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Evil lyn he man movie12/3/2023 The heroic He-Man is all that stands in Skeletor’s way, but an errant skirmish between He-Man and Skeletor’s forces leads our hero and a few companions into accidentally going through a portal that takes them to earth. By squatting in this castle, Skeletor will soon be imparted with all of the power of the universe due to some gallingly lazy plot devices and become the tyrannical ruler of everything. The vile sorcerer Skeletor has captured a castle called Grey Skull on the planet Eternia, which is narcissistically situated in the center of the universe. The film starts promisingly enough, basically doing a straight lift of the expository background of the He-Man franchise. Even with such a fun roster it’s easy to see why the film tanked as its story was an infantile thicket of narrative non-sequitors, with plot developments that strained even the most nimble notions of logic while also being agonizingly banal. It stared Dolph Lundgren as He-Man, who was himself something of a redundancy in the era of Schwarzenegger, and Frank Langella, who was one of the original Draculas back in the 70s, as the evil Skeletor. Released in 1987 and directed by Gary Goddard, who to be frank has done very little else of significance before or after, and tittled Masters Of The Universe, the film was a critical and commercial failure. Conditions were right to take a crack at adapting the character. Which is to say, not a lot to go on should someone decide to make a movie out of it.Īnd yet someone did! Back in the mid 80s the He-Man franchise was, somehow, at the height of something akin to relevancy and the booming toy to film reciprocal cycle was too at its apotheosis. It had very little substance and honestly about as much sparkle and flash. From its comic book inception and toy line to more ambitious iterations, it was a franchise egregiously dressed in the most basic common denominators of ephemeral fantasy acumen and gossamer. A beefy guy with a sword, fighting a bumbling skeleton with even more bumbling minions. That they have evolved in one form or another into somewhat viable franchise in various modern mediums speaks to their ingenuity and appeal. Transformers, GI Joe, Ninja Turtles, all of these iconic franchise that still have an indelible grip on the nostalgia of simpler times operated under similar conditions and objectives. The advent and ensuing economic scalability of video games becoming a key past time for youth that further developed in the 80s and early 90s largely exterminated this industry, but for a while it was quite the ride. If you’re not familiar with the mostly dormant and obsolete He-Man franchise of the 80s, you might be interested to learn that that decade spawned a number of mini media empires spanning comics, TV, and film for the sole purpose of selling toys back when such a thing was a financially lucrative market. I’m glad I did, and I’m sorry I feel compelled to tell you about it, but here we are. There it was just staring at me, waiting for me to watch it one more time. However I revisited the Pandora’s box of a film a couple days ago when it suspiciously popped into my Prime queue, of winch I was exhuming its algorithmically insane depths. Since first watching it repeatedly in my early formative years, thusly considered a more excusable time to have no taste in such things, I always had an inkling that I was enjoying this film more than I should have been, what with it being objectively terrible. I think all of this just makes me enjoy it more. It’s ridiculous, inane, cheesy, largely incoherent, and a flimsy excuse to sell toys. Therefore it is with deep resignation, regret, and a much more potent dose of embarrassment than I usually care to display in public, that in actuality, I think I like the He-Man movie. All of us understand, with few if any caveats, that the He-Man move is bad. In fact it’s one of the few things that nearly everyone, despite the epistemological fissures and ecosystems of toxic fandom ripping the internet to shreds, can actually agree on. It’s not like there’s a litigious discourse or lively online partisanship regarding the matter.
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