Season 1 Episode 2 "The Shaping Staff"

I was going to start including the original air dates of the episodes, but apparently they were released in a totally random order.  Seriously, check IMDB.  It's either that or the listings are incorrect.  Anyway, on with the show!

I seriously started laughing during the customary intro sequence when Prince Adam says the phrase “fabulous secret powers”.  Oh, that’s going to get me every time.

The episode opens with He-Man being assailed by some kind of flying robot.  He shows off how strong he is by lobbing a boulder at it and blowing it up, along with the boulder.  He-Man is so mind-bogglingly powerful, that all he has to do to avoid injury from the shrapnel is cover his eyes like its just a little too fucking sunny.

Then a tentacle comes up from the ground and tries to finger his anus.  The tentacle is attached to a giant ground dwelling squid which He-Man pulls up like a turnip.  For some reason, he’s not into a heavy petting session right now, so he chucks it off into oblivion.  Man-At-Arms shows up in Attak Trak and He-Man gushes about what great new training equipment Man-At-Arms has developed.

Wait a minute.  Equipment?  That squid was a living being!  It just wanted to tickle your b-hole a little, and you shot put that thing to its gruesome death on a mountainous crag!  That’s pretty harsh!

He-Man murder count: 1.

Back at the palace, Orko is acting the fool as court jester.  He fucks up every trick and lashes out at Man-At-Arms for heckling him.   Man, I knew that guy was pretentious.  Orko fucks up another trick because Prince Adam comes bolting into the room like an asshole and crashes into a candelabra.  Didn’t his parents teach him not to run inside?  What a tool.

Teela and King-still-don’t-know-his-name harsh his buzz by telling him what a fuck-up fuck-off he is.  Interestingly, his mother now has a speaking part!  Check the end of the post for the cast list - they don’t bother to use her name here, but will the credits have it?  Oh, the suspense!  Anyway, she says that she thinks Prince Adam inherited from her what “we Earthlings call” a sense of humor.

Wait, what?  So his mom is an alien from Earth?  Prince Adam is the product of cross species pollination? That explains a lot.  This also reveals that the ubiquitous “universe” the show refers to includes Earth and Eternia (be it a kingdom, continent, planet or what, I still don’t know).

The King says Prince Adam better quit being such a slouch if he hopes to rule some day.  Prince Adam doesn’t give two shits and says, with a mouth full of mutton, he wants to dick around for a while longer.

Orko continues with his retarded magic show and produces a vial of “demon dust”, which allegedly conjures up the most fearful creatures you could ever imagine - I’m thinking either Pennywise the clown or the lame-ass spider from the TV mini-series that was butchered from Stephen King’s It.  Man-At-Arms continues to heckle Orko like a fucking asshole while he says the magic conjuring phrase “by the powers of wizard and elf” to conjure up a big titty, white haired priestess or something.

So I guess that Orko is some kind of amputee dress wearing elf, not a ghost.  She identifies herself as Magestra, denies she is a demon (or Pennywise, or a giant spider), and says she has nothing fucking better to do than to show up unannounced to entertain the royal court with her magic.  Lets hope she’s better than Orko.

She makes a fair play for Orko’s job with the surprising support of Prince Adam.  Then she’s all like, ‘this next trick is going to blow your effing minds’!  She produces a giant box and the King steps inside like a chump.  The door closes then opens again to reveal that she’s made the King disappear.  Seriously?  That’s your big trick?  I hope David Blaine gives you a Cleveland Steamer for that.  Now that would be a good trick.

Mat-At-Arms, ever the heckler, is like ‘what the fuck? What did you do with the King? You better not be trippin’ cuz I’ll fuck you up’.  With no suspense or build up the door opens again and the King is back.  Whoa.  Didn’t see that coming.  The King is all nonchalant and just goes back to eating mutton.

For some reason, every one is pretty impressed with her trick, and the King is like, ‘bitch, you’re sleeping in my room tonight’.  The queen, revealing her sapphic tendencies, apparently doesn’t give a shit, because he marches off with Magestra to go motorboat those bodacious ta-tas like it ain’t no thang.

Orko decides to perv on them and follows them into the dungeon – hey, kinky! It turns out the real King is nursing a sore anus and a hangover on the floor of a cell, and he recovers in time to look and see Magestra standing there with… himself?

Magestra reveals herself to be Evil-Lyn, and the doppelganger to be Beast Man.  She foolishly elaborates on her evil plan to use the Shaping Staff, which can be used to reshape any matter in the universe.  She was testing it at the palace to make sure the batteries were still good and then turns the King into a goat.

Orko, who has been perving in the hall, trips and makes a commotion drawing the villains’ attention.  Back the fuck up.  How does a dress wearing amputee elf that floats fucking trip?  Seriously?  Did the writers even think about this?  Worse, during the minutes the animators spent drawing it they never realize how nonsensical this is?

Beast Man tries to catch him, but he trips and whacks his head because, as usual, he’s a few martinis past sober.  Evil-Lyn uses the Shaping Staff to turn Orko into a cricket and concludes he can’t possibly bother them any further.  Really?  Crickets are goddamn annoying, of course he will still be a problem.

She conjures up the visage of Skeletor and they have some cyber sex while Beast Man watches and they talk dirty about taking over Castle Grayskull.  I still don’t’ know what is so fucking special about this castle.  A nifty screen wipe occurs – ohhhh marvel at the animation prowess! – and cuts to the fake King and Magestra in the palace looking at a really remedial schematic of Castle Grayskull.  She tells Beast Man (the fake King) that he really has to wow the Academy with his part so that Prince Adam buys it, which will be hard on account of his drunkenly slurred speech.

Right on cue, Prince Adam comes in with Man-At-Arms, and the King suspiciously talks about the old decrepit castle in the woods and how he wants to move his room out there so he can rail Magestra all night with out the wife and kids hearing him.

It’s a good thing that the King doesn’t know Prince Adam is He-Man, because otherwise, He-Man would just be like, ‘yo, dude.  You know that’s where I go put on my He-Man leathers and go prance around in my furry hot pants, why you gotta creep on my shit’?  Instead, he’s like that piece of shit?  Why would you bother?  Oh, I see what you did there.  Man-At-Arms backs him up and elaborates on all the gay anal orgies they have over there and recommends the King stay away.

Ok, I have to say at this point we’ve heard Prince Adam speak a lot more in this episode than the first.  His voice is kind of soft and flaccid, sounding very strangely like Michael Jackson’s speaking voice.  Anyway, the fake King isn’t having it and shits on Prince Adam for being a fuck up.  Damn.  Even the fake King has to dump on him.

The fake King and Magestra leave the room and they recycle the same animation of them walking down the hall from earlier.  Surprisingly, Prince Adam realizing he was clenching his asshole the whole time and interprets that into the shenanigans that are playing out in the palace.

We get a nice exterior shot of the palace-city thing (seriously, I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a city with the palace at its peak, or if the whole thing is the palace or what), and then we cut to Prince Adam sleeping in a tank-top and gold bracelets.

Cringer tires to sneak in and slip his pink panther into Prince Adam’s sphincter (hey, why not, the King and Queen are apparently different species).  Once they are post-coital Prince Adam goes back to sleep, only to be awoken by a cricket.  See?  I told you they were fucking annoying!

Of course its Orko, who reveals the whole evil plot.  Apparently, Prince Adam actually sleeps in a toga with a belt, rather than a tank-top.  I guess the skirt makes it easier for spontaneous anal intercourse.

Prince Adam gets dressed in his pink-vested best, only to immediately turn in to He-Man, during which we are treated to the same recycled, stock transformation animation we have seen before.  Oh, snap.  Now some shits going to do down.  Shockingly, they cut to some original animation of Cringer saying, “I hate this part” just before becoming Battle Cat.  I fucking knew it! Where the fuck is PETA when you need them?

Evil-Lyn, desperate because Skeletor doesn’t fuck her, sneaks into Price Adam’s room with for some nookie and discovers He-Man instead.  Somehow missing that its just Prince Adam in leathers and furry hot pants, she launches a magic attack on him.  He expositorily reveals that his sword deflects magic.  Of course it does.  Teela and Man-At-Arms come running to join the sex party, but Evil-Lyn turns Teela into a frog and says she will stay that way forever if He-Man doesn’t lick her bitch slit.  Of course she’s barking up the wrong tree, so he doesn’t do it.  No big loss, He-Man, I hear if you lick a frog’s ass you trip out or something.  You’d probably like that more than rug munching anyway.

Since He-Man isn’t into it she turns him into a gold statue as a trophy for Skeletor to beat off to.  She and Beast Man disappear before Man-At-Arms even has a chance to get his thumb out of his ass.

Next we get an exterior shot of the precariously perched piece of shit, Castle Grayskull.  Let me back up for a second.  Earlier, the fake King referred to it as being “out in the woods”.  I don’t see a single fucking tree.  Not even one like the sad sack Charlie Brown Christmas tree.  Just more barren rock.  Man, isn’t Eternia beautiful?  Even their trees are rocks.

All the sudden, Skeletor is standing in front of Castle Grayskull and uses some magic from his index finger to make… a fake He-Man?  Whaaaaat?  If he can just do that using his finger, what the fuck do they need the Shaping Staff for?  Ugh.  Forget it.

Fake He-Man, whom Skeletor addresses as Faker, tricks the Sorceress by feigning an injury.  She must not be a very good sorceress if she can’t divine the difference between this pod-person and the real He-Man.  When she shows up, Evil-Lyn is there and she reveals that something about the rock formation at this particular site makes her powers comparable to the Sorceress’.

Evil-Lyn offers her a taste of the battery operated excitement that is the Shaping Staff, but then she’s like, ‘psych, I turned you into a tree’!  As an aside – this totally reminded me of the awful, awful movie Troll 2, which I first saw upon its video release back in like 1990 or so.  Also check out the documentary on it called Best Worst Movie.  Last I checked, both of these were up on Netflix instant.

I digress.  Skeletor shows up and you can tell by his boner that he’s impressed.  Apparently, He-Man’s brain still works even though he’s a gold statue now, and he telepathically communicates with the Sorceress tree.  I guess that telekinetic juggling exercise from the last episode paid off.

He-Man is all like, ‘don’t be a wus, use your magic and stop being a tree’.  So she’s like, ‘oh yeah’, and she does.   She then proceeds to will He-Man out of his gold statute state. Evil-Lyn wants to use her fancy vibrator on the newly freed pair, but Skeletors like, eh, I’ll just sick fake He-man on them instead.  This is really just an excuse for some autoerotic wrestling between fake He-Man and real He-Man.  I’m pretty sure they tired to kiss each other.

Fake He-Man says he’s just as powerful, and bites real He-Man’s tongue while they make out to prove it.  He-Man is all like, ‘no fair’, and throws a rock at him.  For that shit, fake He-Man tries to knock real He-Man off a precipice.  He rushes at He-Man, who simply side steps him causing him to fall to his death. 

He-Man murder count: 2.

Skeletor conjures up some kinky manacles to bind He-Man’s feet for some S & M foreplay.  Just then, Man-At-Arms swoops in with a fleet of floating jet-ski riding soldiers.  Whoa. I guess they do have an army.  Who knew they’d shell out the scratch to animate that?!

While they are distracted, Battle Cat tries to hump on Beast Man for some more cross species fucking.  I’m pretty sure that’s the theme of the episode.  Skeletor gets pissed and tries to rape the Sorceress.

Failing to get is dick up on account of liking men, he does summersaults instead.

He-Man out-limbers Skeletor (duh, he’s a skeleton) and breaks the Shaping Staff, thus restoring everyone affected by it to their original selves.  Evil-Lyn foolishly tries to use the broken staff and ends up turning herself into a winged salamander or something.  She even has the nerve to call everyone else fools while she does it.  Dipshit.

Instead of straight up decapitating Skeletor with his sword (why not? he’s already committed two murders in this episode), He-Man just stands there while Skeletor is like, ‘I’ll get you next time and your little dog, too’.

One nifty screen wipe later, and we’re back at the palace where the queen is conspicuously absent.  Seriously, where did she go?  Did she actually leave the King for motor-boating Megestra all night?  I guess we will have to tune in to the next episode to find out!

Teela can’t resist shitting on Prince Adam for not being around for the big climactic battle with Skeletor, and then she talks about how creamy the dreamy He-Man makes her.  Prince Adam is like, ‘I wish I could wrestle with that hot piece of ass you call He-Man someday.  Oh wait, I already did, snap’!

Jump cut to Orko recapping the moral of the story which is stranger danger.  Fuck, I didn’t see that coming.   I totally thought it was about promoting cross species procreation. Anyway, he gives some totally useless advise about not letting strangers talk you into touching their special places and vice versa, and that’s that.

The episode ends and we STILL don’t officially know the King’s name.  Or the Queen's for that matter.  Adding insult to injury, she's not even credited for her speaking part!  Don't worry, I'm on the phone with SAG already.

He-Man murder count: 2

IMDB Cast List:

John Ewrin: He-Man, Prince Adam, Beast Man, Faker (voice)

Alan Oppenheimer: Skeletor, Mat-At-Arms, Cringer, Battle Cat

Linda Gary: Teela, Evil-Lyn, The Sorceress, Magestra

Lou Scheimer: Orko, King Randor