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.
Sometime 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?’.