The Full Story of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe

A toy company that had passed on the rights to Star Wars went hunting for a muscleman of its own, and built one out of plaster in a mold shop. Parents kept calling to ask which of the figures were the good guys, so the company hired a science-fiction screenwriter to invent an entire planet just to answer them. Then the cartoon that resulted broke every rule of how children's television was sold, and tacked a life lesson onto the end of each episode to keep the censors off its back. The people who made it have spent twenty years arguing about who deserves the credit.

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was an animated series produced by Filmation for the toy giant Mattel. It premiered September 26, 1983, ran two seasons of 65 episodes each, 130 in all, and was the first cartoon based on a toy line to succeed in first-run syndication. Filmation chief Lou Scheimer financed it himself to keep creative control, made it entirely in America, and closed each episode with a spoken moral to blunt the outcry that it was a half-hour toy commercial. Its success created the spin-off She-Ra: Princess of Power and rewrote the syndicated cartoon market.

The toy that came before the show

The cartoon exists because of a toy, and the toy exists because of a gap. When George Lucas shopped the Star Wars merchandising rights in the mid-1970s, Space.com's history of the franchise records that "the management at Mattel ... decided to pass on the opportunity to make action figures. A small Cincinnati company called Kenner's subsequent gamble on Lucas paid off big time, leaving Mattel hunting for a fantastical behemoth of its own." Mattel's own male-action-figure sales were at zero in 1980. The company went looking at the muscular fantasy art of Frank Frazetta and at Conan the Barbarian, and there the trouble started.

Who actually made He-Man is the oldest fight in the fandom, and both claimants have gone on the record. Roger Sweet, a Mattel preliminary designer, is blunt in a 2005 question-and-answer session with the fan site He-Man.org: "I originated and named He-Man." His telling centers on three prototype figures he calls the He-Man Trio, presented, he says, "at a Mattel Product Conference in late 1980," one an ancient barbarian, one a modern soldier, one a futuristic spaceman, the last wearing a modified Boba Fett helmet from a Star Wars figure. Sweet insists the prototypes were sculpted from hard plaster and that "no parts came from Big Jim," Mattel's earlier action figure.

The other claimant is Mark Taylor, the development designer who drew the figures that reached shelves. In a 2015 interview with Topless Robot, Taylor connects He-Man directly to that abandoned Conan project. "One of the excuses that Mattel used to bail on the Conan project was that the movie was R-rated, and they couldn't make toys for an R-rated property," Taylor said. The Conan rights-holders then sued Mattel, which had used the same designer on both projects, leaving the company needing a fantasy hero it fully owned. Taylor also designed Castle Grayskull, and fought the engineers to keep it strange: "I wanted it to feel organic! Like it was alive! ... the engineers kept trying to design it with straight angles to make the tooling easier." The two men do not agree on the basic facts. Sweet says he built the prototypes with no Big Jim parts; the Taylor-side telling, in Topless Robot's own framing, has Sweet sticking "some clay on a Big Jim action figure in 1980" and calling it a prototype.

The toys sold, and then a different problem appeared. Mattel, according to writer Michael Halperin in a 2019 SYFY WIRE oral history, kept getting "phone calls and letters from parents of kids who had purchased the toys. And they didn't know who were the good guys and who were the bad guys, except for He-Man." Mattel hired Halperin, who had written an unproduced sword-and-sorcery screenplay, to build a world. He submitted a pitch bible on December 1, 1982. "There was nothing," Halperin said. "I came in and created planet Eternia." He named Skeletor's headquarters Snake Mountain and had his ten-year-old son sketch what it should look like: "his drawing had most of the prominent features we ultimately saw on Snake Mountain. He never got a penny for that drawing, though!" And he pushed back on the assumption everyone made about the hero's roots. He based He-Man, he said, "on Beowulf," not, as most people assumed, on Conan.

How a toy got a cartoon

For most of the 1970s, a cartoon built to sell a toy could not have aired at all. The Federal Communications Commission had effectively banned program-length commercials aimed at children. When that restriction was relaxed at the start of the 1980s, the road opened. Mattel already had a relationship with Filmation, the Reseda animation house run by Lou Scheimer. As Scheimer's daughter Erika, who worked at the studio, tells it in the SYFY oral history, "in about 1980, Mattel came to Filmation to do the animation in a He-Man commercial of theirs," and her father, already developing a barbarian show of his own called Blackstar, started thinking, "Maybe we could do this He-Man as its own show."

The show was not an easy sell. Both firms pitched it to ABC, which turned it down. On Scheimer's suggestion the series was re-pitched at the 1983 NATPE convention directly to independent local stations, and it sold there into first-run syndication rather than to a network. That made it, per the archival record, the first syndicated series based on a toy, and it ran as a weekday strip rather than a Saturday-morning block, proving an animated show could hold a daily timeslot.

What made the deal remarkable was who paid for it. Erika Scheimer is precise about the money: "My dad spent over a million dollars developing He-Man. Mattel gave us a bible that wasn't something that Filmation would produce. So my dad started from scratch. And Mattel put no money into the development of it." Lou Scheimer got the production subsidized by Filmation's parent, Westinghouse, and used that independence as leverage. "So Filmation had carte blanche because we funded it. And we could choose which toys we would or wouldn't use. They didn't make us do anything," Erika Scheimer said. Her father made clear to Mattel that he "wasn't going to allow them to tell him what toys we had to put in it." He also insisted, unusually for the era, that the animation be done in the United States. The series premiered September 26, 1983. By 1984 it was on 120 American stations and in more than 30 countries; by mid-1985 it was the most popular syndicated program among children aged two to eleven.

The rules of Eternia

He-Man arrived just after a decade in which action had been all but scrubbed out of children's cartoons, and the show tested the boundary carefully. He-Man could hit people, which was itself new, but the standards of the time kept the violence stylized. He used wrestling moves more than punches, rarely drew his sword against a person, and mostly threw enemies out of the frame. Straczynski, who wrote for the show, remembered the producer Arthur Nadel policing this line to absurd lengths: on one occasion, Straczynski told SYFY WIRE, Nadel "balked at having He-Man hit someone with a tree because it would kill the tree, so the tree had to be clearly and visually dead to begin with. His big thing was to throw the bad guy out of frame, because once they were out of frame apparently we never had to worry about them again."

The budget showed on the screen. Filmation reused animation aggressively, and the studio's writers knew it. Straczynski described a chart that hung outside the animators' wing: "There were drawings of his face designated as He-Man Angry. He-Man Sad. He-Man Happy. He-Man Confused. This went on for something like 16 different emotions. They were all the exact same drawing." The core voice cast was tiny, four actors carrying dozens of characters, plus Lou Scheimer voicing Orko and others. Alan Oppenheimer, who voiced Skeletor along with Man-At-Arms, Mer-Man, and Cringer, invented the villain's signature cackle himself. "That's why I put the laugh in, and it just makes the character," he told SYFY WIRE. "Otherwise, he's just a snarling, mustache-twirling villain. I'm not interested in that." The cast recorded together like a radio play, then the animators drew to the track.

The moral of the story

The best-remembered thing about He-Man may be the short segment at the end of every episode, in which a character stepped forward to explain the lesson. It was not an artistic choice. It was defense. "We hired a child psychologist to write those endings," Halperin told SYFY WIRE. "This was in response to a major outcry by parents' groups that complained the show was nothing but a half-hour commercial for He-Man toys and was very violent. We needed to do something to ameliorate that." Erika Scheimer traces the practice back to Filmation's Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids in 1971, when her father first put an educational consultant on staff; for He-Man the studio hired Don Roberts, a Stanford communications professor. G.I. Joe, the other big toy-cartoon of the era, added its own end-of-episode public-service segment for the same reason.

The writers did not enjoy them. "We [the writers] hated them because they were clearly pandering to pressure groups to give the shows some social value," Straczynski said, adding that a genuinely moral episode would sometimes get a "dopey" unrelated moral tacked on anyway. But the segments landed in ways nobody scripted. Erika Scheimer has collected the stories for decades: "I can't tell you the number of stories I've been told about kids who were close to suicide and then heard a moral that told them to find a friend if they're feeling down." Oppenheimer tells one from a Miami convention, a young man from Argentina who got separated from his family hiking in the Amazon, remembered the moral about staying put, and was found two hours later.

Was it just a toy commercial?

The charge followed the show for forty years, and the makers push back on it with a technicality and a principle. The technicality is Halperin's: "When the show was syndicated, the FCC had a rule that said we could not have a Mattel commercial showing during the show itself. Mattel was not allowed to advertise any of its He-Man toys in the show." The principle is Erika Scheimer's, who points out that Filmation chose which figures to feature and skipped the ones that did not serve a story: "do you think the Prince Adam figure sold well?"

Even the question of who ran the show has two answers. Erika Scheimer describes her father as hands-on to the frame: "My dad read every single script. He did the final cut of every show. He dubbed it. He mixed it. He was incredibly involved." Straczynski, from the writers' room, saw almost none of that. "The whole time I was at Filmation, I only saw Lou twice and never heard anything directly from him otherwise," he said. "He set himself as kind of the creative center of all of Filmation's shows, but that was really just PR. He was a salesman and a front-man." In Straczynski's account the day-to-day control belonged to producer Arthur Nadel, whose most common note was two letters, "DB," for "do better." Both can be true at once, the owner reviewing every cut while the writers dealt only with the producer, but the tellings do not sound like the same studio.

How the telling has grown over the decades

• 2005, He-Man.org. Roger Sweet, in a long fan-site question-and-answer, stakes his claim: he originated and named He-Man, presented the three-prototype He-Man Trio in late 1980, and used no Big Jim parts. The same year he published a book, Mastering the Universe, arguing the case at length.
• 2012, Creating the Filmation Generation. Lou Scheimer's memoir, written with Andy Mangels for TwoMorrows, puts the studio's version of the origin and the moral-segment philosophy on the record in the founder's own words before his death in 2013.
• 2015, Topless Robot / Toy Masters. Mark Taylor, the development designer, gives the counter-claim: He-Man grew out of the collapsed Conan toy project and the lawsuit that followed, and he, not Sweet, drew the figures and Castle Grayskull.
• 2017, The Power of Grayskull. A feature documentary and a companion episode of Netflix's The Toys That Made Us assemble the surviving makers and cement the broad outline for a new generation.
• 2019, SYFY WIRE. Jamie Greene's oral history brings Michael Halperin, Erika Scheimer, J. Michael Straczynski, Alan Oppenheimer, and Melendy Britt together, and it is here that the internal disagreements, over Lou's role and the value of the morals, sit side by side in one piece.

The drift is worth naming plainly. The creator credit has never been settled: Sweet says he built the prototypes and named the hero, Taylor says he designed what shipped, and the two even disagree on whether the first prototype was plaster or clay on a Big Jim body. Lou Scheimer is either the man who read every script or a front-man the writers barely saw, depending on whether you ask his family or his staff. And the moral segments are remembered by the audience as the heart of the show and by the writers as pandering they resented. The dates and the episode counts are firm. The credit and the meaning are still being argued.

The honest bottom line

He-Man was, at bottom, a machine for selling plastic. It was born because a toy company needed a hero, its animation was so limited that sixteen emotions shared one drawing, and its famous morals were bolted on to keep regulators and parents' groups at bay. None of that is the reason it lasted. The show treated an afternoon cartoon as something worth building a real world around, made in America when almost nobody bothered, and handed millions of kids a plain sentence about kindness or courage at the exact moment they were paying attention. The toy came first and the toy paid the bills, but the thing people still quote is the moral, not the merchandise.

Sources

• SYFY WIRE, "A thorough oral history of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, the game-changing '80s toon," Jamie Greene, January 14, 2019.
• He-Man.org, "Q&A with Roger Sweet," 2005.
• Topless Robot, "10 Things We Learned From Mark Taylor, the Designer of He-Man," 2015.
• Space.com, "It had the power! The weird origins of He-Man, Skeletor, and the Masters of the Universe," Richard Edwards.
• Lou Scheimer with Andy Mangels, Creating the Filmation Generation, TwoMorrows Publishing, 2012.
• Wikipedia, "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" (premiere date, season and episode counts, syndication and station figures, cross-checked).

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of She-Ra and the full story of the G.I. Joe cartoon. BobbyAndJason.com covers the toy line and the franchise in He-Man and Masters of the Universe: The 80s Toy Turned Legend.

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