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.
Responding To The Chibnall Who Essay Backlash
I need to get more pictures of the 13th Doctor in my image library. The same two over and over are getting old.
One of the things reviewers and commentators get to hear when they discuss something they haven’t seen, whether they’re judging from the marketing or other reviewers who braved the media they already expected to hate that confirmed everything they were expecting. This is especially true when you know it’s going to be a terrible adaptation regardless of the quality of the work (*ahem*). It’s gotten to the point where these defenders of “you can’t review it until you see it” don’t always practice what they preach. They’ve already made up their minds that ANY rebuke of something that’s been reworked to cater to their preferences is racistsexisthomophobicbigotry and you will so not convince them otherwise that you shouldn’t have even bothered saying something contrary to what they think. They don’t want to know WHY you don’t like it, they just don’t want to hear you put down something they love…while constantly putting down, trashing, and sometimes outright remaking something they hate and declaring it wasn’t “made for you”. That’s the essence of the “everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeee” crowd.
For example, before I went offline I brought you a five-hour essay by Jay Exci going over everything Chris Chibnall did wrong as showrunner for Doctor Who, which included things like unnecessary retcons, stories that make the heroes look like the baddies because going after the sociopolitical target of the day was more important, not giving Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor a personality to act with (that’s the 13th Doctor, not the actress–you work with what the script and director give you, even when it’s bupkis), and not really understanding the source material. Not to mention the butt-ugly control room that makes wish they went with the coral room of Davies. Yes, it’s that bad, and Chibnall was handing the best design in New Who and said “nah, I want a big honking crystal in the center that looks like a volcano died mid-eruption and a claustrophobic version of McGann’s pylons where you can barely get a good camera angle”. If you’re going to put your own mark on something, make sure you have the creativity and respect of the work you are now steward of to make it good. The video made the case that he didn’t.
So watch the original video before you watch the following video. I know its five hours but worth it, and will give you an edge over the protestors who clearly didn’t watch it at all before making rage rants that caused Exci to make this follow-up video (don’t worry, this one is just under 30 minutes) where he clarifies his previous critiques and pushes back against those who didn’t even watch it before saying it was garbage. Note that both contains profanity. I like to warn people because I don’t use it myself so it’s good to have a heads up in something I can’t edit for PG
Continue reading →
Tell others about the Spotlight:
Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on August 4, 2021 in Television Spotlight, web series and tagged Chris Chibnall, commentary, Doctor Who, The Thirteenth Doctor, video essay.
1 Comment