“I Have the Power!”

On the bittersweet pleasures of watching “Masters of the Universe” with my son.

When my son was a four, my parents called me one day and said that they had found my old He-Man toys in the attic and wanted me to take them so they could make room. I protested that I didn’t have any space for old toys, but I ended up nevertheless with a box of action figures the next time they drove up to visit. The heavy plastic used in the original Masters of the Universe figures aged remarkably well and most looked the same as they did in the 1980s—and the minicomics packaged with them survived as well. For my son, it was love at first sight. He took to the giant hunks of 1980s plastic with a gusto matched only by the Imaginext superhero figures he soon outgrew. Over the next few months, my house became host to all of my old Masters of the Universe toys, including various vehicles and the large Castle Grayskull playset as my parents dug them out of the attic. Over the next few years, the collection grew as my son acquired new figures to supplement my old toys.

My original 1980s Skeletor and He-Man stand beside their 2026 counterparts in front of vintage Snake Mountain and Castle Grayskull playsets.

This would have warmed the hearts of the Mattel executives who developed the idea for the Masters of the Universe franchise in between 1979 and 1981 because they wanted a “generic Male Action Figure” that could be sold independently of movies. “A large part of the time boys spend in fantasy play revolves around aggression while they project their own personality into the role of the ‘good guy’ or hero,” an internal memo wrote. “Boys are attracted to strength, fierceness and super human powers.” The result was what a 1980 memo described as a combination of Frank Frazetta’s fantasy hero artwork “with parts of Conan, Flash Gordon and Star Wars.” He-Man would borrow from comics, too, with Prince Adam transforming into He-Man the same way Billy Batson turns into Shazam.

Wildly successful, Masters of the Universe sold more than 70 million toys in its first three years of production, from 1982 to 1985, bolstered by a 1983 Filmation cartoon series that critics of the time described as a 30-minute commercial for the toys. The height of the He-Man craze even saw the characters appear in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and perform at Radio City Music Hall. But too many brand extensions, from the world of He-Man’s sister She-Ra to the prequel land of Preternia, a widely panned flop of a 1987 film, and kids who had aged out of action figures led to the cancelation of the toy line in 1988.

I have some of toys from the final 1988 release, so I know I was still playing them that year, but eventually they disappeared into boxes in the attic, and around the age of nine, give or take, I repurposed the back half of Castle Grayskull, which was a more traditional castle shape than its skull-faced front half, as the home for my Dracula and Frankenstein action figures. I can’t say I thought too much about He-Man after that, aside from watching the 2002 revival cartoon when it was new and adding a few He-Man animation cels to my collection of cartoon art.

A He-Man animation cel hanging in my house.

My son loves He-Man because my parents happened to save my old toys, and I eventually realized I could save hundreds of dollars by letting my son play with them instead of buying him a whole set of Star Wars figures at $30 apiece. Ironically, that was the same reason my parents had gotten them in the first place: My childhood was at the tail end of the original He-Man craze, when the kids who bought the figures from 1982–1986 had aged out and my parents could pick up the figures at yard sales for pennies. But thanks to daily reruns of the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon series, all the kids still knew who He-Man was, and we would all play He-Man. But how many kids today have piles of old toys to introduce them to characters from another time? And even if they did, in today’s atomized media landscape, how many have friends who share the same interest? Among my son’s friends, it’s hard to find two who watch the same streaming shows, at least beyond a couple of big YouTube channels. And who is going to be nostalgic for old Unspeakable prank videos thirty years from now?

It’s been five years since my parents dropped off my old He-Man toys, and my now nine-year-old son is nearing the end of playing with action figures. But Masters of the Universe remained a constant throughout. They survived his Batman phase and his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phase, and he was quite excited by “Turtles of Grayskull,” the 2024 crossover between Masters of the Universe and the Ninja Turtles. Even this year, he still wanted to add new figures to his collection, and a few months ago we watched the entirety of the 2002 Masters of the Universe revival cartoon series together. It was my son’s enthusiasm for He-Man that revived my own interest after a very long time.

Naturally, we were both excited about the new Masters of the Universe movie, which hit theaters this week, and I took my son to see it this weekend.

When we arrived at the theater to see the film, I couldn’t help but compare the experience to the first Masters of the Universe movie I saw. I was six years old in 1987, and that year’s Dolph Lundgren-led Masters was the first movie I can recall seeing in a movie theater. I remember my parents taking me to the mall, and I remember having to stand in line to wait to buy tickets, and I can remember how disappointing I found the movie, which was nothing like the cartoon my kindergarten self and most of my friends watched every afternoon. In 2026, most of the waiting involved trying to get the Regal Cinemas website to accept a discount code, only for some vague “booking fee” and a weekend surcharge to turn a 30% off voucher into seventy-five cents in savings. Eventually, I managed to make it work and get tickets.

My son and I both loved the film, albeit for different reasons, but I am not sure how many other kids will end up He-Man fans. In the screening we attended, my son and one teenager in the back were the only kids in the audience, and graying beards and beer guts suggested that nearly everyone else in the sparsely filled theater was over the age of forty. And almost all of them were male. (Mirroring my experience, Variety reported that 66 percent of the first-weekend audience were male, and 40 percent were over the age of 45.)

Masters of the Universe flopped with a gross of only $29.3 million in its opening weekend, a respectable but not incredible gross for a film with a budget seven times that amount. It’s difficult not to think that Mattel trusted too much in younger audiences loving He-Man by osmosis, despite pricing their toys for adult collectors (classic-style Masters toys average nearly $30 apiece, while movie tie-in toys, belatedly in Walmart a couple of weeks ahead of the film were priced at a kid-friendly $9.50) and providing only one child-friend He-Man media product (the reimagined 2021 CGI Netflix series) in the past quarter century.

It really feels like, as a branding exercise to bring in new fans, Masters of the Universe would have been better served by being a ten-episode Prime Video series than a PG-13 movie. More kids would probably see it that way, and that would drive more toy sales—if, that is, there were toys to buy. The movie doesn’t seem to be launching any major new toy line, and the handful of movie tie-in figures at Walmart seemed aimed more at collectors than kids.

And that’s a bit of a shame because the movie we did get was pretty much everything that a kid from the 1980s would want a He-Man movie to be.

Nicholas Galitzine as He-Man in “Masters of the Universe” (2026)

The new Masters movie retells the story of He-Man with a small twist: In this version, Prince Adam’s mother and the sorceress who guards Grayskull send the ten-year-old to Earth to protect him from Skeletor’s conquest of Eternia. Fifteen years later, Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) is a sad-sack working a human resources job in Oklahoma City and pining for his home on Eternia. He isn’t shy about telling people in his life about it, and they think he’s nuts. But when he is reunited with his Power Sword, it sends a signal into the heavens, and his childhood friend Teela comes from Eternia to bring him back to join the resistance to Skeletor, who has reduced the planet to ashes. (Why the defeated Masters never retreated to Earth to escape Skeletor if it is so easy for them to get there is left unaddressed.)

On Eternia, the bumbling Adam eventually comes to discover his power, and, by becoming He-Man, he inspires the demoralized remaining Masters of the Universe to rise up again and take on the evil of Skeletor. It should surprise no one how the movie ends, or that our hero rides off to further adventures.

Director Travis Knight, himself a longtime franchise fan, created a film that balanced humor and adventure with heart, evoking the look and feel of the original toys and the 1980s Filmation animated series. Online chatter complained that the movie was too silly, but it’s He-Man—the story of a nearly naked muscle man battling a cackling queer-coded diva of a villain across a giant rainbow-tinted world with the help of friends with names like, well, Fisto and Ram-Man. Campiness is baked into the concept. Indeed, Master of the Universe resembled in look and in tone the beloved 1966 Adam West Batman series, which similarly presented itself to kids as a straightforward if amusing adventure story and to adults as a campy comedy.

If the 1966 Batman was many a child’s introduction to superheroes, Masters of the Universe in its many forms has always been a child’s first introduction to sword-and-planet fantasy. The 2026 adaptation may not be as serious as a Marvel movie, but, really, in what world is a man who turns into a giant green monster in purple tights suddenly the measure of dramatic gravitas? Skeletor is no more ridiculous than Red Skull, or He-Man than the Incredible Hulk. Marvel movies try to flatter their audience into thinking kids’ fare is serious adult drama, in keeping with the rising esteem of comic books; no one would make that argument for a property rooted in toys, which still carry a whiff of the juvenile, even if 28 percent of toys worldwide are purchased by adult collectors—now the single largest demographic for toy sales.

The movie is not all silly, of course. I will admit that the moment where Adam lifts his Power Sword and transformed for the first time into He-Man was unexpectedly moving. The heavens swirl with storm clouds, a funnel of light envelops the hero, and he metamorphoses into the great hero. As corny as a shout of “I have the power!” might seem to adult ears, my son was transfixed, and for me that scene evoked on film how it felt to play with Masters of the Universe toys as a small child, imagining the greatness that kids know lies within them, before the real world comes to grind it away. I choked up a little bit remembering what it was like to be a kid.

The story of Adam is basically the return to that sense of childhood wonder—leaving behind the dull world of jobs and rent and “living for the weekend and counting down the days until your next vacation,” as one character put it, and embracing the fantasy, imagination, and joy of childhood.

Masters of the Universe is a great movie for parents—OK, fathers—to share with their kids, and that’s probably why it flopped. While at 45 I am on the young end of original He-Man fans and on the old end for parents of young children, the fathers who loved He-Man as kids mostly have children of their own who are now teenagers or young adults. The movie should have come out ten years ago.

I couldn’t help but feel a little sad when the movie ended. Masters of the Universe came out at just the right time for my son and me. In a year or two, he will be too big for toys, and He-Man and Castle Grayskull will be packed away for another thirty years. And soon enough, he won’t want to see movies with his dad anymore, and certainly not live-action cartoons with talking tigers and magic swords. He is nine years old now, halfway to adulthood, and he is already reading books for much older boys and losing interest in kids’ movies. I am all too aware that this summer is probably the last time my son will get excited about He-Man. I’m glad we could share it this summer, when Masters of the Universe still means something more than a memory for us both.