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Castle Grayskull at Comic-Con International in San Diego.

SAN DIEGO — At Comic-Con, Mattel announced a Web site for sales to collectors of exclusive figures, including a new line of “Masters of the Universe Classics” figures.   A new figure will be available every month, starting with He-Man in October.  The Web site is www.mattycollector.com.

– Matt Price

 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.
From Friday’s The Oklahoman
By Matthew Price
Assistant Features Editor

Turning a 1980s cartoon world into a fantasy epic that would play in the era of “Lord of the Rings” was the task of the creative forces behind 2002’s “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.” The first 13 episodes were released on DVD earlier this year, with the next 13 set for a May release.

The Masters of the Universe are the heroes of the fantasy world of Eternia. The greatest hero of Eternia is He-Man, who transforms from the meek Prince Adam into the courageous hero.

Story editor Dean Stefan said the 2002 team was able to work from the rich history of “He-Man” from the outset.

“We had the luxury of looking at all this and trying to figure out where geographically, chronologically things might have happened, and what led up to the fact that Adam became He-Man,” Stefan said in a recent phone interview. “That gave us the idea to go back to even his father getting the prophecy that a hero will emerge, in the pilot.

”Stefan says the team was inspired in part by Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With a Thousand Faces.”

“We were all thinking in terms of the classic hero, reluctant hero, the call to adventure … classic elements of what makes a hero,” Stefan said. “And it’s always stronger when the hero is reluctant and doesn’t want to do it until something happens that forces him to.

”Stefan revealed some of the secrets of Castle Grayskull in the new series. He-Man claims his abilities by “the power of Grayskull,” but what did that mean?

“I think Castle Grayskull was originally because some guy who worked on the original stuff, his wife’s name was Gray,” Stefan said. “That was the inside kind of reason. The phrase, by the power of Grayskull, we thought, what does that really mean? Is it a castle? Then we thought, well, if it’s a castle, maybe it could have belonged to someone named Grayskull, King Grayskull.

”In the 2002 series, He-Man’s powers were handed down from King Grayskull, via his sword. King Grayskull’s design, Stefan said, had similarities to the original He-Man design from the 1980s, before the blond He-Man design.

“The origin of King Grayskull, at least the design, it harks back to the original design to He-Man way back when they wanted him to be more barbaric looking,” Stefan said. “So we were trying to figure out, where He-Man got his powers, was there a He-Man or a version of that before him, and it sort of led us to King Grayskull.”

Stefan said the artists involved referenced the “Lord of the Rings” adaptations as a way to portray a fantasy world that felt real.

“The artists had a map of (Eternia), and we knew where things were in relation to other things,” Stefan said. “The (more real) you can make it to an artist or a writer, you inhabit that world and it makes it real for you and hopefully the audience.

Still, there are limits to the reality, Stefan said.

“We have a main character named He-Man and another guy named Ram-Man. There’s something a little silly about some of the names. … You just deal with it,” Stefan said. “There’s a certain campiness to He-Man. We kept a little of the camp in there, but we made it a little darker.”

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.

Here’s the extended cut of the interview with Dean Stefan, story editor for “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” following up on the story in Weekend Look. Several bits from the interview didn’t make it into the paper, so we’re including more information here for those interested, in several parts.

Matt Price: Was Skeletor’s backstory new for the 2002 series?

Dean Stefan: He was Randor’s brother, I don’t know if we ever said that explicitly in the series, but that was where we were going, or his half-brother. And we were actually, if we went further, we were going to go into that he actually had a rightful claim to the throne, because we were going to go into that he was the first born. We never got into it, but he would have rightfully been the king. So he had sort of a legitimate beef with his brother Randor. And that makes Adam his nephew, which is kind of interesting also, He-Man is Skeletor’s nephew. Again, we never got that far, but that was all in the mix. We showed how he got damaged by Randor in this battle, his looks got screwed up. And then in a later episode we showed how Hordak, we did another backstory between him getting the acid on his face and becoming Skeletor. He made a deal with the devil, Hordak, who made him into the bone creature, but also with the implicit promise that Skeletor was someday going to free Hordak, and that wouldn’t bode well for Skeletor when that happened.

The other thing we did in the early episodes, we had all these great characters, the Masters and the villains, but we wanted to solo them in some way to figure out their backstory. There were characters that we had no idea really what they were except we knew they had been used before or were a toy like Man E Faces or Mekanek. And we said well, these guys are goofy, maybe, but let’s figure out what they’re about. And the best way to figure out what they’re about, rather than ignore them, is to base a story on it, and then sort of force yourself to explore their foibles, their weaknesses, their fears . That always makes it richer, obviously when you can figure out the motivation and what makes the character tick. So they become real for you and for the audience. That was a very conscious decision to do early on.

And then all along, we were very intentionally trying to figure out, OK, what does Skeletor know about Castle Grayskull? He’s been in prison behind the Mystic Wall, so he’s basically been out of it for a while. So he gets that down. And then he goes to where the Hall of Wisdom used to be. Which is all he knows from his days in the pilot when he fought Randor. And it’s not there anymore. It’s been leveled, it’s a marketplace. And then he finds out that there’s something about Castle Grayskull, because it seems important to someone else. So he sort of through the first several episodes, he’s gaining knowledge about Castle Grayskull. That it exists, that there’s something there. … Later he learns what is there, the power of the elders, which is the big power in this universe. Then he tries various means to breach the castle. So that was the logic for that first number of episodes.

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.

“He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” story editor Dean Stefan talks about the most interesting, and most difficult characters to write for on the show. The first 13 episodes are available now on DVD. The second 13 episodes of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” are set to come out on DVD on May 27.

Matt Price: When you were reviving these characters, who was the most interesting, that you hadn’t expected to be?

Dean Stefan: Two-Bad, in a way, because we originally had him in the pilot and then we took him out because we wanted to do an origin. So we made him two separate characters, two bounty hunters. And then we decided to fuse them at the end. Skeletor punishes them. That was kind of interesting, the way that we stumbled on the idea to do that. As far as just the characters fun to write for, I would say Teela and Evil-Lyn, I really enjoyed the women characters, because you don’t often get to see them in that kick-ass role. And Evil-Lyn was definitely the most complex, she was very duplicitous, you knew she would turn on Skeletor in a minute, and she was probably smarter than him.

MP: And she’s extremely powerful in the pilot.

DS: We kind of were able to justify that by saying she can only do this occasionally. If she did this she would have to save up for a while, her power, because obviously if she could go nuclear anytime that would be very powerful. So in our minds she was powerful but there were limits.

MP: Who was the most difficult to write for?

DS: The most difficult character to write for was He-Man because in a sense he was a newborn. He was part Adam, but he had his own consciousness. He was sort of new to his powers and becoming this hero, and he was so good, that much like Superman, it’s hard to sometimes write for the perfect hero. No big inner conflict. In “Courage of Adam,” which was the first episode after the pilot, we did the flipside. We wanted to explore what it would mean to Adam to have this new responsibility and yet not be able to tell anybody about it. And still be thought of as a coward by Teela and by his dad, knowing he’s the most powerful man in the universe, but has to do the Clark Kent bit to sneak away in the midst of battle to change. He was trying to prove himself as Adam and prove to them that He-Man wasn’t needed. Like, if I can step up, we won’t need He-Man. So he was in a sense jealous of himself and he was trying to work that out, which is a very interesting kind of inner conflict.

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.

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, story editor of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” talks about what the future might have been for the series, and what he’s working on now in the final installment of our interview.

Matt Price: There were some things you didn’t get to that you intended?

Dean Stefan: We did 39 episodes with a 40^th that never got produced. The second season, the Snakemen played a big role. In the 3^rd season we were going to probably have Hordak be freed, so there’d be all these different factions. Skeletor’s guys, Snakemen, Hordak.

We had plans for He-Man and his father, we were going to have this whole line where he gets sent to this nasty world of Despondus, his father would. And He-Man would have to follow him. Something would happen with the Masters where they would become renegades, not quite guerillas, but Skeletor would have taken over the good kingdom, and our guys would have to fight their way back. There was a lot of elements, a lot of balls in the air so to speak. Because I expected it to go for several years, til my kid went to college at least.

Matt Price: What caused the cancellation?

Dean Stefan: I’m sure it relates to finances and ratings in some way. Some fans said the timeslot got changed around a lot, some people said that kids don’t want to see a guy in a loincloth with swords after everything they’ve been exposed to. I don’t really know. I think working in this business you just never know what’s going to catch on, for whatever reason.

I’ve certainly seen plenty of TV shows that I thought were brilliant that didn’t last for more than a few seasons. Then they come out on DVD, and you say, wow, that was really good. It’s a whole new generation almost. It’s not quite ten years, but it’s been seven years, six years maybe. I’m really proud of it, and everybody who worked on it was really passionate. Obviously you want it to be a huge rating success and last as many years as it can, but hopefully with people writing about it, it’ll sell some DVDs and people will be exposed to it and like it. The next He-Man DVD will be coming out in May, the 2^nd 13 episodes.

Matt Price: What are you working on now?

Dean Stefan: I’m at Disney now, I’m working on ‘My Friends Tigger and Pooh,’ which is about as far away from He-Man as you can get, but we’ve got actually a few of the artists who were on ‘He-Man’ work on our show. It’s a CGI show, and it’s very young, and it’s very cute. You gotta be versatile, right?