Thanks for posting that. That's awesome. It's hard for me to tell at this resolution, but are there marks on the actors' faces and foreheads for guidelines?
This version of the show has a female showrunner and is aimed at young girls, so naturally the concern shaping the costume design is what would be practical for a woman of action to wear, not what would turn on adult men watching a children's show. Especially considering that this version of Adora is a teenager.
Which one of them was Orko? And more's the point, I'm guessing just the three central figures were the actors. I'm surprised they bothered to have two people doing Skeletor AND He-Man. The builds of the toy figures are effectively identical, no? And I'm guessing the Actress did duty as the Sorceress and whatever other female characters were needed. Unless they just keyframed those the old-fashioned way. mark
Maybe for rotoscope scenes of He-Man fighting Skeletor. Although as I said, the same rotoscope sequences were retraced for multiple different characters in different shows, so the photo is kind of confusing. I do believe there were some rotoscoped sequences for Teela and the Sorceress, though some of them could've been recycled from earlier shows. Teela was a reuse of the Princess Aura character model from Filmation's Flash Gordon, with an up hairdo and a less skimpy costume. (Ironically, Aura was played by Melendy Britt, later the voice of She-Ra.)
Teela's costume was like a bathing suit. So was Adora in She-Ra when she had that red outfit on. Just not practical. Same for He-Man looking like some bondage dude.
Filmation's Flash Gordon started in 1979 as a TV movie that was much more lushly animated and rather more adult than their usual stuff -- Flash and Dale meet during a WWII battle in Europe, Ming is allied with Hitler, there's lethal violence, the heroes' clothes are ripped alluringly, etc. -- and was also remarkably faithful to the original comic strips. But unfortunately, legal conflicts with Dino DeLaurentiis's 1980 live-action Flash Gordon movie (I think) prevented the far superior Filmation movie from getting released until a single, never-repeated showing on prime-time TV in 1982, and it's never been released on home video in the US, though a version ripped from a Japanese DVD release is on YouTube. Anyway, the first season of the TV series (which is on home video) is basically a reworked and expanded version of the movie, starting in medias res after the WWII stuff and redrawing Flash, Dale, and Zarkov in their later Mongo costumes throughout so that it would be easier to reuse animation and intermix movie scenes with TV scenes, since the plot was stretched out with a lot of episodic side adventures between the main plot points of the movie, so that it plays out much like the Flash Gordon movie serials of the 1930s. Surprisingly, they kept Aura's really skimpy bikini-like outfit rather than redrawing her in something more modest. Anyway, because it incorporates so much footage and reused/retraced animation sequences from the movie, it's far more richly animated than most of Filmation's shows. It recasts most of the voices from the movie aside from Flash (Robert Ridgely), Dale (Diane Pershing), and Aura (Melendy Britt), so that it could have a smaller ensemble; Alan Oppenheimer (as Zarkov and Ming), Allan Melvin (as Thun and Vultan), and Lou Scheimer (as the announcer and bit parts) rounded out the TV cast, with Oppenheimer using the exact same voice for Ming that he'd later use for Skeletor. Unfortunately, for the second season, NBC insisted on dumbing it down more and playing up comedy at the expense of adventure, dropping the serialized format and doing two half-length episodes per show, as well as adding "Gremlin the Dragon" as a comedy sidekick who dominated the show. It was a shadow of its former self, let alone of the brilliant and sadly buried movie version.
Yes, along with fellow King Features Syndicate comic strip characters the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician. I never liked that version as much.
I don't like the animation or She-Ra's voice but I'll check it out. It can't be worse than the new Thundercats.
The art style. It doesn't appeal to me. I think all the characters looked better in the original series. Surely the idea of a remake is to improve things. That's why I don't get this and Thundercats. They both looked much cooler in their original incarnations.
But there is obviously no objective way to define that when it comes to something like art and design. Different people have different tastes, and different generations have different standards and expectations. The look of the original show was consistent with the norms of its generation, and the look of this show is consistent with the norms of the current generation. This is a children's show, after all, made for children today, not the people who were children 35 years ago.
Ah, you are referring to the character design. Animation is the technique used to give static images the appearance of being "animated".