He-Man and She-Ra – A Christmas Special

Like many males of my generation He-Man was big favourite of mine when I was young, so when I saw that the characters from the He-Man and it’s weeker follow up She-Ra (no relation to Alan) had come together for a special cash in holiday theme episode available on DVD I knew I had to watch it, and review it for you just for you.

Adora has returned to Eternia, where conveniently enough it is snowing, to celebrate her own and her twin brother Adam’s birthday with their parents. She’s also brought a bunch of her wimpy girly friends from Etheria with her to join in the fun. Seriously the reason no boy would be caught dead watching She-Ra is her awful supporting cast, with names like Mermista and Perfuma (yes really, Perfuma).

The plot starts when Orko starts screwing things about as usual, he launches Man-at-Arms’ new Sky Spy Rocket Ship, and somehow lands on Earth about two minutes later. On Earth he meets two extremely annoyingly cute children, Alishia and Miguel, who are lost in the woods. Naturally having just met Orko they follow him back to the Sky Spy to “get out of the cold” just as Man-at-Arms figures out how to bring the ship back to Eternia. Like good Christians the children proceed forced their Christmas beliefs on their new friends.

Of course, Christmas with He-Man and She-Ra wouldn’t be complete without everyone favourite villain Skeletor and no ones favourite villain Hordak. The villains have been commissioned by their boss, Horde Prime (who never appeared on screen), to kidnap the children and deliver them to him. You know rather than just killing them which would obviously be too easy and not very TV-Y7. Horde Prime believes their “disgusting Christmas spirit” is polluting his universe and after watching the kids for a couple of minutes it’s difficult to disagree as Alisha and Manuel are so nauseating you do hope that Skeletor and Horak will catch and brutally murder the children.

Skeletor and Hordak being bad guys in an 80′s cartoon are not allowed to work effectively together so they compete against each other to see who can kidnap the children first (which gives us an rare opportunity to see Hordak and Skeletor interact) which leads to children being in Skeletor’s care for most of later half of cartoon.

Alishia and Miguel seem to have strange effect on Skeletor. I’ll call this effect ‘cheap Christmas sentiment’. When the kids refuse to leave a Machine puppy behind, Skeletor does not destroy the dog with his staff as you would expect and hope, instead he kindly carries it for the kids. The puppy licks Skeletor’s jaws in thanks (or perhaps he quite rightly thought it was a nice juicy bit of bone) while the children explain Christmas to him;

Manuel: “Christmas is lots of fun. We get presents and we do a lot of fun things.”

Skeletor: “You mean you get in FIGHTS!”

Alisha: “No we do FUN things.”

Skeletor: “But fights are FUN.”

After this exchange Skeletor learns the sickeningly sweet true meaning of Christmas. It has such an effect on him that he wants to send the kids back home instead of sending them to Hoard Prime. Hordak attempts to grab the kids and pull them onto his spaceship but in a rare moment of bad assary Skeletor blasts the ship with his staff and sends the ship hurtling into the cosmos. Skeletor considers the repercussions of this action while the children hug him and He-Man and She-Ra stands right next to him taking the mickey out of the poor confused .

Now that they have successfully inflected the Christmas spirit on a new planet the kids are sent home back to their parents who are so relieved to see them they send them straight to bed without listening to why the kids where missing from several days and what happened to them while alone with Orko.

Overall, this Christmas special DVD is like a lot He-Man cheesy and horrible, but with added Christmas cheese and horribleness. The strange thing is it some of it works very well especially the parts with Skeletor being unable to stop himself helping the children. As stupid as the concept sounds Alan Oppenheimer’s vocal performance really sells it, and it is extremely funny.

I give this seasonal DVD four out of five Man-At-Arms.

Conor and Jet on the Radio

An vaguely interesting thing happened this week Conor was interviewed by Diane Youdale, former TV Gladiator Jet,  f or Radio Tees. Conor’s school was featured because they are growing their own food in their own garden. He’s a picture of Conor, Diane, and his Conor’s cousin Abi.

Conor and Jet

You can hear Conor’s interview below ;

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The full recording is available on BBC Listen again (UK Only) for the next few days.

The joy of Instant Messaging

Right, it’s been a long gap since the last blog, because of apathy, illness and work. I Usually would feel bad  about this, but not today for I have two reasons for this. The first reason is this Blogging without Obligation thing, and secondly according to Blogged.com, I’ve got a top blog. -

Aye, a few weeks back I got an email from Blogged.com telling me they have rated my site 8.6 out of ten.

c64GLeN @ obscureInternet.com at Blogged

My first thought is this some sort of con, as My blog is a bit rubbish and I’m not a good blogger by any means, but after checking the site it seems real enough, so I shall except the complaint with good faith and continue on with my mediocre bloggings.

Oh, I haven’t touch the new design of the site for about two weeks, I should really get on with that.

Remember the Secret Santa 2007, Well in a new an exciting development I’ve finally eaten the chewing gum. (Hey, that’s 8.6 out of ten blogging right there).

I had the old Amiga 1200 set up at the weekend, testing it out with the video capture card I’ve got. It is almost working perfectly using composite outputs except I’ve got a big border on the left hand of screen, which pushes the right hand side of the side of screen. I’m going to try routing through the TV and then using an S-Video cable to see if that resolves the border issue next weekend. If it does, I’ll be uploading some video of my old programming project like Plorrds, to YouTube.

VSometime you forget how good thing the simple things are. I’d forgotten how good Instant message could be until early this week when I had a couple of conversations that made me both laugh and relieve a some good memories. The first conversion with was with the forum’s Lazarus, but it was one of those you had to be there moments which had me laughing for a good 15 minutes and the second conversion was with my old flat mate Baz, in which we discussed out favourite C64 loading musics (Miami Vice), Max Headroom remix (Mahoney and Trace) David Whittaker track (Super Robin Hood, Trantor), and when I sent him Mike Post’s ‘The Rockford Files’ music (from the Favourite TV theme tune thread in the forum) we then got in discussed how great the theme from ‘V The original Mini-series’ was and how the show is better than V The Final Battle, and appalling cack ‘V – The Series’. Also did you know a ‘V – The Second Generation’ is in production, set twenty after the original mini-series and will ignore the other follow on shows? I have a feeling the new show will be a bit gash, but hey, I’m hoping I’m wrong. Anyway I’ve gone of topic, so to summarise Instant Message can be great and not just all ‘How R U?’.

Ironically I was listening to a remix of Max Headroom on Slayradio while typing the above, this time it was Wobbler’s mix which is also excellent, but was one we forgot to mention.

He-Man, and the Masters of the Universe.

I am Adam, Prince of Eternia, defender of the secrets of Castle Greyskull. This is Cringer, my fearless friend.

Fabulous secret powers were revealed to me the day I held aloft my magic sword and said: “By the power of Greyskull”

HE-MAN!

“I have the power!”

Cringer became the mighty Battle Cat. And I became He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe.

Only three others share this secret. Our friends the Sorceress, Man at Arms and Orko.

Together we defend Castle Greyskull from the evil forces of Skeletor.

HE-MAN!