Fans are weird. In my not particularly toxic but illustrative little arm of the Star Wars fandom galaxy, there are people in their mid-40s to -50s arguing ad nauseam on forums about how fan restorations of the original films should be colour-timed.
Some folks who would have been younger than 10 at the time of the first film coming out insist that this or that fan choice for the tint of the Tantive IV hallway is wrong, and should be less blue, say, because that’s “not how they remember it.” They’re almost certainly misremembering, but that doesn’t stop anybody.
Fry: “Married? Jennie can’t get married!” Leela: “Why not? It’s clever, it’s unexpected.” Fry: “But that’s not why people watch TV! Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared.”
“When Aliens Attack”, S1, ep 12 - first aired November 7, 1999.
Look, I like how Kevin Smith writes and stuff, but I am not going to bother with this. I hated the toys as a kid and the commercial disguised as a cartoon didn’t interest me. I was full in on Advanced Dungeons and Dragons at the time, a Trekkie who thought himself too good for those action figures, so to me He-Man (and GI Joe and Transformers, for that matter) are gaudy Reagan Era crap that only jerks and mundanes fell for.
How old were you then? From that description you sound older than what I would have considered the core Master of the Universe audience. I never had any myself, but as far as I remember they were popular from kindergarten to early grade school.
Yeah, that’s the thing. I was about 12 or 13 when they came out. Just outside of the age group. Still into Legos, and I had just discovered lead figures. So I was just old enough to have friends who got them, and older friends who sneered at them.
Unlike the She-Ra reboot, he knew He-Man fans were die-hards who never lost interest in their boyhood fave, and he set out to please them.
Which is why this held no interest for me, as someone who definitely lost interest in He-Man once I reached the ripe old age of, like, four, and only enjoyed it in adulthood as camp trash and a source of memes.
However, the fact that this series has misogynist dipshits up in arms is actually making me curious to give it a watch…
Instead I’m going to go with drag the fuckers and/or then leave them to stew in their misery. But then I’m less than keen on giving in to the childish tantrums or toxic assholes.
I had no interest in the show until I heard the pissbabies were angry at it, especially after they were crowing that this would be the proper sequel that She-Ra wasn’t. And it’s OK, I had a good time with it but it’s utterly unessential. If you have no emotional connection to He-Man or 80s nostalgia it’s probably not worth the time.
This is not to hate on He-Man - it’s not my cup of tea, but for many it obviously was - but I wasn’t a fan. So when I saw the name Teela, my first thought was to wonder hopefully how Teela Brown could be fit into He-Man.
Then again, we already got an upgraded screen adaptation of Teela Brown in the character of Domino.
You missed the worst part of all this. In an “actually, it’s about ethics in gaming journalism” twist, the [malicious, spiteful, or overbearing woman] manbabies are claiming their hatred isn’t because Teela is the main character—they claim they hate it because “KEVIN SMITH LIED!!!”
Someone named Clownfish spoiled the show like a year ago and Smith, attempting to put the rabbit back in the hat, decided to vehemently and repeatedly claim the spoilers weren’t true, when in fact they were. So now you get idiotic online discussions that go something like this:
“What did you think of the new He-Man show?”
“Good animation. Decent voice work. Ok story.”
“So you liked it?”
“Hell no! It’s an abomination because KEVIN SMITH LIED!!!”
See, it’s not about misogyny. It’s about betrayal most foul!
This got a bigger reaction than I expected. I see this less as letting the assholes win. I come at it more from the point of view that this kind of idealized nostalgia is itself a problem, it becomes a box in which new content must fit. None of the IP I fell in love with as a child was a reboot. In greater or lesser quality, they were new stories. I think the act of rebooting a franchise/beloved toy commercial contains within it the seeds of the toxic culture we’re discussing. Anyway, It’s not a hill I’m going to die on. There have been some reboots that I think were great. Many are not. I’ve been around enough toxic fans in my life that I am generally a happier person when I’m engaging with new content.
I don’t believe for a moment that all of those frothing people are “hardcore fans”. Just like with Star Wars, Star Trek, She-Ra, etc. there are people who don’t give a flying flick about the original/source material, they’re just jumping on the latest vehicle to rant about how “wokeness” and “sjw agenda” ruins everything.
(Watch out for them in the new Dune movie too, when they realize that Kynes is now a black woman, and somehow that ruins everything despite Kynes being a character whose skin color and gender literally doesn’t matter whatsoever.)
Even in the so-called “Golden Age of Cinema” a huge portion of the entertainment out there was a reboot, an adaptation or both. The 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz was no less than the eighth Oz adaptation to hit the screen.
So there’s a very good chance that some of the IP you fell in love with as a kid was indeed a reboot, but you never realized it because it was one of the reboots that was good enough that it came to eclipse the original.
Even if they weren’t reboots, they were probably built on already existing ideas about what stories were good for children based on our culture and what was considered profitable for corporations. There is very little novel in the world of mass culture.
I think the problem is this idea that by being among millions upon millions of people who watched a show that could not have been more mercenary if it tried a generation ago you somehow become a stakeholder in the franchise as long as you feel strongly enough that you should. The original is still around. They can watch that all day long and skip the new one. People are not owed canonization of their personal childhood nostalgia.
