TV: She-Ra: Princess of Power – A Quick Look

 

She-Ra: Princess of Power (1985-1986), 93 episodes

Filmation’s She-Ra: Princess of Power is a spin-off of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. It features Adora, Prince Adam’s twin sister, who was kidnapped as an infant and brought to the planet Etheria. Adora now leads a rebellion against the Horde, which rules the planet. She-Ra has He-Man’s strength and agility plus a large number of seemingly needless extra powers, including animal telepathy, healing, and the ridiculous ability to transform her sword into pretty much anything (sword to blanket, sword to racket and sword to digger are a few of the sillier examples).

She-Ra continues He-Man’s focus on a strong female character. There, we had Teela; here we have Adora/She-Ra. Unfortunately, the rest of the characters are fairly poor. Part of the problem is that the IQ of nearly every character besides She-Ra seems low (especially the villains; even Skeletor’s bumbling minions could find a bone occasionally). Just because a show is for five year olds doesn’t mean the characters have to have the mental abilities of five year olds. There’s no Man-At-Arms equivalent here; leading the rebellion is like babysitting a bunch of children sometimes.

Many of She-Ra’s characters feel like cheap copies of He-Man characters. Shadow Weaver is the poor man’s Evil-Lyn, Grizzlor is the poor man’s Beast Man, Kowl is an annoying version of Orko (while Madam Razz is the Jewish grandmother’s Orko), and so forth. Hordak isn’t quite a poor man’s Skeletor, but he is strictly middle management. Bow actually grows on you in spite of his outfit and mustache. He-Man himself wanders by occasionally, and when he does, we usually get one of the better episodes.

The writing on She-Ra is noticeably poorer than it was on He-Man, which is surprising, given that the two series share quite a few writers. Nearly every episode is padded with needless dialogue. She-Ra is also considerably less funny than He-Man was. While He-Man had some genuinely funny characters – notably Cringer and Skeletor – She-Ra has none (although there are some genuinely annoying characters– notably Kowl and Mantenna). Worst of all, something like two-thirds (no, seriously, two-thirds) of the episodes are rescue stories. Just about every rebel character (including She-Ra) has to get bailed out of the Fright Zone (and other places once in a while, just to mix things up) numerous times. This may have something to do with the prevalence of low-IQ characters; in any event, the way the series goes suggests to the viewer that actually overthrowing the Horde isn’t very high on the rebellion’s to-do list. Oh, and there’s air in space, apparently (“Assault on the Hive”).

Since She-Ra’s target audience was girls, there’s a bit of romance here (there was none in He-Man); it was a good idea, and as far as I’m concerned, there could have been more; it tended to freshen things up. A little freshening is sorely needed; She-Ra recycles some really worn-out old stories (including some that were used in He-Man), like the old hit-my-head-and-got-amnesia bit. We even get the ridiculous fly-around-the-world-to-go-back-in-time business copied straight from Superman. Several stories have frame narrators – two of whom, strictly speaking, reveal She-Ra’s identity to their audiences in their stories. She-Ra generally tries to teach good (if simplistic) morals, although “The Bibbet Story” and other episodes teach kids that they should sacrifice their moral ideals and ethical beliefs for violence under certain circumstances.

She-Ra suffers from a deficiency of voice actors. For the most part, the regular voice cast consists of three women and two men. Most of them do a good job, but there just aren’t enough voices to go around, especially since three of these actors worked on He-Man. To try to compensate, She-Ra scrapes the barrel by giving nearly every villain (as well as a number of rebels) either a speech impediment or an annoying vocal tic. This gets tiresome in a quick hurry.

The music is a high point of the series. It uses most of the great themes from He-Man while adding an eclectic assortment of new pieces. The art is also good, especially for a Filmation series. Since it uses models from ­He-Man, there’s plenty of stock animation to draw upon (no pun intended), freeing up resources for plenty of new animation. And the backgrounds are particularly good; the villains’ lairs are so sinister looking that they contrast sharply with the clownish behavior of the villains themselves.

Obviously, it’s hard to evaluate She-Ra without comparing it to He-Man, to which it is noticeably inferior. But She-Ra is not without its own merits, which are easier to perceive when the show is watched in small doses (so that the viewer does not, say, catch five straight episodes where She-Ra has to rescue one of her friends from the Fright Zone because he/she did something stupid and immature). When it’s good it’s very, very good, but most of the time, it’s mediocre.

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe always held my interest, even as an adult. She-Ra: Princess of Power struggles at times to do so, and often it makes me wish I was watching He-Man instead.

My favorite episodes:

1. “Sweet Bee’s Home”

2. “The Price of Freedom”

3. “The Inspector”

4. “My Friend, My Enemy”

5. “Into the Dark Dimension”

I give the whole thing a 6.