I must confess that I was really excited for MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. My childhood had its share of dumb cartoons and toys, but those spring-loaded muscle dudes were the ones that power-punched deepest into my brain. I don’t have strong opinions about the Eternian canon or whatever, it’s not holy scripture. It’s more like an incredible mural that I invest my own meaning into. The character designs and concepts, and also the overall aesthetic of fantasy barbarian paintings mixed with cyborgs and colorful vehicles shaped like spiders and sharks and buzzsaws and shit… it just makes me happy to think about it. I mean, there’s a castle with a giant skull on the front of it, and they gave that to the good guy! Even though by all rights the bad guy should’ve had it because he is a skull!
My attachment to Masters of the Universe isn’t about childhood nostalgia – it’s about a very specific, timeless vibe that came out of Mattel artists brainstorming crazy toy gimmicks, and the studio that made Fat Albert reverse engineering a cartoon out of them, together stumbling across one of the most potent mixes of stupid and awesome ever formulated. So I’ve had many years of anticipation as one movie adaptation after another has been dunked in the Evil Horde Development Slime Pit. I didn’t expect the world. I just figured I would get a kick out of whatever they came up with because even if it was bad it would be a modern movie where, like, Trap Jaw fights Ram Man. It would make me chuckle, at least.
Then a dangerous thing happened: they actually made the movie, and with a director that seemed likely to do a good job. Travis Knight is the head of the stop motion studio Laika, director of KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS, and he also did BUMBLEBEE, the one actually good Transformers movie, the one that opens by capturing the Cybertronian cartoon shit Michael Bay was never interested in, then turns into a new thing, a heartfelt ‘80s-set teen movie IRON GIANT with a very likable Hailee Steinfeld befriending the titular alien robot Volkswagen. We can get into Knight’s peculiar background later, but his movies so far have been really good.
I was concerned when I read a plot summary that sounded like a GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY rip off (this He-Man grew up on Earth), but the trailers made the concept look okay, gave me that excitement of seeing Mekaneck and shit in live action, and when there started being good buzz from people not invested like me I thought holy shit, what if this is really good?
MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE has a great cast, an amazing theme song by Daniel Pemberton featuring Brian May on guitar, it’s well designed, has some big cool sets and colorful costumes, gives me the joy of putting these ridiculous characters in live action, giving them cool super-powered fights. It’s so much of what I wanted. But I think they fucked it up pretty badly.
Weird, but true: turns out you can make a TRANSFORMERS movie that’s sweet and funny, with sensible, reasonably concise storytelling that never feels like it’s whacking you in the face with a frying pan, and has characters you can care about. Even a human female one! All you gotta do is get the director of KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS and a script by Christina Hodson (SHUT IN, BIRDS OF PREY).
