Quite Enjoyable (Not as bad as you think)
Other than the disingenuous ad promotion, Mark Hamill just being another Joker for Skeletor, and Sarah Michelle Gellar sounding like a little girl/teen for She-(Wo)Man-At-Arms Teela, it was quite enjoyable. Thanks Powerhouse Animation Studios for the great animation as well.
Sure, you don't get He-Man no more and this is more a Chris Nolan-type dark abode to a final epic battle, we're seeing what happens after our great hero of the past meets his end. Nothing lasts forever (temp.). Didn't feel the woke as some of the others here. Some of you have that sensitivity tuned too high.
I really think they'll do something about bringing him back in Part 2 of Revelation because the meaning of Revelation is a surprising and previously unknown fact, especially one that is made known in a dramatic way.
David’s initial pitch to Smith kept Adam alive the entire time. In the midst of a massive battle at Castle Greyskull, Skeletor breaks the vessel containing all magic on Eternia, and He-Man is forced to split the Sword of Power in two in order to contain the ensuing explosion. In David’s version, Adam survived; robbed of his ability to become He-Man, he spends the rest of the series figuring out how to build himself back up to his former glory.share
“Kevin thought that was terrific,” said David. “And then he one-upped me and said, ‘What if we don’t just break the Sword of Power? What if we actually break Adam, too? What if he dies, when we flash forward a few years we really get to explore that — also what is it like for a world without He-Man?'”
In breaking the story for “Revelation,” Smith said David pulled out “books of lore” for He-Man and Eternia created by Mattel over the decades since the toy was first created. Between David’s commitment to the history of He-Man, and Biaselli’s bone-deep love for the original show, Smith felt like he had guard-rails keeping him from going too far afield. Besides, his mandate was to make a He-Man show where characters could actually die; what better way to make that clear than killing the show’s main hero and villain from the jump?
“All we have to do is not disavow anything,” Smith said. “Nobody’s saying, ‘Hey, man, everything you knew about He-Man was wrong.’ It’s like, no, everything you knew was absolutely right. And now, this is what happened when they finally had their epic battle — and what happened after that.”
“Even though this is a love letter to the 1980s version of ‘Masters of Universe,’ we didn’t want to rest on that,” added David. “In order for something to be alive, it’s got to have the capacity to surprise you. It has to have the capacity to grow.”
Once Wood understood the approach, he loved it. “It was jarring, but in a really amazing way, you know, because Skeletor and He-Man, there was no real urgency or life or death stakes to their battles [in the original],” he said.
With He-Man’s death locked in, Smith looked at the characters who were left in Eternia who could drive the story for the next four episodes. One jumped the to the fore.
“Teela I was particularly interested in because she’s been fucking lied to her entire life,” Smith said. “And that, to me, was drama.”
“My favorite movies are ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ ‘The Wrath of Khan,'” said David. “The hero gets really hit hard, and then the story becomes about how the hero gets back up again and better and stronger than ever. In basically stripping away all the comforts the hero took for granted, the hero reveals to him or herself what truly makes them strong inside and then have to rebuild.”
“We thought by having an unexpected character go on that journey in real time with the audience,” he continued, “we would be able to really hit just how important He-Man is, and just how important those themes are.”
It was that opportunity to humanize and complicate established characters that Smith was most excited about, especially since it gave him a chance to put into practice a decade’s worth of personal observations of the most successful attempt at fan service in Hollywood history: The Marvel Cinematic Universe.