What happened to my Filmation He-man and She-ra???

[ooo-baby]

Mattel and hard-core fans have run He-man and She-ra into the ground with their desire for something new.

They don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Just go back to what worked…….Filmation, which propelled Masters of the Universe into the #1 toyline in the entire world in 1983-1984!

Mattel and hard-core fans keep on trying to find new truths when all they need to do is re-discover the old ones.

 

[Dake]

What happened to my Search function???

People keep trying to find the answers to questions when all the need to do is rediscover the old threads!

 

[ooo-baby]

Why do hard-core fans keep ripping the Filmation He-man and She-ra Christmas Special?

I loved Skeletor in that show. His performance and his story arc in there was worth its weight in gold.

Can you hard-core fans out there present an example of what you consider a “good” Christmas Special?

Perhaps you expected the He-man and She-ra Christmas Special to be dark and gritty like Batman vs. Superman.

It’s no wonder the fans themselves have killed He-man and She-ra.

I think the reason why Filmation He-man was so successful was because the creators were pretty much non-fans, business people and artists who could look objectively at what would work through innocent eyes. I guess that was the 80’s.

In my opinion, it’s the hard-core fans who have kept complaining that Filmation was corny and talked down to us as kids that have killed Master of the Universe with their constant harping since the 1980’s.

So I guess you guys consider the CGI cartoon so much more mature than Filmation. Enjoy! You got your wish.

 

[Steevy Maximus]

 

[ooo-baby]

We need to bring the Filmation Lbrary (eg. Backgrounds, music, animation cells, voice actors, writers, etc.) out of mothballs, create more episodes , and re-release the vintage line alongside it, including Castle Grayskull, Eternia, Crystal Castle, and all the vehicles.

And keep the Barbie team at Mattel the hell away from Masters of the Universe and Princess of Power. They killed the line in the 80’s by getting their grubby little hands on She-ra and ripping her away from Masters of the Universe.

 

[Daith]

Seriously the He-Man thread is still in the first page of discussions.

He-Man, and also the Masters of the Universe

Fun times in the MOTU fandom. Masterverse wave 2 (Teela, MAA, Beast Man, Spikor) and Origins wave 6 (Green Goddess, Stinkor, Webstor [string breaks easily!], LOP Beast Man) are sneaking out here and there, hopefully BBTS will start shipping them soon. Origins wave 7 listings are up - Jitsu...

www.allspark.com

As for your geewunner attitude, you might get some minor agreement, but adapt and change is the way of the world. You like the Filmation series. Good for you. They are up on YouTube and pretty available still. You like the Vintage line. Guess what the best thing that is going to happen along that line is the current Origins series toys. It's pretty much the vintage style toys with added articulation. Some of the more action featured characters have suffered losses of their play features, but considering 40 years of safety reforms and cost cutting it's bound to happen.

As far as straight up recreating the Filmation series, good luck. It's been almost 40 years. A good portion of your production crew probably aren't even still kicking. It takes more than Alan Oppenheimer and John Erwin coming back to do voices. Not to mention recasting Teela, the Sorceress, Orko and many others. Heck Erwin is 86 and Oppenheimer is 92. I wouldn't blame them for not wanting to do it anymore.

At some point you got to realize time has gone by and as much as you love something from back in the day, it's never going to be that way again.

 

[ooo-baby]

I think Troy Baker has the ability to duplicate all of the male actors based on his Joker voice which is indistinguishable from Mark Hamill. He also showed he can duplicate Kevin Conroy’s voice in Batman vs. Teeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I thought it was Kevin Conroy until I saw the credits.

Surely there are female voice actors who can do the same thing with Linda Gary and Melendity Britt. Heather Locklear’s natural voice is actually very close to Filmation Teela.

As far as the writers we still have Bob Forward, J. Michael Straczynski, Paul Dini, Donald Glut, David Wise, and a host of other writers who got their start working for Filmation. Bruce Timm worked on the art and animation for the He-man cartoon and mini comics. He has a whole animation team under him now.

It can be done. Just look at the Scooby Doo and Tom & Jerry cartoons of today. They are exactly the same as in the 60’s and 70’s.

They don’t even need to even make new episodes. The He-man and She-ra Filmation cartoons have been syndicated in countless languages and they will be brand new and fresh to any new generation of kids who will be watching it for the first time, sort of like Three’s Company has won the hearts of every new generation that watches it for the first time. They don’t need to remake, or make new episodes. The show speaks for itself.

So use it as the main marketing vehicle to propel Masters of the Universe Origins into the #1 Toyline in the entire world like it did in the 80’s. It has a proven track record of success with the data and history to back it up.

Stop wasting precious time with these so-called new creators who want to make a name for themselves by putting their own stamp on the Masters of the Universe brand. It’s all politics. They can’t acknowledge that Filmation is the way to go because then they would not have a job. They can’t admit the dirty little secret that Filmation already figured out the magic formula.

They have to keep making content that is radically different from Filmation to justify their getting a paycheck even it means running Masters of the Universe into the ground. It all comes down to getting that money into their pockets and that means blinding Mattel into thinking they need them, and misdirecting Mattel’s eyes away from the Filmation Library sitting in the vault at Universal.

 

[ZacWilliam1]

You have a really weird idea of where MotU is right now.

You have a an extremely optimistic concept of where a 40 year old cartoon that was primitive and simplistic at the time would rate with modern kids.

It's cool to like and love what you like and love for nostalgia but you're imagining time flowing in directions that it is never going to flow.

Honestly these posts are so over the top out of touch on a number of fronts I can't help but suspect this is a gag.


-ZacWilliam, also "it could be like modern Tom and Jerry and Scooby Doo" is pretty wow as a concept, as the only time either of those shows has had a modern critical and fan success is Mystery Incorporated which was the kind of reimagining you don't want...

 

[ooo-baby]

You call this primitive:

I call it POWERFUL!

 

[LBD "Nytetrayn"]

I could have sworn kids just weren't into the whole pantsless barbarian thing, and that's how we wound up with Snake Armor He-Man as the new default in 200X.

Of course, that was 20 years ago...

 

[Dake]

These bots are getting more and more realistic!

 

[Sabrblade]

These bots are getting more and more realistic!

It's just Duragrip using a new name. He's been banned from at least both TFW2005 and Seibertron.

He may have also been banned from here once upon a time back before the hack attack, but I can't remember.

 

[ooo-baby]

What happened here? The hub of Masters of the Universe and Princess of Power, He-man.org, has been abandoned, all the quality He-man and She-ra podcasts have stopped putting out episodes, and all the new cartoons have been one bleep show after another. And I don’t know what’s become of Power-Con. I heard it’s just a generic toy show now. And it appears that every new content creator like Rob David has buried and burned the Filmation Bible in order to line their own pockets by desperately trying to come up with something new that will outdo and beat the success of Filmation in order to make a name for themselves, put their stamp on Masters of the Universe brand, and use it to enrich themselves. They don’t care that they’re running He-man and She-ra into the ground, as long as they can ensure Mattel is feeding their families and their egos.

They pretty much took down 90% of the Filmation clips from YouTube and even stopped James Eatock from making new Filmation episodes, which he was doing for free. Why? I think it’s because they know that Filmation threatens their jobs and livelihoods. If Mattel ever figures it out:

and decides to put Filmation back into syndication on multiple channels alongside Masters of the Universe Origins, in order to market it, they’d all be out of jobs. They all know it and they can’t have that. As many cartoons that have come out since Filmation, all the newbies that did not grow up in the 80’s have watched and loved the Filmation He-man and She-ra cartoons the best because it has been syndicated on so many different off-air and cable channels ever since the 80’s. He-man and She-ra combined for almost 200 episodes. That’s a lot of syndication power!

 

[Steevy Maximus]

Syndication is dead. And many episodes of the show(s) have been available across assorted streaming services for years. Hell, you can go on to YouTube and watch a bunch of them RIGHT NOW

 

[Sabrblade]

 

[Steevy Maximus]

This thread is even more strange to me in the context that, MOTU seems to be in the strongest spot it has been in 20 years! While the Netflix series seems to have sputtered out, the Origins and Masterverse lines still seem to be going strong on the back of major initiatives from last year’s 40th Anniversary push.

Despite no major feature film or major animation projects prior to Revelation, I actually Masters, the brand, is having better exposure right now than GI Joe.

 

[Dekafox]

If you want to talk concepts, I wonder how much was inspired by Thundarr?

I mean if we're gonna go "older is better" this came out before He-Man, and that haircut is suspiciously similar.

if we're going to write Thundarr off because of the brand, THIS is the original He-Man (literally, it's the first time he was depicted):

And it was the costume that gave him superpowers, not the sword:

So you could say Filmation ruined the original He-Man by removing the barbarian part of the high-science/super-sorcery barbarian concept.

 

[ooo-baby]

You probably were not around in 1983-1984 when Masters of the Universe was the #1 Toyline in the entire world, beating out all other toy lines including G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Star Wars! I guess I’m just used to Master of the Universe being on top. Maybe you’re lucky that you never really experienced that. You can’t really miss what you never knew. I apologize. I stand corrected.

MOTU Origins is probably the best that most living He-man and She-ra fans have experienced. I suspect most of the 80’s fans have either died off, or were casual viewers who bought the toys primarily because they loved the Filmation cartoons.

That was the great thing about Filmation. It reached all kids at that time whether or not they went on to become hard-core Masters of the Universe and Princess of Power fans. I guarantee if Mattel revived the Filmation cartoon, put it front and center again, all those lay people, the “normies”, would come back with a vengeance and make MOTU origins the #1 Toyline in the world, AGAIN!

 

[Dekafox]

Considering I'm over 40, I'd hope I was there. Unless someone invented cryogenics and somehow lost the technology after unfreezing me. Or created a time warp portal. Honestly it sounds like YOU weren't there if you weren't aware of the actual original He-Man....

 

[ooo-baby]

So you could say Filmation ruined the original He-Man by removing the barbarian part of the high-science/super-sorcery barbarian concept.

No, that’s the genius of Filmation. They softened up the Thundarr Barbarian and Masters of the Universe Minicomics look, mythology and lore to bring in the “normies, “ They brought in professional writers, artists, and animators to make He-man appeal to the masses.

Filmation was obviously derived from the minicomics, so Filmation owes its success to that source material.

I’m just saying it took the business genius of Lou Scheimer at Filmation to bring together the best creative minds ever assembled and the world has ever known:

Larry D’tillio (Beast Wars)
Bob Forward (Beast Wars)
J. Michael Stracienski (Babylon 5)
Bruce Timm (Batman: The Animated Series)
Paul Dini (Batman: The Animated Series)
Donald Glut (Transformers)
David Wise (Transformers)

Linda Gary
Alan Oppenheimer
John Erwin
Melendy Britt
George Dicenzo

just to name a few, none of who were Masters of the Universe fans but who were creative geniuses who came in and won the hearts of the “normies”, without whom you could not make Masters of the Universe the #1 Toyline in the world. That’s what hard-core fans cannot seem to see or grasp, or want to accept. They just have the attitude, “I like what I like, “ even if they’re only one of a hand few who do. They would not care if the entire He-man and She-ra fan club was comprised of just 3 or four weirdos who met on the internet once a year.

The brainpower brought in at Filmation was akin to the creativite force of the team assembled at Los Alamos that architected the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That’s real POWER! Is it any wonder where the Power of Grayskull came from?