Boys and girls, today we will be talking about the 1987 film, "Masters of the Universe". This was the live action movie version of the cartoon, "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe". If you happened to be a 10 year old boy in 1987 (which I was) this was the must see movie of the year. The "Academy" decided that "The Last Emperor" was the best film of 1987, but we've rarely been on the same page when it comes to movies.
In this film, He-Man and some of his friends have to travel across the universe to Earth. There they have to battle evil foes and local law enforcement. As an added challenge they must also stay clear of the razor sharp chin of a then 37 year old Courtney Cox. All of your favorites made an appearance in the film. There was "Gwildor", "Saurod", "Blade", "Karg", and "Carl the Janitor". I remember that they introduced so many new characters there was a special line of action figures just for the movie. Buying new toys and spending $3.50 for a movie ticket (a hefty sum back in those days) ensured that every cent of a kids allowance was spent on He-Man related items.
The best part of this movie was casting Dolph Lundgen as "He-Man". Dolph is a tall, blonde, muscular dude. It seemed like he was genetically engineered just to play this role. I bet it's the same laboratory they used to create Katherine Heigl with the one purpose of making horrible movies. Lundgren was perfect in his portrayal. He was handy enough with a sword and luckily the dialogue didn't require any heavy lifting. The one change the movie made to "He-Man" was changing his hairstyle. In the cartoon he sported a "Dorothy Hamill". For the movie they updated his do to a more contemporary "feathered mullet".
The movie would not have been complete without "Skeletor". Frank Langella went pretty big in his portrayal of the villain. They went low-tech for his costume, which confused me. I understand that special effects make-up has come a long way since the late 80's. What I don't understand is why they used what looked like wet toilet paper for his skeleton face. The mask was so bad I expected the "Scooby Doo" gang to show up and reveal that is was "Old Man Jenkins" all along. Later in the film they covered "Skeletor" with golden adornments. I'm thinking they could have cut the elaborate golden headdress budget a little and made his face not look like a dried up bowl of Cream of Wheat.
Earlier I did make fun of all the new characters, but they did include many of the classics. With the glaring omission of "Skunkor" they managed to squeeze in all of the main goodies and baddies from the cartoon. In what was probably one of the best decisions about the whole movie, they pretended "Orko" never happened. He was the magical whatever he was supposed to be from the cartoons. I think he was equally annoying to the die hard fan and casual watcher. I'm assuming that with having Courtney Cox in the movie they didn't need another little annoying character.
As far as cartoon, action figure tie-in related movies go, this was a pretty solid film. It had all the things that a growing 10 year old boy needed. Here we are 25 years later (yeah I know), and while the movie doesn't dazzle me the way it did back then, it's a nice little escape back to the times when you wore footy pajamas and got up early to watch Saturday morning cartoons.
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