Given the wild success of its She-Ra reboot, I'm surprised its revival of He-Man sticks so close to the early-80s original (and the brief turn-of-the-century revival). Variety, with the exclusive, makes clear the promise that not much has changed beyond our hero being "a bit glowed up."
Since the series was announced in 2019, fans have been speculating just what executive producer and showrunner Kevin Smith — writer-director of "Clerks," "Chasing Amy" and "Dogma" — would be doing with the property. As the images make clear, Smith and the team at Powerhouse Animation (also the animation studio behind Netflix's "Castlevania" series) are paying homage not just to the look of the original series, but its storylines as well.
Hall is right, but on reflection I think he perhaps underestimates the commercial value of that audience and its ability to knock this show. By the time Noelle Stevenson made something new and wonderful from it, She-Ra was but a warm memory for its audience. But He Man, like all the other 80s boy-marketed stuff, is forever alive with its audience's cold grip on everything from their childhoods.
Another way of putting it: the backlash against the new She-Ra came from old men who never watched it then and would never watch it now. But the backlash against a significantly rebooted He-man would come from old men who never stopped watching it and are the only people who would ever watch it now.
On which note I realize it has been four years since I last posted CKY ft. Gnarkill's Skeletor vs Beastman.
