orko turned evil, and the Sorceress was beheaded sometime after everyone regained their memories. So already we’re off to a bad start, and apparently we aren’t doing so well at the start of the race either.
