More from He-Man’s Dean Stefan, part 3

HE-MAN, MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE and associated trademarks and trade dress are owned by, and used under license from Mattel, Inc. © 2007 Mattel, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Dean Stefan talks about changes made from the 1980s “Masters of the Universe” to the 2002 “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” as well as fan reaction to the project.

Matt Price: Adam and He-Man are different in this series, much moreso than in the original series.

Dean Stefan: It was a very conscious decision to age him up and to, more importantly, make him different looking from Adam, so it wouldn’t beg the obvious question, gee, they look exactly alike, why don’t his parents recognize him? And even the sword transforms a bit. Even though it’s Adam’s sword it becomes bigger when he becomes He-Man. Part of that was knowing the audience was more sophisticated, our Cartoon Network audience would be a little older. And similarly, we didn’t make Battle Cat/Cringer talk. And that was the big debate among fans, why doesn’t he talk. And we just felt that it skewed a little young to have a talking animal. And similarly, the animators and the sophistication of the animation, we felt like they could express everything a cat would say by expressions. Whereas in the older series, for all its charm, I don’t think they had the luxury of great animation and super-expressive face movements.

And the other big thing that the fans didn’t like was that Marlena, Adam’s mother, was not from Earth in our version, where she was in the original He-Man. To me that was a no-brainer. As soon as you bring in Earth, it begs the question, what time era are we in? If it’s Earth it takes it out of the world of fantasy, into we’re up on another planet, rather this is a universe that exists unto itself.

I think a lot of that stuff, like Marlena being from Earth, came about later in the original He-Man series. … They were making stuff up probably more as they went along, we had the luxury to map it out and figure out an arc for the season.

And also, going forward, we had other arcs that we never got to implement.

Matt Price: What was the fan response to “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe”?

Dean Stefan: I did find that you can never please everyone. I think we made every effort in the world to satisfy the old-school ones with little references to things like the Diamond Ray of Disappearance, and certain stones, and using characters they were familiar with. But nostalgia is a very potent thing. And people remember things from when they were 12 as being brilliantly executed and music being fantastic, and voice acting, and animation.

I look at our show, and thought it was fantastic what the artists did. So when you read something like he-man.org, there would be hundreds of replies after every episode aired. We would look at them, and have to keep in mind, we’re glad we’re keeping these fans on board but what’s the real fanbase of grownups watching He-Man? A few thousand to several thousand people, maybe, but we had to appeal to kids, and if anything, I think we could have maybe skewed it more to a new audience. Maybe we gave to much credence to the old-school fans. We were trying to toe the line, be true to it and yet move it forward and find a new audience. Hopefully we did. To me it was a huge success, because we told the stories we wanted to tell. The animation had the luxury of really playing out, and we had just incredible people designing characters and painting backgrounds and doing the scoring and writing scripts and everything like that.

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