Welcome to He-Man Reviewed

A little background on the blog concept:

Giving credit where credit is due, this blog is directly inspired by Billy Superstar's blog Full House Reviewed (fullhousereviewed.com).  He started his blog out of a desire for a regular writing exercise.  I come to this project with the same goal.  One of my two college majors was English Lit, and I love to write.  Alas, I have fallen off of any regular writing and would like to get back to it.

Billy Superstar claims to have arbitrarily chosen Full House as his subject matter.  He says that he loves to hate the show so much that he decided to write an entertainment blog that posts episodic reviews of the show in chronological order.  His perspective is full of piss and vinegar, and wildly funny.  If you have not seen his blog, I highly recommend it.

I have enjoyed his work so much, that I decided I wanted to take his concept and do something similar.  With Mr. Superstar's blessing, I considered various TV shows to review and pretty quickly landed on He-Man.  I used to love this show when I was a kid, around ages 2 - 5 or so.  I might try to see if I can get some scans of some old pictures of me as kid with my He-Man gear to post in my bio.  Anyway, I was obsessed.  I had most of the toys and play sets, the sword replica, etc.

Eventually, I grew out of it, of course.  But when I was in college, the episodes got a release on DVD. I rushed right out and bought Season 1 Volume 1.  I couldn't wait to revisit my beloved childhood cartoon.  I made it through about five episodes before I could no longer stomach its sheer awfulness.  Seriously.  There are so many recycled animation sequences and background songs, I just couldn't take the repetition.  I ended up selling the DVD set back to the local indie music and movie shop I bought it from without watching any more of it.

So why would I want to go back and try again?  Because this time, I am going to tear that shit apart and make fun of every possible thing along the way.  As I stated, this is an entertainment blog and is very much in the vein of Full House Reviewed - a snarky retrospective of a show that was treasured as a child, before we had learned enough to recognize how piss-poor it was, that now looks back with a cynical adult lens.  There will be plenty of foul language, so if this sort of thing offends you, or if you still treasure He-Man so much that you will be personally offended, then this blog is not for you.

My goal is to post one new episode a week, probably on Sunday nights, so its ready for you to waste time on at work on Monday.  There are 65 episodes in season 1.  Jesus.  There are 20 episodes in season 2.  85 episodes to review at one a week, so you do the math.  Guess we are going to get to know each other pretty well.  All of the episodes are on Netflix instant streaming currently, so that's pretty sweet.  Also pretty sweet is that the 1985 Christmas special is on instant, which is probably the only distinct memory I have of any He-Man episode, which I will review (if it is not part of the regular series, which ended in 1985).  I remember a couple of kids get some hover-belts, and Skeletor gets icky Christmas-y feelings.  That's all I remember.

I own a DVD copy of the 1987 live action movie Masters of the Universe starring Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella already, so I will probably review that after I get done with the original cartoon series.

I discovered that there is a 1990 show called The New Adventures of He-man, that I didn't even know about.  How I missed that when I was still only 9 years old is beyond me.  There are 67 episodes of this series.

Then, even more astonishing, there is a 2002 series called He-Man and the Masters of the Universe vs. The Snake Men that I also didn't know about.  I may review that as well.  There are 39 episodes of that series, which seems like an awful lot for such a specific premise.

I'm curious to see it though - is it any better constructed than the original series?  I sure fucking hope so.  Holy fuck, what am I getting myself into.  Billy Superstar has approximately 190 episodes of Full House to review, and if he is consistent (which he is) and posts every week, its going to take him over four years to finish his project!  There are 221 episodes of He-Man (222, if the Christmas special is in addition to the original 85 episodes) and a movie for me to tackle!  Anyway, we are talking years down the road here, so we will see.  All I'm intending to commit to for now is the original 1983 - 85 series, including the Christmas special, and the 1987 movie.

I hope you have as much fun reading this as I will writing it.

Cheers.

~Santanaonfire