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  And we're off! It should be noted that the opening credits for this fiasco was way ahead of its time on the importance front - we're treated to stills of the characters with the voice actors getting their name recognition, while in the background the corniest and most addictive song ever blasts. When I found this thing a few months ago, I spent three hours listening to the mp3 of it on repeat, feeling progressively more and more like a master of the universe and less and less like a 103-year-old. The credits serve a purpose - they lay to rest any potential nagging doubts over who's voicing Hordak. Its of course George Dicenzo, who when you add up his appearances on Go-Bot movies, Swiss Family Robinson, and the part of Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi in the Charles Manson made-for-tv movie Helter Skelter, you begin to notice that he has a pretty fajoobaduked up resume. Suffice to say, this is his greatest role, since Hordak's arm can transform into a cannon solely used to blow up his own equipment in frustration. But, we'll get to that in due time...
  The Sorceress, who prior to this flick hadn't really given us any indication that she had any emotion, dreams about some vile creature robbing babies and running through portals. If only I reviewed this when that whole Elian thing was going down, I could've made a time sensitive joke sure to be quoted by Entertainment Weekly. The Sorceress wakes from the dream to find a mysterious sword floating around in midair and attempting to point to one of the enigmatic doors that litter the castle. Pretty standard day at Greyskull, so don't think the Sorceress finds any of this a little odd.
As it would turn out, the dream and the floating sword were all a sign - there's something the Sorceress has been waiting for for years, and it looks like today's the big day. So she calls over Prince Adam and tells him to go into another dimension with the new sword. She refuses to divulge any details whatsoever about his mission - who he's looking for, where he's going, what he's supposed to be doing...but then again, the Sorceress never liked to make things easy for Adam. Its her that demanded his true identity remain a secret, despite every possible fraction of evidence pointing to him being He-Man. Basically, because of this cruel rule, Prince Adam was constantly reminded that his family were a bunch of bloomin' idiots. Adam will be talking to his mother about Skeletor's latest attack, step out for a minute, and dissapear for hours on end when a guy who looks exactly like him takes care of business. Either his parents aren't too astute, or they're pretty negligent with giving the kid some attention.
Nevertheless, Adam knows he shouldn't defy a woman who can morph into a big colorful eagle, so he accepts his mission.
  This new dimension Adam's at looks a lot like Wonka's Chocolate Factory, only the orange midgets have been replaced by a bunch of depressed old men wearing rags. Why Adam didn't transform into his more powerful self the second he stepped foot into this place is beyond me, maybe he's just happy his outfit finally seems to fit in somewhere. Adam might be a nice guy, but we've seen the way he looks at Teela. He's definitely not wearing pink by choice, it has to be some sort of royal rule that the prince must endure wearing a horrible shirt and lavendar underwear for decades in an effort to prove his worth by the time Randor kicks the bucket and passes the helm.
Now remember, Adam and Cringer have no clue why they're actually here. They don't even know where 'here' is. But, they gotta start somewhere, so they spot some sort of alien saloon and head on in.
  Meet the Horde Troopers. Adam watches from afar as this big metal monsters wreak havoc on the villagers - particularly the one playing the harp. As a pretty cardinal rule in cartoon lore, the bad guys don't like anyone who plays a harp. So they rough him up a bit, which isn't easy to complain about since the guy honestly was a pretty awful musician. Still, its evil to halt the aspiring musical expression of the innocents, so Adam decides to take a stand. Luckily for him, he finds a little help in someone who manages to one-up his outfit on the swishy scale...
  Bow is a rebel, this time with a cause. See, these Horde Troopers are just the henchmen of the evil Hordak, who's taken control of this whole place and treats its citizens really, really poorly. I don't mean just with taxes and crap like that, the guy steals dozens of 'em at a time, locks them up in a dungeon to die, and misinterprets his crime as forcing the people into slave labor. I'm not sure what Hordak gains by putting dirty old men in a cave, but in Eternia and its sovereign dimensions, the bad guys are pretty fond of calling anyone they capture 'slaves'. Since Bow is part of the rebellion to stop the Horde, he can't let the troopers continue to grab people by their shirts and stand there in silence for minutes on end. He and Adam team up to kick their asses - making them Horde enemies #1 & 2, but conversely, forming a hot new friendship with chemistry unseen until a few years later when Larry got a little visit from his cousin Balki. Meanwhile, over at Horde headquarters...
  Roll call! Hordak addresses his minions very carefully and by name, obviously hoping that the audience will have a good enough memory to know what toys they're looking for. The villains are myriad and ridiculous as usual. Some examples of them are: Mantennae is a bug/bat with four legs, pop-out eyes, and the ability to shoot rays that make people fall down. Leech is a green monster with suction cups all over him. Catra is the chick with a waistsize smaller than your fist who meows her way through conversations before donning a mask and turning into a ferocious purple panther. Scorpina's a transsexual with claws. There's others too, but I think we've safely established that Hordak's troops aren't all so uniform.
Hordak explains that a mysterious stranger and some rebels are causing problems for his plans, and that the baddies would do themselves good by killing them all with extreme predjudice. For those unfamiliar with Hordak, he only showed up on the He-Man side of things a few times. He was the main villain on the She-Ra cartoon - a pretty smooth move considering the fact that he looked cool and had enough ties to He-Man that boys who usually had a stance against girly toons would watch the show. Aside from the incessant snorting and awful success rate, Hordak is far less comical than Skeletor, who believe it or not, has a secret past with our new bad guy. We'll find out a little more on that later, its truly a historic moment. You know, if you're into that sorta thing.
  In the woods, Bow introduces this guy in a pink shirt to the rest of the rebels, prompting more gossip talk than any crimes the Horde were committing, believe me. Once Adam sees the group that's supposed to save the world, he's not too shocked that the Horde's been running rampant over everyone. Aside from a few superhumans like the above-pictured Glimmer, its just a buncha farmers and little elves. Eternian villains aren't the brightest bunch, but this is just no competition at all.
While Adam is a relatively convincing guy - he can't seem to get the rebels to realize they have a better chance at transforming into talking pigs with exaggerated snouts than beating any of Hordak's forces, so he just gives up and joins in their little plan to take back their homeworld. By the way, he still hasn't turned into He-Man. I really think Adam at some point back up the road developed some sort of inferiority complex because essentially he was useless until calling upon the power of Greyskull. In his mind, this might be his only chance to do something right as Adam the man, not Adam the He-Man. I love when plays on words work out so well in analogies, but I'm not fooling anyone here by insinuating that Adam's anything other than a one-dimensional good guy with a pretty decent complexion.
  Standoff! Its the Horde versus virtually every early Plymouth settler in a fight to the death! Actually, no one dies, because little kids don't understand death. That's a fairly big animated taboo - especially in older shows. The closest we really got to a big time death was Optimus Prime, but he was just a robot, and eventually was ressurected anyway. Personally, I'm on the side against that kinda stuff in kids movies...for those of us unwilling to accept that these types of programs were geared for children, sure, death scenes and overdrama look cool. But I don't think problematic life lessons should be learned from He-Man and the Smurfs. Let them teach us to share and be friendly, chalk the other lessons learned up to homelife. Coincidentally, proving the point, Duke was originally supposed to die in the GI Joe movie, until cooler heads prevailed and they just put him in a coma. Again, I'm with those kinds of decisions - parents who took their kids to these movies weren't expecting having to explain some of the less attractive elements of life because of it. Sure, maybe its a good segue, but that's up to Mom and Dad, not Chris Latta or Seaspray. Anyway, where was I?
  The villains get the upper hand in the early goings, and take a look at the cute blonde up above. That's Adora, Hordak's force captain who doesn't realize that the Horde is evil. See, He-Man's family are a bunch of freakin morons. Adora somehow believes that a bunch of farmers would even try attacking monsters using pitchforks and spoons for a criminal cause, all the while ignoring the fact that her subordinates keep referring to beating on the helpless as 'fun'. Look the other way, Adora. It'll all just go away.
Meanwhile, Leech proves just how important to the Horde cause he is by massaging Glimmer's temples. She's been pretty stressed out by this whole rebellion thing, you know.
  Ultimately, the good guys overcome the odds and knock out Hordak's troops, in pretty rudimentary fashion - the elves throw some stuff at Mantennae, causing him to sneeze. The sneeze was apparently powerful enough to warrant Mantennae flopping twenty feet back into a concrete wall. Adam finally transforms into He-Man, and throws Scorpina into a fruit cart full of watermelons, which for some reason is directly adjacent to the Horde's slave labor transporter. This place is somehow even more esoteric than Eternia, where all the caves have shackles and all the villains have a dense mountaintop to shout evil intentions to the sky. While all this is going on, He-Man chases Adora into a secluded room, and if you didn't already know of the nepotism aspect of this movie, you'd think something completely out of hand was about to take place.
  He-Man notices that the sword the Sorceress gave him to bring glows when it sees Adora - so of course, he immediately realizes that Adora can't possibly be evil. Remember, the choices of the magic sword are infallible. Unfortunately, Adora is a big dummy who thinks He-Man and the rest of the rebels are the real bad guys, so she's reluctant to believe anything he says. Kudos to the team on the development of the Adora/She-Ra character - it is what it is, but for the era and past exploits of the show, they did a great job with that.
  One of those blasted Horde Troopers knocks He-Man out with one zap, totally negating those six thousand other times when we've seen entire mountains drop on the guy's head without a hint of damage. Its like He-Man has this one square-inch weakspot that one out of every thousand bad guys manage to locate. The Horde Trooper's unfamiliar with Eternia, so he doesn't realize how big of an accomplishment this actually was.
With that, He-Man is now a prisoner of the Horde. The rebels totally forgot that he was there, and have already retreated back to the woods. Either that, or they just don't give a shit about He-Man. I'm not so sure why they would, since Adam never told any of them his true identity. Would you risk your life for some half-naked guy who just happened to stumble onto your side of the battle? I'm surprised none of the rebels shoot him. But that's the way it goes - He-Man is now a prisoner, or as Hordak would say, a slave laborer. Meanwhile, Adora holds on to the magic sword, which she sums up pretty succinctly as 'curious'.
  A little time to reflect by the show's characters gives me time to explain the She-Ra show. As if you can't tell what we're building to here, this movie was made basically to spinoff the She-Ra series. At the time, Mattel, who owned the franchise, felt that the She-Ra line would completely dominate the toy market, since most girls toys were basic Barbies and Mattel was certain little girls wanted dolls with weapons. Obviously, Mattel's theories weren't quite as on-the-mark as they had hoped - She-Ra did pretty well, but it certainly didn't break much new ground in the industry. To be honest, I only vaguely recall what went on on the show itself, but I do remember being pretty fond of it. Then again, I like Michelle Branch and Estelle Getty, so maybe I'm a pretty bad gage for the boy/girl crossover possibilities. In any event, the people who did love the show loved it enough to still hold on to their memories today, and if you look hard enough, you can find most of the toys and some of the episodes on tape. As always, try .
Now, back to the show. The rebels start planning their rescue, while Hordak hears the warning of his most trusted assistant, Shadow Weaver. For a ghost demon, she's got pretty supple breasts. Shadow Weaver explains to Hordak that she has a funny feeling Adora might be having doubts about her role in the Horde - and she couldn't have hit the nail more on the head if Adora didn't walk in immediately following this shouting 'SHE'S RIGHT!' He-Man had implored that Adora go see what the Horde was really like for herself a bit earlier, and now, she's going to get a severe wakeup call.
  Adora had lived her whole life thinking that disgusting monsters, beastly machine warriors, and the guy with the pig skull for a face were the good guys. Finding out the truth really hurts sometimes. In this case, Adora watches as a trooper throws a poor slave into a river for no particular reason - certainly not the exploits of a 'hero'. But she thought to herself, maybe this was just an isolated incident. I mean, we've got our police...surely not all of them are as virtuous as we think. Maybe this was just one bad Horde Trooper. Unfortunately, that whole idea gets tossed aside when Adora looks to the left to see Horde ships blowing up the villagers' houses. Ouch, double whammy.
  Meanwhile, the rebels launch their rescue mission. They fly to the prison island on some boat, crash, almost get caught, break through walls, and a whole lotta other stuff we won't get into for the sake of time. Ultimately, its Kowl who rescues He-Man. Kowl's this hooting little creature who hangs around with Bow. He looks pretty useless and hurts the overall intimidation factor of the rebellion, but he's got good intentions and giant rainbow ears. He-Man and the rebels escape the island, as closer friends, and better people.
  Continuing on, it becomes more clear that this just isn't a good day for Hordak. First, his island prison gets taken under. Second, the animators decide that Hordak should be followed around by a little bat named 'Imp' who dressed like him. Now, Adora complains that she was lied to for all these years, and that she's going to stop the Horde from doing anymore evil things. Luckily for Hordak, Shadow Weaver ups her spell powers and takes the magic sword away, turning Adora back into the accidentally-evil princess we all know and love. God damn, this is a looooong movie. Its a full 90 minutes, but considering how each regular episode of He-Man ran about 22 minutes, this is around four episodes merged into one giant adventure filled with battle cats and big-breasted voodoo priests. I don't know how my attention span ever lasted this long as a kid.
And, we've barely scratched the surface! Stay tuned for Part Two of this grand story, which includes appearances from Skeletor and his gang, talking horses, and the realization we've all been waiting for!
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