News He-Man anime series from Kevin Smith coming to Netflix

...Fine. I'll buy another comic.

 

New trailer:

Spoiler: plot point from the trailer

He-Man's sword being split down the middle feels like a sly nod to Blackstar, Filmation's earlier series that was something of a prototype for He-Man. In that series, there was a single sword of power and both the hero Blackstar and the villain Overlord had half of it.

 

Damn, beat me to it...

 

Doesn't that Zodac have the exact same skin tone as He-Man when he's He-Man? Not sure I'd call him black in Filmation.

The Power Sword was split in the original toy concept as well, with He-Man having one half and Skeletor the other. You could attach them to eachother and use them as a key to open the jawbridge on the Castle Greyskull playset.

 

That was a pretty cool trailer.

 

Kevin Smith himself breaking down the trailer:

 

Spoiler: Swordy spoiler

Maybe split back into the Sword Of Power and the Sword Of The Ancients?

They never revisited that particular idea.

 

Alternate title, Kevin Smith himself breaking down... and the trailer.

 

I did that error again and I read the comments on YouTube under the new trailer.

My God. "They sidekicked He-Man! They made the series about Teela! They will probably make her a lesbian! SJWs are ruining Hollywood! They made Adam a wimpy so a Strong Woman will help him! The men will be reduced to nitwit and wahmen will save eternia!!!"

I really, really want them to put in a mini moral lesson from He-Man where he says "Remember to be kind and respectful to each other and THAT WE ARE IN 2021 AND GROW UP!!!"

 

They're morons. Filmation was always liberal and inclusive, at least relative to the standards of its time. Filmation shows and their preachy sign-off messages shaped my values as a child as much as Star Trek did.

I mean, they're forgetting that Filmation did create a He-Man spinoff that featured strong female heroes with just one male sidekick dressed in a heart-themed outfit.

 

And technically in the 2002 series, since Skeletor has a sword with two halves.

 

Yeah, but “that was basically for a female target audience, right?”

Best response imo would be, well, Filmation had a rainbow logo decades before the term woke even existed.

 

It was for both male and female audiences. Filmation wanted shows with a broad appeal rather than an exclusionistic one. She-Ra was a female-focused show, but one that had the same level of action and adventure as He-Man and pitted She-Ra against villains created for the He-Man toy line. At the time, I was always struck by how much more gender-segregated the toys were compared to the cross-gender appeal of the actual show.

If anything, She-Ra was always more of a badass than He-Man. She fought Skeletor's ex-boss, who was a far bigger threat because he'd successfully conquered her world rather than constantly trying and failing like Skeletor; and her civilian identity Adora was the leader of the entire resistance, while Prince Adam was just a lazy, pampered layabout in the Scarlet Pimpernel/Zorro/Shadow/Batman tradition of foppish, dissolute secret identities. (Though I always wondered why Adora even bothered with a secret identity when she was just as much a target of the enemy in either identity. And why would the resistance even want Adora as a leader when she always disappeared in favor of She-Ra whenever a fight happened?)

"Woke" in its political sense has been used in the black community since the early 1960s, around the same time as Filmation's founding in 1962, but considerably predating its rainbow logo which debuted in 1983.

 

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! (And I hope Netflix deleted the real offensive comments).

 

It might just be but I much prefer character over gender, just write you characters well and more often or not your audiance will respond to that.

 

In the original Adam and He-Man had the same dimensions.

Huge boys with girl hair.

The only reason that no one recognized Adam as He-Man is if they were looking at his thighs all the time instead of his face.

Adam was shit at fighting?

Adam had no formal trailing as a warrior?

How is that possible?

Imagine that He-man is just as bad a fighter as Adam, but his magical reflexes are 5 times faster than Adam, and he's magically 5 times stronger than Adam.

He doesn't have to fight well, because everyone is moving in slow motion and comparatively as weak as a kitten.

Which is cheating.

OR

He-Man is given magical wisdom that teaches him to fight like Chuck from Chuck.

Which is also cheating, if Adam is on Auto Pilot while his body is almost killing people with out his guidance. Its also similar to Jedi giving over control to the force during lightsabre duels.

Teela on the other hand got up at 4 am every morning, did a ten mile run, and then combat trained until it was time to cook dinner for her father.

She earned it.

Everything Lex Luthor ever said about Superman.

Now...

Adam has a scrawny boy body.

Is he a teen?

He doen't look like He-Man, and even if he has all the theory down on sword play, dude looks too weak to lift a sword. Or at least a broad sword. Obviously as the heir and defender of the realm, he's going to have to know how to fight, but he'll be using lighter/smaller yet as deadly swords.

 

Well, that's the point -- to write female characters just as well as you write male characters, as opposed to the all-too-common practice (mercifully less common these days) of writing them far more one-dimensionally, or having a range of different male characters but only one token woman whose entire characterization is being "the girl."

He-Man suffered from that to an extent -- it only had a handful of female characters, Teela and Evil-Lyn most centrally with the Sorceress and Queen Marlena in supporting roles. It did a pretty good job making Teela more than just "the girl," to be a capable protagonist in her own right. But she was still the only female action character among the good guys, a lonely place to be. No surprise that the new show is trying to balance that a bit by adding that new character (well, present in the comics but new to the Filmation continuity).

 

When you mentioned how old shows treated women, the first thing that came to mind for me is Gilligan's Island. I've been watching it off and on on MeTV for a while now, and it's unbelievable how sexist the writing and treatment of Mrs. Howell, Mary Anne, and Ginger was. At times it's almost hard to watch now.

 

60s tv was teaching rebellion.

A guy was sexist, and then a girl called him a jerk.

All the woman watching now knew when and how to call sexist pigs, sexist pigs.

Basic brain washing.

 

I dunno. Certainly it was a different time with different expectations for how men and women should behave, but I'd say all three of those women were rich, strong characters in their own ways. Ginger may have been a sexpot, but she quickly transcended her initial Marilyn-clone persona to become smart, savvy, and calculating, very much owning her own sexuality and using it to her advantage rather than the men's. Mrs. Howell could be clueless and unable to see beyond her bubble of privilege, but she had a strength of character and dignity that helped maintain civility on the island. And Mary Ann was just about the most level-headed, sensible person on the island, in her grass-roots way. They were far more than just window dressing.

I'm thinking more in terms of shows that marginalize their female characters or fail to individualize them, neither of which was the case with Gilligan. Rather than having a single token female with a generic "female" personality, they had women making up nearly half the cast and all being as distinct and individual from each other as the men were.