Netflix has really decided to go all in on Masters of the Universe, offering two different series based on He-Man as well as a spinoff She-Ra. And they are not done yet, as there's more coming, including a live-action movie being made by Aaron and Adam Nee.
But doing live action with Masters of the Universe isn't an easy thing to do, as it's the probably cheesiest (said with so much affection for both He-Man and cheese) of the major Saturday morning cartoons from the 80's. How do you make an audience take characters named Extendar, Snout Spout, Tung Lashor or Fisto seriously?
Well, Aaron and Adam Nee has decided to try to recreate the magic of the original series, rather than keeping it somewhat ironic. Speaking to Slashfilm, Aaron says:
"And that's what we are trying to hold onto is, what was that sparking inside of us, as kids? And so, we want that, at its core, that very basic human connection that we were feeling while not going, "Well, we're grownups now. So we can't really have a character named Ram-Man, we can't really have Fisto." Instead it's like, "No, we're going to have that." How do you pull in like all of the kind of just wildness and craziness, but do it with love and affection?
It's a wild, crazy property, and we wanted to keep it wild and crazy. Like, you had just wacky characters, but what we also wanted to keep is what it was to experience those toys and those cartoons as kids. Whereas kids, we took it completely seriously and trying to tap into, what was it that it was making us feel then? That empowerment that made us feel, and that sort of wide-eyed wonder of the incredible things that can happen, and the incredible worlds that you can encounter. And so we want that wildness, but also the sort of reverence and love of it, that we saw it with through the filter of our child eyes...."
That sounds like pretty much all we could ever ask for, don't you think?