Last night I looked at the four minicomics that were made for the He-Man toyline and their introduction to this new direction for the franchise. Tonight we see how the newspaper comic strips handled the journey to Primus. For those of you not interested in the toys’ pack-in minicomics I’ll summarize the situation: With the Masters Of The Universe line down, Mattel didn’t want to give up the property so they switched things up. Where the original was about a magical world with a dash of science (that science fiction factor soon bringing not just vehicles and lasers but robots and androids) the new He-Man line would be science fiction with a hint of fantasy, mostly coming from He-Man and Skeletor. He-Man the toyline is basically Masters Of The Universe the years backwards.
While the toyline and accompanying cartoon, titled The New Adventures Of He-Man (the name the “He-Man” toys are referred to as since the first cartoon, He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe, often leads to the Masters Of The Universe toyline being referred to as “the He-Man toys”), failed to capture the same level of attention, I think both were actually pretty good. I’ll talk about the cartoon another time and I only bought one figure out of curiosity, the original version of He-Man (which is how I got the first issue of the minicomics) which may or may not be a Clutter Report in the future. Tonight we’re talking about the newspaper comics, but the most interesting thing is that this was the last newspaper comic. For whatever reason Mattel didn’t continue the strip, so this is the last story we’ll be reviewing. Does the strip end well? What was their take on He-Man’s adventures on Primus? Let’s take one last trip into the newspapers to find out as He-Man meets…
Shazam! And Quality Versus Adaptation
My introduction to Captain Marvel, the original, was in the Filmation Shazam! television series, both the live-action and the cartoon teamed with Filmation’s Hero High as the Kids Super Power Hour With Shazam!. Done right, Billy Batson is wish fulfillment for kids, as they get to do all the fun kids stuff and all the fun grown-up stuff while getting to have cool superpowers and still have a normal life from time to time. Also, Billy got to have his own radio show, which was big at the time of his first appearance in Whiz Comics #2.
Of course when the New 52 came around (and even before then as the reign of DiDio began) the kind and optimistic Billy was replaced by a smart mouthed punk kid with a heart of gold, and from what I’ve heard Geoff Johns refuses to let anyone fix this mistake. Also, interpretations like Young Justice seems to play up the “kid in a man’s body”, like it was a superhero interpretation of Tom Hanks’ Big. I discussed the problems with that when the upcoming Shazam movie was still in development hell and we thought we’d never get one. The problem isn’t whether or not the story would be good but whether it would be a good adaptation of the source material. Of course if you don’t care about the source material, like the base concept, and don’t have the imagination or guts to create something original you’ll do anything you want and the heck with the fans. We’ve seen it time and again in Hollywood, and Professor Geek goes into why this is not cool in this commentary.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on March 27, 2019 in DC Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged Billy Batson, Captain Marvel (DC Comics), commentary, Shazam (character).
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