Some childhood kingdoms came in cardboard boxes. Others arrived through the television, sometime between getting home from school and being called to dinner. I knew He-Man and the Masters of the Universe through the second arrangement: a glowing screen, a theme tune, a muscular blond man raising a sword, and the rather optimistic suggestion that a few well-chosen words could solve most of life’s problems. In a 1980s Philippine childhood, that was more than enough to occupy an afternoon.
The toys were another matter. Classmates had He-Man and Skeletor figures, vehicles and, for the particularly fortunate, Castle Grayskull. Their bedroom floors could become entire battlefields. I had the cartoon and the ability to imagine what was happening elsewhere, which is what adults generally recommend when the household budget has already made its decision. I was a He-Man fan, but from the cheap seats.
That distinction followed me into the cinema when I watched Travis Knight’s 2026 Masters of the Universe. I wasn’t carrying a checklist of accessories the filmmakers had to reproduce, nor was I expecting a two-hour cure for middle age. I wanted to see whether this very odd piece of 1980s popular culture could survive a modern blockbuster without apologising for its own ridiculousness. To my mild surprise, I had a good time.
The cartoon was the whole kingdom
The original Masters of the Universe action figures appeared in the early 1980s, before Filmation’s animated series gave Eternia its familiar television voice in 1983. That order matters. It was a toy line in search of stories, then a cartoon that made the toys feel like things with histories, loyalties and purposes. He-Man, Teela, Man-At-Arms and Skeletor were impossibly simple to recognise, which is not a criticism when your audience is six years old and the story has to compete with the smell of dinner coming from the kitchen.
There was something pleasingly untroubled about its logic. Prince Adam became He-Man by raising the Sword of Power, Skeletor pursued various badly conceived schemes, and Battle Cat was a tiger with considerably more nerve than Cringer. The stories wandered between swords and lasers, sorcery and computers, ancient castles and futuristic vehicles. Nobody stopped to explain why this mishmash of genres should make sense. The confidence of it was almost architectural: build the kingdom in bright colours, give everyone a strong silhouette, and carry on.
Each episode also tended to leave us with a tidy little lesson, as though the moral instruction might help balance half an hour of enthusiastic product promotion. I remember the certainty more than any particular sermon. The villains were villains, the heroes knew what needed doing, and the transformation was always waiting to happen. For a child negotiating homework, school routines and the smaller indignities of growing up, that sort of clarity was useful.
Some children had the kingdom in plastic
If you owned the figures, the cartoon was an invitation to continue the adventure. You could watch a battle in the afternoon, then restage or improve it with a fleet of plastic warriors before dinner. If you didn’t own the figures, the television was the beginning and end of the experience. There was no second act on the bedroom floor, unless you were willing to improvise your own inventory.
I remember that small social economy rather clearly: who had a new figure, whose relative had brought a vehicle back from overseas, who could talk about some character I barely recognised because they had the toy but I had missed the episode. Nobody needed to explain income or class to us. We understood the difference between wanting something and taking it home. Childhood inequality often arrived not as a lecture but as a shelf full of objects you could look at and occasionally touch.
Perhaps that is why this franchise means something slightly different to me than it does to devoted collectors. I don’t associate it with the satisfaction of completing a set or carefully preserving a box. I associate it with being close enough to participate in the culture but not quite owning its physical version. The cartoon had to do all the work, and it did it rather well.
The first time He-Man went to the cinema
The 1987 Masters of the Universe with Dolph Lundgren arrived at a time when the industry was still learning what to do with properties born on toy shelves. Much of that film takes place on Earth, a peculiar destination for anyone who had been waiting to see Eternia properly realised. The limitations show, although there is a certain interest now in watching the machinery of an ambitious production struggle visibly against its budget. Not every old film needs to be rescued as an overlooked masterpiece; sometimes it can remain a fascinating, rather battered artefact.
What does endure is Frank Langella’s Skeletor. Langella understood that a skull-faced tyrant requires complete seriousness from the actor, not from the audience. He went at the robes, speeches and theatrical menace with the conviction of someone who would never allow a costume department to get the last word. It is a lesson I wish more contemporary franchise films remembered: characters this extravagant need performers who believe in the world, not actors winking at us from outside it.
Back to Eternia, with a reluctant Prince Adam
Knight’s 2026 film gives Nicholas Galitzine’s Prince Adam a useful disadvantage. Separated from Eternia and raised on Earth, he comes back to a world he is meant to inherit but barely knows. The Sword of Power is still central, of course, yet there is more going on than the usual business of waiting for a handsome actor to acquire an even more impressive physique. Adam has to return to a place that suffered in his absence and confront the uncomfortable difference between being designated its saviour and knowing how to help.
It is familiar fantasy territory: the lost heir, the damaged kingdom, the weapon that knows more than its owner, the long-awaited confrontation with an occupying villain. I don’t mind that. These stories have been recycling their most reliable components for centuries, only with different levels of leatherwork. The interesting choice is to let Adam appear unsure of the role before he grows into it. The old animated He-Man was practically complete from the moment he stepped on screen; a feature-film protagonist needs somewhere to go.
I also appreciated that the film doesn’t treat his awkwardness as a reason to despise its source material. There are jokes about the mismatch between ordinary life and cosmic destiny, but the premise is not held up for public ridicule. When Adam finally raises the sword, the film allows the moment to be big, bright and entirely sincere. That matters. If the filmmakers are embarrassed by the words ‘I have the power’, there really isn’t much point in making a He-Man film.
The people who stayed behind
Camila Mendes’s Teela gives the story a necessary perspective. Adam’s return can be framed as a homecoming and a heroic awakening, but for the people who remained on Eternia it has been a period of actual danger and loss. Teela doesn’t need a visiting prince to explain what is happening to her own world. She needs him to learn quickly, take responsibility and stop mistaking a grand destiny for useful experience.
Idris Elba as Duncan, or Man-At-Arms, supplies some welcome weight. There is something wonderfully practical about Elba in a setting populated by skull masks, magic swords and elaborately named combatants. He behaves like somebody who has inspected the equipment, spoken to the soldiers and filled out the paperwork. Together he and Teela remind us that an embattled kingdom must have a life beyond the hero’s transformation sequence.
That also improves Adam’s story. The film is better when strength does not simply settle every argument, and when listening to people who have been carrying the fight becomes part of heroism. This isn’t a radical reinvention of the franchise. It is a modest adjustment that allows an old-fashioned power fantasy to contain a little more human sense.
Skeletor has not discovered subtlety
Jared Leto’s Skeletor comes from the correct school of villain design: if you are going to wear a skull for a face, it is probably too late to cultivate understatement. The character has always operated somewhere between theatrical tyrant and particularly vindictive Saturday-morning nuisance. Play him as a realistic politician and the result becomes tedious; treat him as nothing but a joke and the entire threat collapses.
The 2026 film gives him the right to loom, declaim and occupy an unreasonable amount of space. Alison Brie’s Evil-Lyn brings another texture, more calculating and restrained, the kind of ally whose interest in power clearly extends beyond her employer’s latest tantrum. As with the older cartoon, the pleasure lies partly in how immediately legible these characters are. Nobody needs a forty-minute origin story to establish whether Skeletor is going to be a problem.
This is the quality I admire in the film’s better moments. It doesn’t pretend that ridiculous designs become sophisticated simply by making everything dark and humourless. It lets the designs do what they were made to do. A bit of scale, a bit of menace, an extravagant costume and a performer who commits to it can still be enough.
A designer’s weakness for Eternia
I suppose the visual side was always going to be the easiest way in for me. The original franchise has an unusually clear graphic vocabulary: muscular silhouettes, exaggerated armour, skull imagery, chunky machinery, luminous magic and a palette that seldom worries about good taste. It sits halfway between heroic fantasy and an especially enthusiastic science-fiction toy catalogue. That should be a mess. Somehow it has a character all its own.
Knight, who previously directed Bumblebee and has a background in animation, understands the value of a readable shape. The new Eternia is most convincing when costumes, props and environments feel designed for this world rather than borrowed from whatever digital fantasy production happened to finish shooting last month. The combination of blasters, swords and medieval architecture still works because nobody insists that one part must cancel out the other.
There are places where the visual effects turn weightless and the surfaces acquire that familiar blockbuster polish, as though somebody has applied the same finishing filter to an entire planet. I wanted more texture, more objects that looked handled and damaged, more evidence of people living inside the production design. But the film has colour and recognisable visual ambition. At a time when so many fantasy worlds look as though the brightness has been turned down for their own protection, that counts for something.
The film is better when it remembers to have fun
It isn’t flawless. The story occasionally carries too much franchise luggage, and some sections feel designed to establish possibilities for the next film rather than sharpen the one in front of us. Certain emotional points are explained after we have already understood them, a modern screenplay habit that suggests writers no longer trust an actor’s face to complete a thought. And there are only so many times a familiar fantasy beat can announce itself before an audience starts calculating the distance to the next battle.
Yet I remained entertained, largely because the film mostly resists two common reboot mistakes. It doesn’t mock the original so persistently that affection becomes impossible, and it doesn’t inflate the toy line into a sacred text requiring three solemn hours of mythology. He-Man is already a peculiar idea: a blond prince shouts a phrase, gains immense strength, and sets off to fight a skull-headed sorcerer. The sensible approach is to treat the people and their choices seriously enough, while allowing the premise to remain gloriously odd.
I liked its relative lack of embarrassment. The film has familiar names, recognisable objects and nods to the devoted, but it does not demand that every viewer have spent the last forty years carefully cataloguing action-figure variants. It is possible to recognise a childhood world without needing to move back into it. That, perhaps more than any Easter egg, is the kind of nostalgia I can still enjoy.
I have the power. Sort of.
Watching He-Man now, I find the fantasy has changed. As a child it was about power, the possibility of becoming strong enough to meet anything in front of you. At this age it is more about clarity: being able to raise a sword, say the words, and know with absolute confidence who you are and what needs doing. Ordinary life is rarely as cooperative. We have bills, work, half-finished plans, uncomfortable mornings and the occasional email that makes the idea of battling Skeletor seem relatively straightforward.
That is why the film’s less-than-perfect pleasures were enough for me. I could enjoy the spectacle without pretending it transformed my life, and remember the cartoon without needing the new version to reproduce every detail. I still think about classmates whose kingdoms came in enormous boxes, and about how much imaginative territory a television programme could cover when no toy collection was waiting in the next room.
I wasn’t a particularly devoted He-Man fan in the eighties. The cartoon belonged to me for half an hour at a time; the merchandise mostly belonged to other people. Four decades later I still find that a perfectly serviceable arrangement. The sword lights up, the villain makes his entrance, and for a little while the afternoon is there again. I don’t need the deluxe playset to appreciate it.
Image credits: Filmation and Mattel character imagery remains the property of its respective rights holders. Film stills and publicity photographs from the 1987 and 2026 films are credited in individual captions.
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