"Sorceress, you used the space portal to bring us here. Thanks!"

A reviewer casts his eye over the DVD re-release of 'He-Man and the Masters of the Universe', seeing it from a vastly different perspective now he's no longer six years old:

The show, it turns out, is not quite the singular artistic triumph I once thought it was. Its creators seem to have spared every expense. It's a badly animated, low-budget scramble of every sci-fi and fantasy franchise that preceded it—Conan the Barbarian, Star Wars, Star Trek, Superman, even The Jetsons. It's set among craggy gothic castles and dramatic stone arches on a generic action-planet called Eternia; the time frame is a kind of medieval future in which battle axes coexist with freeze rays, video screens, flying Jet Skis, and memory-projectors. Plots usually adhere to the Bond formula: Villains take short breaks from marathon sessions of maniacal laughter to hatch the most transparent evil schemes, which He-Man foils while tossing off bons mots like a drunk uncle ("I guess they just don't make energy bows like they used to," he quips to a flustered Trap-Jaw; "Boy, the things people leave lying around," he says wryly while tossing two stunned Fishmen off-screen). The dialogue is tediously expository, written apparently for viewers who have slept through most of the episode: "Sorceress, you used the space portal to bring us here. Thanks!" or "Hurray! The power of Grayskull brought your memory back!"

And that's even before he gets on to the subject of rampant homoeroticism!

- Sam Anderson on Slate.com

[Courtesy of Louwrens]