He-Man and the Masters of the Universe/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adaptation Displacement: Almost all the canon nowadays comes from the Filmation animated series, instead of the original pack-in mini-comics. Even the mini-comics themselves began adapting their own canon to fit with the cartoon.
  • Alien Scrappy: Many fans have a particularly strong distaste for Orko, but others think he was adorable, including Paul Dini, who draws pictures of the guy in his spare time.
  • Ear Worm: The 80's opening. Man, it's so hammy that it's delightful.
  • Evil-Lyn Is Sexy:
    • Oh yes she is!
    • As well as Keldor, before becoming Skeletor.
  • Fan Yay: The main character is a buff, handsome man running around in little more than a loincloth.
  • Ho Yay:
    • "By the power of G(r)ayskull!"
    • Prince Adam is quiet and unassuming, wears pink, has a secret he can't tell anyone, has only one female friend and is strictly platonic with her, likes cats, and transforms into a tanned body-builder in leather and loin-cloth by waving around a phallic object. Do the math.
    • Characters named Ram-Man and Fisto. Fisto.
    • The fan-video "Fabulous Secret Powers".
    • It doesn't help that Prince Adam in the 2002 series was voiced by the openly gay Cam Clarke.
    • All that manly facial hair...
    • I Love the 80s lampooned this subtext in its review of MOTU, with clips of Prince Adam talking about protecting his "secret" interspersed with suggestively looping footage of Beast-Man grappling He-Man from behind.
    • The New Adventures of He-Man almost seemed to embrace this, by changing He-Man's outfit to be tights and a leather strap across his chest, giving him a ponytail, and having Adam speak with a pronounced lisp. Adam also has what can only be pigtails.
  • Memetic Mutation:
  • Narm: When Skeletor and Beast-Man are flying around turning things to stone, Man-at-arms stands up to them and shouts, 'YOU DON'T SCARE ME!' while firing his blaster at their ship. This is supposed to be dramatic?
  • The Scrappy:
    • Orko. Dear God, Orko.
    • He's much more tolerable in the 2002 series, but then, so is everyone. At least he doesn't doom Eternia on a daily basis.
    • In the 80s series, his mistakes were sometimes irritating, but almost never dangerous. The 2002 series, despite being better in many things, was worse in this one. 2002 Orko could have killed somebody with those statues.
    • Blame Man-At-Arms. Orko's statue spell was working just fine until he got yelled at and lost his concentration.
    • There's also the fact that Man-At Arms physically grabbed Orko by the hands, disrupting the spell.
    • To be fair, he's more of a Base Breaker: while some fans see him as The Scrappy, others think he's the cutest thing ever.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Season 2 of the 2002 series saw the formal introduction of the Snake Men, who were also bent on conquering Eternia. They battled He-Man and the Masters often, but despite being a rival faction, they had no real interaction with Skeletor's Evil Warriors. Their only clash was in "Rise of the Snake Men, Part 1" - a battle some saw as disappointing due to the Snake Men curb stomping the Evil Warriors (who had already been wearied from battle with the Masters). (Reportedly, the unproduced 40th episode would've seen Skeletor leading an offensive against what was left of their ranks.)
  • Unfortunate Implications: The original series and toyline's He-Man emblem was a cross patée resembling the German Iron Cross. A statuesque blue-eyed blonde wearing an Iron Cross and calling himself "Master of the Universe"...WW2 anyone?
    • Especially bad after you watch "Education of Death" by Walt Disney. Why? What's the hair and eye color of the main character?
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