So the angry boys of the internet are angry again, this time over Netflix’s reboot of the Masters of the Universe show, directed by Kevin Smith. What happens when the angry boys get mad about movies and TV shows? They all go to Rotten Tomatoes and this happens to the audience score:
Yep. Despite the high rating from professional reviewers, the angry boys have pushed the audience score lower than that of the He Man and She Ra Christmas Special from 1985.
So what exactly are the angry boys angry about here? Well, without giving away any spoilers, He Man is sort of sidelined in the first half of the new series, which dropped last night on Netflix. And instead we get a lot of Teela, who is some sort of cartoon lady, if you can imagine such a thing. A cartoon lady? We want cartoon man back!
Also Teela has a black lady friend who might be more than just a friend if you know what I mean. (Having not watched the show I’m not sure I even know what I mean.)
Over on IMDb, “fans” of the show are pounding out their own reviews expressing their objections to this terrible lady-centric change to a beloved show that in its original form was basically a half-hour infomercial for Masters of the Universe action figures.
Someone called AngryBaneling sputtered:
I cannot even begin to describe the level of disregard and disrespect shown toward the MOTU franchise and its fans. …
Just what is going on in the western entertainment industry? … Are men not allowed to be heroes anymore? Do we have to prop up female characters at the expense of male characters just so a couple of nobodies on social media can feel good about it?
They’ve resurrected another franchise just so they can debase it in front of a crowd. Hope the paycheck was worth it, Kevin Smith.
Yeah, take that Kevin Smith!
Someone called Jackie_Viera added:
This show is sheer woke culture crap that’s happening now in films and TV now. The trailer did a fine job in bait and switch for people who were nostalgic enough for the original 80s show. This was meant to be about He-Man and his adventures. Instead, [SPOLIER REMOVED] its Teela to sort things out.
Teela? What the hell?
If you wanted to make a show on a strong female character, you had She-ra and I would’ve been fine with it. Instead, this show has ruined a beloved childhood cartoon of mine.
Yeah, this is what happened when they rebooted She-Ra.
Another “fan” decided the show should be called She-Man : Masters of the Social Justice-verse
They completely sandbagged He-Man so they could instead focus on a more female centric story… Then why even call it Masters of Universe?…
They want to recapture the target audience by excluding them and pushing them aside for a new gender obsessed social justice demographic that would never watch this show in the first place?.
They have their crap , we have ours. …
There are dozens more “reviews” like these. Here are snippets from some of them.
None of this happened by happenstance. It was all intentional. They had a message to push and they did push it.
no one told us this was going to be a show about Teela and her girlfriends. If you want to make that show, please go ahead, but don’t hide it behind another name, that’s being a coward and a liar. If we pretend this is okay, then we’ll get more garbage remakes like we’re having since the Ghostbusters. Oh, and I’m laughing hard at the “oMg thESE iNtErNeT TroLLs hAtE wOmEn!!”, imagine taking your kid to watch the good Star Wars and they play it The Last Jedi instead.
Boy i am sick and tired of this age we are in. You had She-Ra! You could make a series about her and we would watch it with fun but no! You had to ruin He-Man with your meaningless woke culture. Yesterday was my birthday and i became 40.
I am perfectly fine with LGBT community. But this project is pretty badly produced and delivered.
If you are a He-man fan then do not watch this show. Pure wokeism at its finest. He-man got cancelled in 2021.
I will give it 2 because of good animations but -8 because He-man is side charater and because of false advertising. I was happy now i m sad.
They literally take any show that would be good and shove wokeism-lgbtq down your throat and destroy every damn show, just let kids be kids for God sake.
How does it feel to sell out your soul for a cash grab and to give Netflix board members, producers and executives along with the Obamas what they want and sacrifice art and nostalgia for this woke garbage?
Yes, angry nerds. You’ve finally convinced me. The Obamas are the one wrecking your favorite cartoons by putting too much ladies in them. I should have known. It’s all a vast conspiracy.
As He Man himself might ask: What’s going on?
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I’m confused, but it still sounds like He-Man isn’t gay enough…. I really wanted the new He-Man reboot be just as gay as the She-ra reboot. I mean… i don’t want to spread stereotypes, but some of the original He-man characters were just crying out to be left out of subtext and just become, well, text. Fisto and Beast Man most of all
They are really tarnishing the legacy of important characters like Stinkor and Moss Man.
I was never a fan when the original series was on, but I ended up picking up a lot of the show’s mythology because I babysat kids who watched it. I figured I’d binge it this weekend because I was in the mood for some popcorn TV.
It’s not bad. The new She-Ra is better – the characters are more well-rounded, and I think the She-Ra creative team poured a lot more work into it than what I’ve seen of the new He-Man. (In all fairness, the She-Ra story is finished whereas the He-Man only has 5 eps right now.) I’d give the She-Ra reboot an A. The He-Man gets a B+ from me, with the understanding that I just watched a half-season and the story will continue.
That having been said, Mark Hamill is obviously having fun with the role of Skeletor, and Kevin Smith could’ve coasted on pure nostalgic fanboy but didn’t. He has said elsewhere that the story absolutely depends on Teela as the fulcrum, and I agree. I wouldn’t say I’m the target audience (especially since I hate toy commercials disguised as children’s entertainment), but I liked a number of things about the reboot. I won’t specify because spoilers, but if a non-fan like me can find something to enjoy, it can’t be all bad, right?
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the man-babies who can’t deal with stories that don’t cater to their every desire. Especially because they can never just sit back and let us enjoy our own stuff in peace.
Fancy letting a cartoon ruin your entire 40th birthday! There’s a grip to be gotten, here. These dickheads will find any reason to feel miserable.
My inner Screwtape simply says “Anyway, why should the creatures be happy?”
Well, considering that the entertainment industry is a business run on money, like all businesses, that these guys are not the audiences for any of these cartoons (that would be Gen Z), and these corporations can see the future population trends just like everyone else, and know which side of the bread their butter will soon be on (women and poc are basically the new audiences they’re appealing to), I would suggest these guys gather their Kleenex, and handkerchiefs for a lot of crying in the future.
Every ten to twenty years, the entertainment industry gears up to appeal to the next generation of people they want to suck money out of, while the previous generation becomes more irrelevant. To date, white men, who have always been the audiences catered to for much of entertainment history have never taken their obsolescence well. Ever! Or At all!
They’ve always acted out, and showed their asses each time a new generation of consumers was catered to. Remember what happened at Komiskey Park?Anybody remember what happened when Elvis and The Beatles supplanted the crooners of the 40s and 50s? The only difference between then and now is we are watching their collective meltdown in real time, online! They haven’t stopped a single ounce of pop culture progress by doing it, but then again, none of them know or follow the history that they insist on endlessly repeating!
Im a person who takes the long view, both forwards and backwards, and I just know that in ten or twenty years were gonna look back on this time period and be comepltey baffled, in the same way we’re baffled now, at how white people lost their shit over Elvis’ out of sync hip shaking fifty-sixty years ago! Hell! We’re baffled today at the white Boomer hysteria and Pearl clutching, at what’s now considered fairly tame rap music, that was released thirty or so years ago, when we couldn’t even envision a gay black man with naked dancing black guys in his videos!
If they fee that way about women then maybe they should do a series of Kronar son of Man. Very NSFW, this is Oglaf.
https://9gag.com/gag/aBx4G3P
Oh wait no, SJWs have ruined that too. /s
@Lakitha Tolbert:
That’s it precisely: Capitalism is fickle and doesn’t love aging straight white dudebros quite as unconditionally as Back In The Day—you’re being abandoned for someone younger, more vigorous, and a longer-term investment.
And your Precious Little Childhood, whenever it took place, was built on the ruins of someone else’s; that’s the way time works. (My introductory Batman was Adam West sucking his gut in, and comics fans were clutching their pearls over the Darknight Detective being turned into a kiddie show and stealth sitcom.)
Someone needs to make a cartoon laughing at these guys and call it “Man Babies: Entitled Whiners of the Universe”. Seriously tho, they really tell on themselves by throwing this much of a fuss over having to watch a few women when women and girls have rarely had heroes who were like them. Also, He-Man was awful even by the standards of the times.
Eh. I never watched the original but I enjoyed the first five episodes of this. Like Victorious Parasol I do think the She-Ra reboot was better overall (though there was too much “YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND!” for my tastes).
It’s my understanding that this isn’t a full reboot – that would be the 2002-2004 series – but a pseudo-continuation of the 1983-1984 series, set after a time skip… with the “pseudo-” caveat being due to numerous small changes to match the expectations and sensibilities of the target audience, as well as taking advantage of more fluid animation to do things which couldn’t realistically have been done in the original show. I haven’t been paying that much attention due to not being particularly interested, but I do make an effort to be aware of pop culture trends.
Note: When looking up the dates I found that there was another show called “The
New Adventures of He-Man” in 1990-1991. Apparently it was so unpopular that it fell into obscurity. Also the characters looked very different; Skeletor looked kind of like a yellow Gollum.
At least He-Man doesn’t need to put pronouns in his bio.
Lifelong Master of the Universe fan, 42-year-old straight white dude – and I loved what I have seen of the new series so far. So my other 40-something straight white dude friends.
Since I’m an avid MOTU toy collector, the YouTube algorithm is constantly recommending videos by these manbabies to me, and I have de-listed so many channels. At least they make their videos easy to recognize, with titles full of hyperbolic doom-saying and thumbnails with Teela’s head photoshopped onto He-Man’s body (I have seen at least three completely different videos do this).
But I’m sure their real objection is to inconsistencies with MOTU’s tight continuity. (/sarcasm, MOTU is famous for “let’s make it up as we go along,” with dozens of variant continuities and retcons.)
The complaints about “Why He-Man, you could have done this with She-Ra” as quite funny, as these supposed “devoted fans” have apparently never heard of the She-Ra reboot? Truly, these are devoted fans.
Though that also relates to the funniest thing about their rage: All the complaints of MOTU being “taken over” by “the SJWs.” My dudes, Lou Scheimer, the head of Filmation and executive producer of the original show (and the original She-Ra), was a total SJW, and actively pushed that “agenda” back in the 80s. The original shows were FILLED with messages about tolerance and caring about people, ending with PSAs where a hero would directly address the audience and be all “Don’t be a dick to people who are different from you, okay?”
Crying by people who have never actually watched He-Man or read the comics.
News Flash: He-Man was always like that! Maybe not the awful 2000s reboot, but the original sure was.
Heck, Prince Adam prided himself on his spice bread making skills! I especially like that the people of Eternia liked their Prince Adam so much, because he was well-read, kind, compassionate and not a warrior.
It’s kinda funny that the same types who tell us not to read too much into things when there is gay/lesbian subtext between two characters. But apparently, Teela having musles and a female friend means she’s gay? Haven’t watched it yet, but a friend of mine says the first episodes have no romance whatsoever.
You know what? I’m gonna watch it right now. I’ve already binged the three releases I wanted to see this weekend, anyway (Blood Red Sky, Kingdom: Ashin of the North and Sky Rojo season 2).
All these guys do is whine and complain. Imagine being so privileged that you think you’re justified in getting so butthurt about a more than 35 year old cartoon reboot that’s only changing to fit the times. There’s always the old stuff to watch.
For those looking for gay subtext between Teela and Andra, keep in mind that this is a show that doesn’t DO subtext. Everything is blatant. Everything is spelled out. The heroic male protagonist is called “He-Man”. His skeletal nemesis is called “Skeletor”. Skeletor’s evil companion is called “Evil-Lyn”. If Teela were gay, she would have been called Gaytina or something, with her trusty sidekick Lesboto.
At minimum, there would have been the line “She and I are more than friends” when they were first shown together. Probably followed by “We are a couple. We’re romantically attracted to each other because we’re both gay.”
So the same people who bitch and moan about how the left cancels everything, are doing their best to cancel He-Man. What a shocker.
So I know next to nothing about the show, but @Amtep you made me laugh for a good half minute with this:
Nobody’s going to mention the live action film with a young, not-yet-famous Courteney Cox?
OT, but is anyone else having problems tonight with page loads here getting hung up on “i2.wp.com” and “secure.gravatar.com”? I’m hoping I haven’t fucked something up with this new machine as I was just fiddling with the networking config not long ago.
Kevin Smith had a good interview about this whole thing.
Summary: fanboy Kevin tells fanboy whiners to get a grip and STFU.
https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/he-man-masters-of-the-universe-revelation-kevin-smith-netflix-1235026831/
And if you’re 40 and are having fits over a cartoon aimed at people 20-30 years younger than you — mostly CHILDREN — then you are a sad little man-boy who needs to evaluate where you’ve failed in life.
@Sylvia: agreed, I always got more of a gay vibe than a lesbian one from MOTU.
@Lakitha; also agreed. The hysteria over Elvis’ hips and the Beatles “long” haircuts looks stupid to the very “men” who are throwing hissy fits over He-Man. And, being a sensible woman, I greatly enjoy Lil Nas X’s videos. I like his style and sense of humor.
@Surplus: What I remember about that movie is Frank Langella, largely wasted behind the Skeletor mask.
“What I remember about that movie is Frank Langella, largely wasted behind the Skeletor mask.”
@GSS: He apparently had tremendous fun with the role, though.
80’s cartoons were created to sell toys. Yeah, I watched them. As did most of the other people in my age group. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling some nostalgia for them and for enjoying those 80’s cartoons. But come one, dudes. They were never important works of art that should never be tampered with and your fucking childhood wasn’t ruined by “woke” reboots.
@ Surplus
“OT, but is anyone else having problems tonight with page loads here getting hung up on “i2.wp.com” and “secure.gravatar.com”? I’m hoping I haven’t fucked something up with this new machine as I was just fiddling with the networking config not long ago.”
No, sorry. I hate the new computer shakedown business. Good luck with it.
@Nequam: thanks for the clip!