When I found out that Kevin Smith, who is a Star Wars nerd and kind of a nerd across the board, was going to be writing and directing a new series based on the wildly popular kids cartoon from the 80's. I got kind of thrilled. When I saw the trailer and noticed that while they were improving the animation they were still sticking to the show's roots (as far as art is concerned) I was more thrilled. My only hope was that they not modernize it too much and for the love of god please keep the politics and PC culture of today out of it. Well, there are no politics but it is also VERY different from the original and most of that is in a bad way.
I started out making this a one part story but it got too long and now I have split it into two sections. In this one we will start out on a positive note.
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Surprise, surprise... there is a new line of action figures being released along with this series
Things they did right
Unfortunately this section is going to be very short because I don't feel as though they did a great deal correctly in this series but let's try to start off on a positive note anyway.
They throw in references to the plastic toys from the 80's
One thing that I enjoyed is something that unless you were alive and a kid in the 80's when the show was popular you probably wont understand and that is a lot of classic characters and vehicles are features in the show. You need to understand that the He-Man toys were extremely popular in the 80's and just about everyone I knew had at least a dozen items from the lineup.
There are certain things that you probably wont "get" if you were not alive when the cartoon first came out or if you didn't have any of the toys. For example, there is one point where at the entrance of Snake Mountain Teela falls into a net trap right at the door. This makes very little sense that there would be a net in the trap because the net actually saves you from falling to your death in lava below and it is also easily escaped. This was a silly "feature" of the original toy castle and I for one appreciate Easter Eggs like this.
They didn't update the animation too much
Back in the days of original He-Man, everything was hand drawn because there were only 22 computers on Earth and Nasa owned 11 of them.
Completely made up computer ownership statistics aside, I was concerned they were gonna Pixar the hell out of this and make it too modern. In my opinion they did it just the right amount. It is certainly more modern and now He-Man has nipples (odd that they were missing in the 80s) but they didn't go crazy with it and because of that it still has a nostalgic feel to it that I think most fans from the 80's will appreciate.
They made Man at Arms a badass
Man at Arms was a major character in the original series but he was always extremely underpowered and mostly kind of served as the guy that He-Man was eventually going to have to rescue. That was basically all he did. He would try something virtuous and then get overpowered and this necessitated Adam's transformation into He-Man that would happen in every episode. In Revelations, Man at Arms is a hero in his own right.
In his retirement, Man at Arms has become a one-man army and even though this is a big step away from the story in the past, it is a welcome one. I remember Man at Arms being one of the only action figures that wasn't a girl that was significantly less "ripped" than the others. He was the toy that you didn't play with but still had for some reason. There were no fans of Man at Arms because he was just weak AF.
They gave Man at Arms his comeuppance and I am happy that they decided to do this.
Unfortunately, this is where the "good points" end and you can go ahead and count me as one of the people that is seriously disappointed and actually struggled to make it all the way through the series. The "Things they did wrong" section is going to be considerably longer than the "right" section and I'll see if I can get that done by tomorrow.