The first time you ever heard of The Death of Robin Hood, starring Hugh Jackman – and maybe that happened to be just now, reading this – two likely thoughts came to mind:

1. “Who the fuck needs another fucking Robin Hood movie? Jeebus fuck, Hollywood is out of ideas and still unaware that public domain IP doesn’t actually make money except for low-budget fucking horror knockoffs.”

2. “Oh, hey, Hugh Jackman as an aging iconic hero who dies? Never seen THAT before!”

Right off the bat, then, I think you need to know a couple of things. Firstly, Hollywood usually leaves out the death of Robin Hood, because each remake is a potential well of sequels if you don’t kill the hero. (Not that that stopped Deadpool and Wolverine from following Logan, but you get the general idea.) Second, and most importantly, this isn’t Logan, though at least in the first 45 minutes it does feel like some version of Frank Miller’s The Dark Archer Returns (which is not an actual thing, I hope you know). Were I an annoying YouTuber, I might say there’s a Logan pall over the whole thing.

But no, The Death of Robin Hood is much more akin to director Michael Sarnoski’s breakthrough feature Pig, in which he took another actor known for superheroics (Nicolas Cage), shoved him into a plot that seemed as though it was building to violent revenge, then flipped the script and made it about nostalgia, sadness, and memories.

Loosely basing his script on one of the oldest known stories of Robin Hood, Sarnoski is looking to deconstruct the myth, and the counter-myth. This Robin Hood will murder children, on camera, to shock you out of expecting any version of Errol Flynn. He’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that Robin Hood was no hero – he never aid his prayers, and just happened to kill a few prominent people that everyone else hated. But this narrative also proves suspect, as we learn when an individual from his past whom he has claimed was fictional actually shows up to correct Robin’s “memory.”

We can’t know what exactly went down in previous adventures we didn’t see, but it seems like Robin is just tired of endless cycles of violent revenge, wanting them to stop with him. If this movie is to be compared in any way to Logan, it’s in the (now falsified) notion that franchise demands were becoming tiring, and Jackman needed a definite end for his Wolverine.

For the first time ever in a screening, at least in my career, someone actually came out before the movie and warned everyone that the first half hour of the movie is extremely violent, and then it settles into a “more poetic” groove. It was a BAFTA screening, and I know refined British cinephiles tend to have lower tolerances for violence than many Americans (I’m literally half-and-half, so my tastes are all over the place), but still, the R-rating should have said it all.

Anyway, yeah, that opening half hour is brutal in many ways. It’s not just the violent stabbings and archery, but the cinematography by Pat Scola and sound editing by Robert Brazier that situate audiences in the bitter cold of England (actually Northern Ireland) in the 13^th century, making you wonder why the hell anyone would have chosen to live there before the advent of central heating. Jackman’s long hair and bushy beard are anomalies even among this cast of characters, but we might assume they’re simply an attempt at face insulation for a self-loathing senior living in snowy mountains by choice.

Jackman is actually only 57, according to Wikipedia, but made up to look older. A medieval 57 year-old might indeed look a lot more worn down, though he still has the massive arm veins from whatever the hell he did or took to look like a shredded Wolverine in his fifties.

So I guess the more poetic groove is meant to appeal to my English side after the violence has satiated my American bloodlust. I have to say that it doesn’t quite succeed. I appreciate a slower pace if I feel like it’s moving towards something, but Robin doesn’t seem to have much of a goal once Little John (an unrecognizable Bill Skarsgard) drops him off at an island abbey to be healed from his latest fight wounds. There’s a girl he maybe-sorta mentors for reasons I won’t spoil, and a mysterious leper (Murray Bartlett) who teaches him to recognize fruit trees, a skill you’d think he’d have picked up after decades living in [checks notes] a forest. Unless we’re going with the idea that even the forest part of the legend was bullshit, too.

Unlike in the similar Robin and Marian, there is no final fight to win, and no Marian either. There’s just the semblance of a reckoning with conscience, and lip service towards getting the right sort of death, which is important when your character is now basically a Klingon, albeit a really physically exhausted one.

This is a movie that may reward subsequent views a little better, once you know it’s not going for the one-last-fight approach, and that may be why were prepped. The atmosphere is certainly rich, with medieval ballads on the soundtrack, and big shots of stacked stones on cliffs setting the mood. The world is inhospitable – only the abbey offers some basic comforts, but even there, their process of healing Robin involves a combination of forced physical therapy and daily bloodletting. In the original manuscripts, the prioress (Jodie Comer) is an active antagonist deliberately engaging in negligence; here, she is sincere, if misguided. There are no villains, which is probably the point – not even Robin, who insists that he is one. [He has that in common with Skeletor this summer, but Skeletor is genuinely unrepentant, much like his actor, Jared Leto.]

So in terms of content, then, think of this movie as more “Death” than “Robin Hood.” It’s getting great reviews all around, probably because there are still plenty of critics who remember the job being great and fun, and now are just kinda hated and broke and marginalized, waiting for (career) death – we can all relate to Robin Hood being in that position, at least mentally. We don’t stab people, contrary to possible belief, but we know what it is to be tired of fighting constantly for our place in the world, and to regret not planning better. We know readers create narratives around us that aren’t true, just as our own sometimes aren’t. And I’ve certainly worked for some publications where it felt like they were just bleeding me, all the time, due to ineptitude and malice.

If that’s relatable to your situation too, you stand a better chance of vibing with Old Man Locksley, as he isn’t called in this film, ever, I have a limited amount of patience for lingering in that space, as I try not to in daily life, with mixed results (ask my wife, or don’t). I want to give this movie another shot, and yet I also don’t – must I sit through all of it again to understand my expectations may have been off?

Robin of Sherwood remains the greatest Robin Hood ever made, and it was plenty grim and downbeat, but stuff was always happening, and they killed Robin off much younger. Sarnoski, who did a Q&A after my screening, looks way too young to be making his mark with movies in which late middle-aged acting icons play characters with regrets, but hey, if that’s your thing, it beats stabbing.

I’m right in the middle on thus movie, but I will say it looks great on a big screen, and it’s shot in 35 mm, for those of you who fetishize the format. Just get the caffeinated soda, and know that bathroom breaks are pretty safe after the first act ends. There is no popcorn bucket for this movie; if there were, it would probably be a kid’s head with an arrow through the eye.

Oh, trust me, we’ll get there one day.

The Death of Robin Hood opens in theaters June 19th. All images courtesy of A24.

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If you’ve seen any significant amount of movies or TV in your lifetime, you’ve likely seen some version of the story that In Waves tells. You just haven’t seen it told this particular way before.

It begins in 2D, sepia-toned line-art animation, as a topless woman walks into the ocean on what looks to be a Hawaiian shore. It’s one thing to say animation isn’t just for kids, but sometimes you have to prove it with cartoon boobs upfront – a lot of times, you’ll hear someone like Brad Bird say animation isn’t just for kids, but then everything he makes is an adventure story for the whole family. This is just nudity right off the bat, albeit the naturalistic kind, letting viewers and parents know right off the bat that it’s not a film for the children (mostly, they’ll be bored by a story that’s about teens doing normal teen stuff).

The topless woman is joined by more shirtless people, male and female, who start beating the water with reeds, as if part of a sacred ritual. The more they beat, the larger a wave in the distance gets, and then it crashes, giving us our Wizard of Oz moment, as the spray turns to color and the animation gets computer enhanced depth, while the topless woman is replaced by our contemporary female lead, Kristen (Stephanie Hsu), in full-body wetsuit on a surfboard.

This story is about her, but it isn’t really her story – it’s that of AJ (Will Sharpe), an Asian-American California teen soon to graduate high school, with aspirations of art school and mad skateboarding skills. AJ literally knocks Kristen down at a high school dance, but she’s forgiving – her brother is friends with AJ’s best bud, so soon enough she’s offering to help AJ get over his fear of water and learn to surf. They’re good looking teens, they fall for each other, and then she’s hit with a portentous pain in the leg which is way too emphasized by the plot to be a mere sprain. Turns out it’s the sort of leg cancer that movies seem to disproportionately feature when they want a tragic romance.

In Waves is adapted from an autobiographical graphic novel by AJ Dungo, so nobody can accuse the story of making up the illness, even though Hollywood often does – leg amputation offers both a striking visual and a secondary obstacle to be overcome before the cancer comes back and delivers the double-whammy of tragedy. Robin Coudert and Marylou Mayniel’s score sounds a lot like Avatar’s, but where James Cameron uses it to evoke imminent wonder, here it foreshadows a seriousness about to overtake the light romance that kicks things off.

The movie plays with time a little bit, but not in any way that’s confusing – the line-art animation, now clearly representing the history of surfing and AJ’s art school thesis, recurs, as do scenes of a future in which AJ lives in a van by the beach, drawing and surfing like a pro with no audience around to notice. It’s pretty clear from his solo future where the plot’s going to go, and again, you’ve probably seen a tragic cancer romance before – A Walk to Remember is just one of the most notable in my lifetime. I just don’t think you’ve seen it as animation.

Likewise, if you’ve ever known surfers, or even seen a movie about them, you’ve doubtless heard metaphors about life being like waves from someone who thought they were being ocean-deep in that realization. Well, no...but watching the animation literalize the image, as it occasionally departs from representative reality to make transitional connections between waves, tree bark, and wrinkles in a face, brings the point home. Or duplicates the drug trip that gave rise to the turn of phrase in the first place.

Director Phuong Mai Nguyen simplifies the story some from the graphic novel, which featured more of the history of surfing, and tangents on pioneers like Duke Kahanamoku (who gets a cool reference here at least). This keeps the focus, as it should be, on AJ and Kristen, but it also makes the narrative more conventional. The bulk of the movie is framed as a memory of first love – as such, Kristen is basically perfect, and her death less messy than in might be in real life, though no less tragic. At the beginning of the movie, we at the screening were told we might want to get tissues, because “You’re going to cry.” I jokingly replied, “Don’t tell me what I’m going to do!” as I hate when critics do that. In the end, to the extent that I came close, it was because of some of my friends at the screening: one lost his wife recently, and the other may lose her husband soon. Wondering how they must be viewing the movie was actually more upsetting to me than the movie itself. Though each loss is different in the details, there is a tragic sameness to the path there at times.

There’s little ambiguity to In Waves – it’s the sort of movie where rain will suddenly start to fall at an important moment, or AJ will stand in front of a walk/don’t walk sign while considering a major life decision. It’s a story that can get away with this stuff because it’s so openly emotional – the initial flirtation-by-text that becomes a first kiss is charming to the point of making me wish I’d done things that well back in the day.

For years, romances like this infuriated me because I’d never had any for real, but there’s something about it being animated, I think, that allows the situation to be relatable without arousing jealousy. I’m aware – too aware! – of people who want to fuck cartoons in this world, but watching In Waves, I just want the pretty cartoon people to be pretty together, and they are even at the peak of chemotherapy, because again, the movie is an adaptation of an idealized memory. The layer of artifice that animation provides helps bring down one’s natural defenses against aching sincerity (assuming one has any, as I do).

Ride the wave, maaaan.

In Waves premiered at Cannes, will play at Annecy, and should debut on Netflix at a fall date TBD. All images courtesy of Silex Films/Netflix.

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(This is a long article. The first half of it is free but you will come to a paywall in the middle)

To paraphrase Christopher Nolan and David Goyer a little bit, if you don’t die at the hands of fundamentalists, they might eventually claim they always supported you. In the ‘80s, televangelists lumped Masters of the Universe in with heavy metal, MTV, Dungeons and Dragons, and literally any story with magic or witchcraft in it as a gateway to Satanism. In 2026, with the new movie in theaters, regressive right-wing, MAGA, Christian fundie website Movieguide, home to LA’s Worst Film Critic (TM), proclaims that “As a hero, Prince Adam is also clearly a Savior figure.” It’s enough to think they might actually understand allegory for a hot second, but never fear, they still think the Bible is entirely literal eyewitness history.

It has been an interesting path for He-Man and his friends and foes over the years, with vastly differing religious undertones to each incarnation. Some have been very conscious of what they were doing; others perhaps accidentally so. But one reason I think the formula still resonates to old-time fans is that it somehow taps into that part of the brain that’s wired for thoughts of the transcendental. In fusing sci-fi and fantasy, robotics and mysticism, it can suck in both the faithful and the scientific rationalists, all of whom might like to at least fantasize that there’s meaning at the center of the universe, however we choose to find it.

The initial appeal of Masters of the Universe as a toy line, to me and probably others, stemmed from its similarity to Greek mythology. Each character was built like an ancient god, and had a specialty similar to the pagan pantheons: Man-at-Arms was Ares, Mer-Man was Poseidon, Teela was Athena, Skeletor probably Hades, and so forth. Like all fantasy media not based on the Bible, conservative ‘80s fundie preachers railed against this stuff – Skeletor, with his skull face, likely made an easy target for claims of necromancy or whatever.

The mini-comics that came with the figures were the only storyline at the time, and it was pretty quickly dashed off for a paycheck by Don Glut, to establish who the good and bad guys were, and why they were fighting for control of Castle Grayskull, at the time intended as a battleground playset that neither side had control of. He-Man was like a cross between Tarzan and a Greek hero like Perseus or Hercules – he came from a primitive village, on a planet where stray technology is lying around left over from a space war. Given magical armor and weapons by the Athena-like Goddess, who was-and-wasn’t the Teela action figure, He-Man becomes the most powerful man in the universe. It is suggested that one day he will become the true king of the mysterious Castle. Skeletor was simply an evil demon from an entire dimension of Skeletors. Subsequent minicomics split the Goddess character into Teela and the Sorceress, the result of two different toy ideas having been combined into one toy.

DC Comics did some crossovers with Superman before the Filmation cartoon, and added some key plot points that would be associated with the animated series, like the Prince Adam secret identity for He-Man (though he still used magic weapons to give himself super-strength). The n came the animated version that perhaps we all know best, with that pageboy haircut, the power of Grayskull catchphrase, and Cringer as Battle Cat’s Scooby-Doo-like alter ego. The Filmation cartoons, while they do give us origin stories for some key characters like the Sorceress, never actually give one for He-Man, who is simply presented to us as an already active hero.

When it comes to mythological allusions, the original He-Man and the Masters of the Universe is still more akin to Greco-Roman than Christian. Prince Adam becoming He-Man is arguably a ripoff of Shazam, a character who literally draws on the power of Greek and Roman gods to transform from teenager Billy Batson to adult hero Captain Marvel. Adam is supposed to be a teen, but that’s obscured by the fact that he looks exactly like He-Man, because Filmation cut corners on its animation in order to stay made in America. Like Perseus, and the previous version of He-Man, he has a magic weapon, but unlike the reek heroes, the weapon is merely a conduit for greater power to infuse his body with strength – and blast his opponents with non-fatal energy beams ( a plot mandate. If He-Man resembles any biblical hero in this incarnation, it might be Samson, who could lose his divinely sourced power if he lost his hair, just as Adam might if he lost the sword. But Samson is brutish and easily duped; He-Man is kind and smart.

Interestingly, the allegory drastically changes once She-Ra comes along.

The She-Ra cartoon really was an odd hybrid. She-Ra’s Princess of Power toy line was very femme-coded, with fashion doll figures featuring combable hair and interchangeable outfits. They came in pastel colors, and villains Catra and Entrapta were mainly coded as mean girls.

For the cartoon, however, Mattel paired the She-Ra doll characters with the most horrifying Masters of the Universe toy line villains. The Evil Horde, which deviated from the standard figure style with new, more monstrous sculpts, were inspired by classic horror movie monsters, and all sported fascist-coded armbands and logos. The She-Ra cartoon depicted them as a planetary dictatorship over an enslaved population, destroying the environment while fetishizing technology (yes, kids, He-Man and She-Ra have always been woke antifa). Presumably the idea was to make the cartoon appeal to boys as well; She-Ra was a Robin Hood-type rebel, who won her battles but never the war.

That, at least, is one way to look at it. The Secret of the Sword, a theatrical movie that became the TV shows five-part pilot (or was it the other way around? Doesn’t matter), is loaded with possible biblical coding.

A key trope we’ll come back to, used to signal to audiences that the story is a heroic narrative they’ve come to expect, is a high-born character who is brought low and must ultimately work their way back up to glory. The stories of Joseph and Moses follow this pattern; Jesus does it less literally in every Gospel but Mark, being born the son of God, but raised the broke, itinerant son of a carpenter until he gains full power (the baptism by John is the equivalent of a magic weapon here) and re-attains glory and high status when he rises from the dead.

Adora is Adam’s princess sister, kidnapped as a baby and raised as a fascist, enchanted by a spell to believe she’s on the side of justice. He-Man is sent from another planet by the Sorceress of Grayskull, who is essentially the Holy Spirit of Eternia, also depicted as a bird in most classical artwork. He bestows upon Adora a sword that channels divine power into her, and gives her a figurative rebirth/baptism to a hero, as She-Ra. She can reclaim her birthright as a princess, but chooses to stay a rebel fighting for justice and the downtrodden.

There’s more: She-Ra has more powers than He-Man. Like Moses, she can transform her signature weapon into other objects. Like Jesus, she can heal the sick and raise the dead...but only if they’re animals. He-Man in this story has the John the Baptist role, showing the world of Etheria that this is their savior and baptizing her with a divine spirit. As far as Etheria is concerned, he must decrease so She-Ra can increase. While she fits the highborn-brought-low trope of Matthew, Luke, and John who depict Jesus as divine from or before both, she also in a way follows the narrative of Mark (and Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ) in that she is not an active, known savior figure until her adult baptism.

Yeah, She-Ra really was a much more radical cartoon than people thought. Ostensibly a toy commercial, it was actually a terrible ad for its specific toy line, in which the figures looked almost nothing like their animated counterparts. As a subversion of empire and religious allegory, it was doing things no other kid cartoon was. It wasn’t just getting boys to watch a “girl” show -- it was delivering a woman Messiah to Reagan’s America.

The Secret of the Sword also has a theme song with lyrics that I’m told were appropriated by youth pastors back in the ‘80s. I can see why, too – they emphasize the notion of He-Man being a Christlike figure to She-Ra:

“Somewhere out there someone needs me
I don’t know how or where, but believe me
I’ll walk the universe to find her
For better or for worse beside her

For the honor of love
By the power above
I have the power
I have the power

A stranger walked into my world
And when he talked, I really heard
Hе spoke of things like love and pеace
The joy it brings will never cease

For the honor of love
By the power above
I have the power
I have the power

The truth of love is here to guide me
His strength above is here beside me
Forevermore, we’ll be together
Our hearts will soar one to the other

For the honor of love
By the power above
We have the power, so can you.”

Draw your own conclusions from that. (“Lemme tell you about another real hero who had the power, ya dig?”)

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WARNING:This editorial most definitely discusses Masters of the Universe movie plot points that could be considered spoilers.

Every critic is entitled to their opinion. It’s the sacrosanct rule of our profession. If I liked a thing, you cannot argue me into disliking it, and vice versa, though it’s always conceivable you could make me rethink my support of something...if, say, it had subliminal pro-Nazi messages, or something clearly negative of that sort.

A review is simply a critic beginning with liking a thing, disliking it, or anything in between, and justifying why they feel that way. You can argue or be mad, but unless the critic is disingenuous, their reaction is honest. If they did not laugh at a comedy, your argument that it was actually funny goes nowhere. If a horror movie legitimately scared them as intended, they are ostensibly bound to respect that, even if the movie falls short in other areas.

However, there are times when their reasoning for how they fell can fall short. If I say The Ten Commandments is bad because the Exodus didn’t really happen – I have stated something I partially believe to be true (the Exodus part; not the Ten Commandments part), but it is irrelevant to whether the movie tells the story well. On the other hand, if I were to argue that Downfall is a bad movie because Hitler didn’t really kill himself, I would be deluded and basing my argument on a lie.

These are clear delineations. There are murkier ones – what if Greta Gerwig makes a feminist Barbie movie, and a critic argues that in fact it is not feminist, but misogynist and retrograde? [I assume at least one critic did.] You have to look at the arguments and see if they’re supported well or poorly by the text.

You can still argue, thereafter, something to the effect of, ‘Okay, maybe I didn’t get the themes right. But the movie buried them so deeply and told them so poorly that it’s the movie’s fault, not mine!” Or “How am I supposed to know this additional factoid that wasn’t in the actual movie clears it all up? I shouldn’t need to do homework!”

As you might imagine, I’m getting to Masters of the Universe. What should have been a glorious weekend for me enjoying the movie I’ve waited an eternity for is turning into a flashback to being bullied for liking the toys, as people root for it to fail so Gen-X IP can stop being made, or wonder why “some stupid toy cartoon – who is this even for?” ever got adapted, or even suggest that the movie itself is racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. This is how you create toxic fans, folks. Acting really shitty towards their fandoms won’t make them swear off fandom; it will make them double down. It’s what drives the Snyderverse cult.

I’ve seen most of the criticisms. Many of the same ones that I think are not well founded keep coming up. So after seeing the film a second time, I’m going to address them. I expect to change exactly nobody’s mind, but in my most optimistic moments, I imagine maybe I can get some to change their approach.

One critic who is fairly high-profile suggested that MOTU, in indulging “manbaby” fantasies about swinging a sword around, was supporting the mindset that leads to MAGA. This critic is also an on-record fan of pro-wrestling, in which muscular men in loincloths with outrageous gimmicks enact battles of good versus evil. I trust the irony speaks for itself there.

Another said there’s “gay panic” in it. It was a moment that I thought about the tree on Dagobah on The Empire Strikes Back – everyone brings into this movie exactly what they take with them, myself almost certainly included. For what it’s worth, my gay friends so far adore Skeletor, even if they hate his portrayer.

But let’s get to the three major complaints that I see recurring, among significant groups.

1. He-Man should be a perfect, masculine man! This guy is a wimp who cries, and screws up! Also there’s woke casting, and the director mentioned “toxic masculinity,” which is a lie created by the left!

I shouldn’t give this any more air than it probably deserves, but it’s the classic toxic fanboy complaint. I addressed the muscles versus acting issue in a previous column, but the bottom line is this: you can cast Brock Lesnar as He-Man if you want the physique, but Brock Lesnar can barely even cut a wrestling promo, let alone deliver a line. If I were making the movie, my version would have cast two different actors as Adam and He-Man, but Travis Knight is doing the Filmation version, in which they look noticeably similar. To pull that off in live action, you have to have someone who is believably buff with his shirt off, and credibly not-so-much when it’s on. You want the next Christopher Reeve. I think Nicholas Galitzine is one hell of a find, and the right guy to do it. That part is my opinion.

As for him crying and failing at some things – are you familiar with Spider-Man? Did you complain when he let Uncle Ben die, because Spider-Man is a superhero who doesn’t do that? Probably not, because it’s a canonical, formative event. Filmation never showed you He-Man’s origin, but no hero is formed perfect. As an awkward teen suddenly empowered, he’d have a learning curve. The concept is basically a ripoff of Shazam, and Shazam had a learning curve in his first movie that lots of people liked.

“Toxic masculinity” does NOT mean “all masculinity is toxic” – that’s bullshit right-wing spin to make you mad. Skeletor is toxic masculinity because enough is never enough for him – he’s entitled to everything, and he rules by fear and torture. He’s also camp as hell, both here and in Filmation and Jetlag. Director Travis Knight grew up a toy fan in a sports home, as I grew up a toy fan in a sports COUNTRY. The same kind of faux-masculinity that once told him to put away the toys is the same kind of shit you’re trying to throw at him now that he’s a filmmaker who gets paid to play with toys. And this is what the movie is really about, and why meatheads hate it – that kid who led a rich fantasy life is the one who wins in the end, and it’s He-Man. Who was also always “woke,” if you’d bothered to pay attention to the moral lessons in all the cartoons. He-Man once gave up all his power because he thought ONE innocent person had died, and the movie repurposes that moment with even tougher consequences. That’s a liberal. A conservative He-Man would be okay with innocents dying or suffering so long as all the evil people get destroyed too.

When it comes to the casting complaints, it’s not really surprising to me that they’re all about Tri-Klops and Duncan being Black. I have not seen a solitary Tweet about Ram-Man being cast Asian. (Ram-Man himself cannot be “Asian,” since Asia is a continent on Earth, not Eternia.) The complainers expose themselves and their actual issue in that way. Besides, race and gender flipping has been part of MOTU since at least 2002, when Zodac became Black. Revelation later made King Grayskull Black, and the CG series made the Sorceress Black, and Ram Man and Mosquitor into women. If you want to really devil’s advocate things, there’s also no reason Clamp Champ, the sole Black action figure in the original toy line, couldn’t be a different skin color. Especially on Eternia, human racial differences are a construct. The only canonical victims of racism are blue-skinned Gars.

2. Adam is taught to be empathetic, and that violence isn’t always the answer, but then he solves everything with violence!

This strikes me as another variation on the “fantasy can’t possibly be subtle or intricate” argument, wherein the same critics who claim to have David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive all figured out will complain that something like Warcraft is too complicated. Granted, as I said in my review, Masters of the Universe does have a South Park-style “both sides” argument to make about violence, but it’s more nuanced than just the very real need to incorporate the “power punch” that was every original MOTU figure’s key action feature into the story.

Adam doesn’t fail every time he tries to use talking instead of fists. He fails only when he tries it against unrelenting warriors of pure evil. When he tries it on HIS OWN SIDE, the good guys, it works. Getting Duncan to open up helps heal his rift with Teela. Getting the heroic warriors to work together rather than individually makes them stronger (Roboto and Duncan’s evolving relationship is the best example of this, and I will say it’s cool that nobody seems to have a problem with Roboto, who never had genitals anyway, being female-coded now).

Adam knows Skeletor is evil, but he has to give him a chance anyway. When he won’t take it, and doubles down on being evil, well...sometimes you have to just punch Nazis. What he learns about violence is that you use it as needed strictly to protect the ones you love, but if you actually set out to kill someone, that kind of wrath violence is going to backfire. The movie is very specific about that, but I know I choose my words very specifically too, and people still misinterpret.

3. It mocks its own source material! The movie makes fun of the names Ram-Man, Fisto, and He-Man! It thinks it’s superior to the property and making fun of it!

As the biggest fan of this property I know, I don’t think there’s any way it’s doing that. Those of you complaining obviously know what Fisto and Ram-Man’s canonical real names are, right? You didn’t just make an assumption that those toy names have always been their real names?

But this follows on from my last point. It’s key to the movie that Adam is such a good person that he cannot lie, even when it would vastly benefit him to do so, as on Earth. Adam comes up with nicknames for them when he’s a kid, and initially they hate the nicknames and think they’re stupid and innuendo-laden. By the end of the movie, though, they answer to the nicknames, accepting them in the spirit of childhood innocence intended.

When Fisto says, “Give them head, Ram-Man!” he’s adopting childhood enthusiasm. When he takes a moment and then says, “Sorry,” he’s not “gay panicking” – he’s realizing he just said an inappropriate innuendo. Would that many adults would have done so around me as a kid. I had Boomer adults look at my toys and go on about their homoeroticism, before any sort of eroticism meant anything to me. Now, I know for many gay kids, He-Man was formative, and I love that for them. For me, though, it was a power fantasy with zero eroticism, and being told by adults and peers that I must be latently gay, well – that resonates in the moments onscreen where the characters see the names as innuendos rather than cool action features seen by the kids who love them. If you want to accuse ten year-old me of gay panic, well, guilty – I didn’t want to be gay, and that’s because I wasn’t. Later in life I would want to be gay – because only men ever hit on me -- and again, I wasn’t.

Travis Knight has repeatedly said he’s being sincere, and everything in his filmography backs that up. The franchise has always had to reckon with the name He-Man being a bit silly, and the biographies of the Masters of the Universe Classic figure line – the longest running toy line in the franchise – did some really heavy lifting to normalize it. In that telling, the sword of power is the Sword of He, and “He” is the Trollan word for power. The guardian of the sword, therefore, is “the He man.”

“Okay, but if those are kid nicknames, what about Skeletor and Evil-Lyn?” Oh, but I could tell you the backstories of those names, and how they are variations on their real names designed to intimidate, but you don’t want a four-hour movie crammed with exposition. Even I don’t – the story of Keldor is best left to any potential She-Ra-based sequel anyway. Character in MOTU have had “real names” alongside toy names since Filmation. Man-at-Arms being called Duncan isn’t a dis to the franchise, any more than the Sorceress being named Teela-Na is, both of which were in the ‘80s cartoons. More controversial to the true fans is the way Classics claimed Hordak’s real name is Hec-tor Kur, when Hordak worked just fine already.

If you don’t even know who Hordak is, don’t worry about it. He’s not in this movie, but he is the primary villain in the animated MOTU movie from the ‘80s, The Secret of the Sword.

Is the movie making fun of the property? Certainly no more so than the Filmation cartoon did. The original mini-comics that came with the first toys depicted a Conan-like fantasy world, with Skeletor as a demon from another dimension. Filmation made him whiny, mincing and camp, and had his henchmen taking cartoonish pratfalls. Cartoon Trap-Jaw had a flyswatter as one of his interchangeable weapons. Skeletor holds a puppy in the Christmas special and gets upset that it makes him feel nice. The ‘80s cartoon was the silliest of all canons – the movie takes it more seriously than that.

Yes, Teela laughs at the name He-Man when she first hears it – then when danger arrives, says “Sounds like a job for He-Man.” the soundtrack promptly affirms the name with the classic Filmation music declaring “He-MAN!” The entire movie is about how the joy of childhood fantasy is pure. Complain that it’s a toy commercial all you want, and my parents would, but these toys were avatars of the imagination, and the key scene is where young Adam in a classroom setting declares “Ram-Man IS real!” as everyone laughs at him.

Just as Peter Pan urges you to believe in fairies, despite their cattiness, Masters of the Universe 2026, while understanding that the name is funny, definitively wants you to believe that indeed, Ram-Man is real.

And if you want to take that away from fans who’ve waited decades to hear it, feel free to fuck yourself sideways. Sorry. I’m not as nice as Adam.

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We’ve culturally appropriated the Kraken, a lot. And even on behalf of people who didn’t ask for it.

For most Americans my age, the Kraken name conjures up memories of Clash of the Titans. Inserted into the Greek myth of Perseus and Medusa, in place of a generic sea monster, it was a Ray Harryhausen creation evoking an amphibious King Kong with four arms. Pirates of the Caribbean got it slightly more accurate with an octopus-like monster in the 17^th century, but it’s hardly a tropical myth – the first recorded mention of a sea monster with that name comes from Norway in 1646.

It’s only fitting, then for Norway to take it back in Kraken (2026), one of two films this year to bear that name – the other one, also appropriating, is Russian. Clearly inspired by any number of 1950s American monster movies, director Pål Øie is working with the significant advantage of being able to film in a beautiful fjord, in widescreen. When the movie doesn’t work as a monster flick, which unfortunately is more often than I’d like, it’s at the very least an effective travelogue reel for Norway.

For much of the movie, the Kraken itself is more Charybdis than Scylla, a reference I assume will make sense to everybody in the world once Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens. If it doesn’t land for you now, consider the Universal Studios tram tour and its Jaws moment. Chraybdis is the diver in a sudden pool of churning water dyed red; Scylla is the shark lunging out of the water at you. In other words, we don’t get a good look at so much as a tentacle until the 55-minute mark, at which point the movie finally becomes the “Creature Attacks!” flick we all presumably came to see.

Older movies withheld their monsters because they had limited resources, and couldn’t always make the creature look convincing in broad daylight. My assumption with Kraken is that they had a limited number of detailed CG shots they could afford. There’s always something cool about a vaguely threatening outline seen under the surface of the water, and the kaiju-sized Kraken, like the Cloverfield monster, scratches off large tick-like parasites that allow for a more human-sized threat. The Kraken itself, though, stays mostly under wraps for a long stretch, during which the plot steers its rather dull humans into boilerplate eco-drama. An industrial salmon farm has developed a sonic weapon to make parasitic lice flee; the inevitable negative side effects include making the salmon go berserk and attracting the attention of the monster cephalopod of legend.

As Kraken makes the same points over and over, killing time till we get to the effects shots the budget did allow, I half-wanted or expected the monotony to be broken up by MeTV horror host Svengoolie, spitting trivia about each actor and where we probably haven’t seen them before, or singing “Tentacles!” with piano accompaniment to the tune of Olivia Newton-Johns’s “Physical.” Kraken is a throwback tribute that is perhaps too faithful in that regard. It’s trying to actually be good, and its visuals are top notch, thanks to cinematographer and editor Sjur Aarthun. But it isn’t actually all that good until the last half hour. And then, after portraying the Kraken as a relentless threat all movie, director Øie really tries to test Dino DeLaurentiis’ famous King Kong-inspired statement, “Nobody cry when Jaws die.” If you want a kaiju to be poignant, don’t wait until nearly the last scene of the movie to flip that switch.

Given how closely this follows the classic B-movie template, don’t give me crap about spoilers on that point. Nothing about the plot is a major surprise – it even cribs the most memorable scene from The Meg, and makes it less interesting.

Syfy’s killer octopus movies may look awful, but they never lose sight of the fact that you came to see creatures kill people. Kraken looks great, but appears to believe you care about a semi-fictional anti-environment device. No, we want to see the Kraken in a movie called Kraken. If it comes on your TV, tune in around minute 55 for a pretty solid short. Or just drink beer while watching and take as many piss breaks as you like in the first hour. What’s good in this movie doesn’t make it worth paying for what’s dull about it.

Kraken debuts in theaters and on digital Friday, June 12th. Images: Nordisk Film Production

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At some early press screenings, I’ve seen intro videos from cast and/or filmmakers asking us not to spoil the movie for audiences who haven’t had a chance to see it yet. I confess it’s a new wrinkle to watch a movie in the theater, on release weekend, and be asked not to spoil anything you see before everyone has a chance to watch it for free on YouTube, two weeks hence. But such is the situation of The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act, which is actually the last two episodes of a nine-episode, CG-animated web series, brought to the big screen by Fathom events because its sheer popularity makes it seem like leaving money on the table not to.

Fathom is in an interesting position, reviews-wise: so much of what they do is one-night only, and includes, for example, simply filmed stage productions that might not traditionally qualify as movies, but more like the arts equivalent of sports broadcasts. They’ll also show religious propaganda no studio would touch, and live concerts, as well as retro re-releases, but when it comes to critics being assigned, they’re in somewhat of the same ambiguous space as 45-minute Imax documentaries were when I first started as a critic at the turn of this century. Do we review them? Do we not? Publications used to review everything, right, but COVID and streaming movies changed that equation some. Especially as critics stop getting paid and start doing this as a Substack hobby, we can write about whatever we want, and let’s face it, so many of us critics are the uncool kids in class desperately wanting to be liked, so we’ll gravitate to the popular things.

That said, I’d be hard-pressed to tell anyone not already familiar with The Amazing Digital Circus to go in cold to The Last Act, unless, as I did, you’re taking someone who is a really avid fan and too young to drive themselves. It’s not that you’ll be lost – there’s a recap at the beginning for the benefit, presumably, of parents and guardians – but that it really does feel like two episodes of a TV show. It’s going to be treated as a movie, since, it’s near the top of the weekend box office, but the episode break is pretty evident, as is the fact that each episode puts its focus on the backstory and primary dilemma of a different main character.

Creator Gooseworx, like the Wachowskis, has created a new Matrix as trans allegory and more, though this virtual reality is one that could have had circa-1988 Tim Burton as its Architect. A group of strangers finds themselves stuck in a circus-themed virtual reality, now existing as bizarre cartoon avatars that range from a court jester to a sapient piece of Zubaz-ish design. The host, a ringmaster named Caine with a pair of gag dentures and eyeballs for a head, is a manic, sadistic narcissist desperate to be loved and utterly wrongheaded in how he goes about it. As the participants gradually lose their memories of who they were before arriving in this mess, they unpack past traumas in hopes that they can either find a way out, or at least coexist on friendly terms in their new situation.

Perhaps 40 years from now, Travis Knight’s grandkids will distill this into a live-action movie that next-generation pundits will mock. But I digress.

I was reminded initially of Poppy Playtime and Five Nights at Freddy’s – these liminal spaces with candy colors run down and faded, and children waking up in horrific new, distorted and cartoonified bodies that are playthings for someone or something else. Masters of the Universe is about the joy of having toy avatars; Gen Z and alpha appears horrified by the fear of literally being forced to become the avatars permanently. Some of it, as previously mentioned, is likely a trans metaphor for the dysphoric nightmare of not having a body that matches what you know you are. More of it, perhaps, is a fear of the divide between one’s online persona and true self, and the degree to which we can be subtly manipulated online into being our worst selves. Jax, the Roger Rabbit-like purple bunny of the group, is absolutely an online edgelord, acting like none of it matters and he’s too cool for emotional engagement; in actuality, what we can glean is that he’s homeless in the real world, and this is a coping skill carrying over. As The Last Act unfolds, we see his history of distancing himself from anyone who gets close enough to risk him opening up to.

If characters inside the circus lose their memories and minds enough, they “abstract” into jagged black voids full of colorful eyeballs. Nobody really wants that, even Caine, who loses part of his audience that way, but they also seem unclear how to stop it. Only when Kinger, a character who looks like a chess piece in a robe, begins to remember he might have a connection to the virtual circus program from the real world, do certain things begin to clarify. Anyway, episode 8 is Kinger-centric and episode 9 is Jax-centric, while also finding time for a reveal that brings closure to the season...though indeed, there is room left to do more with this property should Gooseworx see a creative way forward.

Every generation gets its weird animation. The Boomers had Bakshi, Gen X had a gloriously experimental MTV, and Millennials got Adult Swim. Early computer animation was weird because it had to be; we’ve finally come back around to it being weird because somebody wants it to be. The Digital Circus characters could have been rendered similarly years ago, but there’s no need to make them more detailed than they have to be if it doesn’t serve the plot to do so.

Watching with an audience of younger teenagers, I was fascinated by what they gasped at – so often it was a character suddenly being inappropriate, like Jax obnoxiously hitting on a platonic friend, or using the word “gay” as a pejorative. We think kids today have short attention spans from TikTok, but many scenes in The Amazing Digital Circus are just characters talking, with no quick cuts or even music; just room tone. Ultimately, everyone reacts in their own way to what seems to be a no-win scenario. If escape is impossible, do you despair? Do you deny it’s reality? Or do you make the best of it? There are six protagonists, and only five stages of grief in the classic therapy model, but depending which character you eliminate in that comparison, they probably match up pretty well.

If your kids are watching and liking this, they’re clearly intelligent, and getting a dose of philosophy and emotional logic from it. I don’t know that I’ll go back and watch the whole thing – and I wouldn’t recommend paying for it if you haven’t – but I enjoy letting the kids enjoy things which seem like they could be pretty good for them. If it helps the YouTube generation appreciate the communal big-screen experience, that’s a bonus.

The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act is now playing in theaters. All images: Glitch/Fathom

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It’s time to take a look at some of the articles I’ve done at other outlets in recent days and weeks. For TV Line, I’ve been taking a few deep dives, including my own very important take on possibly the ultimate nerd debate of all time:

Who is the best Star Trek Captain?

Nobody who knows me is likely to be surprised by my #1, but I threw in some curveballs along the way:

It would be easy to blame Captain Carol Freeman for the Cerritos’ chaotic reputation, but honestly, she deserves credit for keeping the ship functional at all. Without her leadership, the Cerritos likely would have been destroyed several times over by its needy, impulsive, and deeply anxious crew. Her primary officers include a testosterone-addled tactical officer, a shameless egomaniac first officer, an aggressive cat-person as the doctor, and, of course, her own brilliant but wildly insubordinate daughter, Beckett Mariner.

As a ship tasked with Second Contact missions, the Cerritos has less responsibility than those that explore strange new worlds. All it has to do is not screw up the follow-through. The problem is that Captain Freeman is just about the only person onboard capable of being diplomatic. The fact that the Cerritos hasn’t accidentally sparked an interstellar conflict is a testament to her ability to balance an unruly crew with fragile new alliances.

From one icon to a pair of them — peripherally. Godzilla and Kong inhabit the world of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, though the story focus is on the human characters. If you like that show, though, which others might you like?

I emphasize “might”…

Both Godzilla and Kong owe a debt to Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel “The Lost World,” adapted as a silent film in 1925 and several times thereafter. Hailing from that same family tree, but in a uniquely ‘70s style, was Sid and Marty Krofft’s “Land of the Lost,” which has also been remade a couple of times and has another Netflix reboot in the works.

Rather than some lost enclave on Earth, the titular land existed in another dimension with three moons. Dinosaurs still roamed there, but so too did lizard people called Sleestak and a Neanderthal-ish race known as the Pakuni. It wasn’t all primitive, either; bizarre technological artifacts littered the landscape.

What are the best TV show revivals of all time? You might not be surprised at one that made the list, but maybe more so that it wasn’t my #1 pick:

Netflix’s “Masters of the Universe: Revelation” and “Revolution” served as very belated sequels to the original ‘80s Filmation series. Because the He-Man media rights had been divided, the revival had to ignore “She-Ra: Princess of Power,” even though He-Man crossed over into his sister’s superior spinoff.

Keeping the essential mythology intact while jettisoning some of the kiddie humor, the Kevin Smith-produced revival aimed at both longtime fans and newcomers. Prince Adam still wielded his sword and said “By the power of Grayskull!” to become He-Man, but in this show, episodes were no longer predictably formulaic and took big leaps. Moving the story significantly forward, He-Man died early in the series! There was a time jump, Teela took over as lead for a time, and sure enough, eventually He-Man fought his way back from the land of the dead. Meanwhile, Teela briefly seemed more interested in her friend Andra than in any muscular sword-wielder.

Both Skeletor and Evil-Lyn wielded the power of Grayskull at different times, answering years of “what if” fan questions. Orko died and came back like Gandalf, all in white. King Randor also died, and He-Man’s identity was exposed. Teela became the new Sorceress, and He-Man renounced his throne to move in with her. These were big steps to shake up the status quo in what had once been a glorified toy commercial. Viewers also got both William Shatner and Mark Hamill voicing Skeletor’s dueling personalities. That’ll never be topped.

Dare I close out with…

Until Next Time!

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Action Man, when I was a kid, was the toy my friends had if they weren’t into Star Wars — a much bigger army guy with interchangeable clothes and weapons. Later in life, I came to find out it was G.I. Joe, rebranded for a Cold War-era Europe that didn’t necessarily always think America was the greatest, and indeed often resented being literally in the middle of two world military powers at odds.

At a certain point, though, as I’ve detailed elsewhere, Action Man became Action Force, and Action Force became the familiar “Real American Hero” G.I. Joe.

Then things get interesting. As the 3-3/4 inch style of figure began to lose its popularity, Hasbro re-introduced 12-inch G.I. Joe figures, and the UK brought back Action Man. At first he used the same body style. Eventually, though, Action Man became a totally new thing. Still 12 inches like the classic version, he was now more of an extreme sports hero, in bright neon colors, facing a cyborg villain named Doctor X. He got his own cartoon, and this time it wasn’t just a redub of G.I. Joe.

Hasbro recently announced that they’re making a 6-inch scale figure of this Action Man character to go into their G.I. Joe Classified line. Now, bear in mind that in the cartoon, Action Man looks like this:

There’s another thing, too — Hasbro will periodically make their figures look passingly familiar to other characters. Quick Kick is typically a shirtless karate guy, but in a recent two-pack, he was given the sort of gear that makes him look a lot like John Rambo:

Then there was a two-pack of Lt. Falcon and Quarrel (an Action Force character, as it happens), with helmets, shoulderpads, and weapons that made them look like the player characters in the Doom video games:

Now, Hasbro won’t ever admit they’re ripping a specific thing off — they’d open themselves to legal action that way. But in the vaguest terms, their G.I. Joe team people have told me that they certainly take cues from popular action movies, games, and other media.

Which brings us to the new Action Man figure. Does he look like the cartoon, or someone else maybe? Could that extra head, perhaps, pop on to a G.I. Joe naval aviator body?

Because here’s the thing: many toy collectors really want a Tom Cruise action figure. Tom Cruise himself, however, really seems not to want one to exist. The only official one I’m aware of was a 12-inch Medicom Toy figure released overseas for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. It’s like when actors used to refuse to do commercials in the U.S., but “secretly” make them in Japan.

Because John Travolta also so rarely signs off on use of his likeness (no Pulp Fiction figures looking like him have ever made it to market, though fans want them), some suspect Scientology, but I’ve talked to Scientology expert Tony Ortega about this, and he says there’s nothing in their religious texts that prohibits graven images or the like. Giovanni Ribisi even got a toy for the first Avatar movie. Tom Cruise just doesn’t want to be a toy. Yet there’s enough demand for him that a company named Ramen Toys has made a bootleg Top Gun-ish line called Aces of Aviation, with figures who bear very strong resemblances to the likes of Tom Skerritt and Anthony Edwards. There’s a very special bonus figure they can’t show any pictures of, only available if you buy something like a case of 12 figures to get that one, and while nobody says it out loud, the implication is that it’s a Tom Cruise-as-Maverick bootleg. People are paying ridiculous prices for it.

And now Hasbro has revealed an Action Man who’ll cost around $28, and looks a hell of a lot like Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying that, since if it gets around too much they might go back and change the face sculpt. But whom does it look like to you?

Action Man is likely to be a favorite anyway, for all the cross-brand synergy and history he brings to the table. If the final figure does end up looking this much like Cruise, preorders should sell out quite fast. Because buying a Cruise figure without him getting any royalties to give to the Church of L. Ron Hubbard is the best of both worlds. If he were smart, he’d sign a likeness deal and put out his own stuff.

I haven’t seen much in recent years to indicate he is, though.

All images: Hasbro.

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So why review these two movies like this? Well, I’m just trying something different because it’s fun. Also, they’re both mostly trying to do the same thing: bring back the multiple-joke-per-minute Zucker-Abrams-Zucker parody movie, but R-rated. They’ll be a true test to see if the recent Naked Gun reboot was just a one-off, or a trend-starter.

What’s Stop!That!Train! a parody of? Basically Airplane! And if you’re wondering how you parody a movie that’s already a parody, you do it by casting mostly drag queens. There’s a touch of Sharknado in there too.

What’s Scary Movie a parody of? Pretty much every major horror hit in the past decade, but mostly the last three Scream sequels, which aren’t quite parodies in and of themselves, but also aren’t totally not parodies, either. So basically, both movies at hand are spoofing other movies that were already funny to some degree.

Please tell me they’re better than the Jason Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer _____ Movie movies? Okay, they are. And Friedberg and Seltzer are not back.

Please tell me they’re also better than Sharknado? That’s not really a question, but with the caveat that I like Sharknado more than most, yes, they both are.

Are both movies actually funny? Yes. I had my misgivings about one of them but both made me laugh steadily.

Which one gave you misgivings? We’ll get to that.

Okay, what are these movies really ABOUT? Good question. Most people, when they ask what a movie’s about, just want the premise. I can tell you’re asking it in a film critic way, like what the real theme is.

So answer it. Scary Movie, the sixth movie in the series but with the same title as the first, goes back to what makes the first one work, and is about how fundamentally white most horror movies are, humorously contrasting the way Black characters handle analogous situations. Stop!That!Train! is mostly about drag queens being sassy, but also classism and institutional sexism.

Do these have plots, or are they just strings of gags? Scary Movie has more of a plot, believe it or not, which is that it’s a legacy sequel, with Temu Ghostface stalking the daughters of Cindy (Anna Faris), one of whom looks like Wednesday Addams and is named Tuesday.

That’s not funny. Well, not every joke in Scary Movie lands. But pretty much all of them in Stop!That!Train! do.

So it’s a better movie? It’s not that simple. Stop!That!Train! is weaker when it comes to structure. It’s a story that follows train attendants Tess (Ginger Minj) and Deedee (Jujubee), as they lose their jobs at low-rent Stank Rail, and happen into new ones with the luxurious Glamazonian Express. Unfortunately, the train is headed into a “stormaganza” with the conductor incapacitated, catching the attention of the popularity-hungry President of the United States (RuPaul). But Tess and Deedee remain fairly passive throughout, and the film clearly couldn’t care less about the actual plot mechanics of stopping the train, which is, you know, the title of the movie, after all. But like I said, the jokes are good. Scary Movie does a lot of Family Guy-style digressions to get in the non-Scream movie parodies, and not all of them work, but its main characters stay proactive about finding the killer. So I never fidgeted in my seat in that one.

And you did during Stop!That!Train!? Yeah. Weird, because again, I liked all the gags and jokes, and I think its ratio of hit to miss is better than Scary Movie’s. But it was also made cheaply and quickly – it was one of those movies that might not have gotten released theatrically if they hadn’t gotten Adam Shankman to direct.

Did they bribe you with alcohol, though? Stop!That!Train gave us tequila drinks after the screening. Scary Movie offered us beer and wine before. In both cases I was driving, so I abstained. In neither case was it necessary.

Wait, who directed Scary Movie? Did they get Keenan back? No, sorry. It’s Michael Tiddes.

Who? Marlon Wayans’ favorite director, who also did A Haunted House and Fifty Shades of Black.

Weren’t those terrible? Nobody knows, because who actually watched them? But most of us assume so.

But this one is good, though, right? Yes. Taking time off from horror movie parodies seems to have allowed these Wayans brothers to recharge their batteries. It’s probably a bad idea to start making a bunch more of these, but when you have ten years of stuff to mock, it’s a bit easier than when one has to come out every two years or so. Honestly, I didn’t even care much for Scary Movie 2, and the rest were way worse. That first one, though, pushed the limits of an R-rating and stuck to its north star of mocking how white slasher movies are.

Is this new one hard R too? If you’re asking me if there are penises, the answer is yes.

Is it homophobic/transphobic? There are some jokes that won’t sit well, but on the whole, the trans jokes are about how bad the older generation is at navigating that stuff. Benny Zielke, a nonbinary trans actor, plays a trans male teenager, and the characters who misgender him are the butt of the joke. That said, the terminology is not PC – there’s a line about Charlie Sheen banging “chicks who were dudes.” The nonbinary pronoun joke in the trailer is one of the least funny jokes in the movie, but it plays out slightly better than the abbreviated version you’ve seen.

Is Stop!That!Train! Straight-phobic? No, and that’s not really a thing. Most of the drag queens are playing straight women, as far as I can tell.

Who are these movies meant for? According to drag queen Symone, Stop!That!Train! is like a big pride party that is inviting the rest of the world in. According to Scary Movie’s marketing, it’s looking to offend everyone.

Do they succeed? If you ask me, Stop!That!Train [I’m going to stop putting in that last exclamation point, because it makes my stupid word program auto-capitalize the next letter after it, even when that’s WRONG) succeeds in being very inclusive of everyone. I sometimes get bored with Drag Race, and was worried RuPaul would be too hammy, but actually Ru shows real star power and the script is way more polished than a Drag Race sketch. I think maybe it’s reality shows I don’t like so much. On the other hand, I think folks on the left will give Scary Movie more of a pass than the right, because while it mocks everyone, it very clearly takes the point of view that racism in America is still a thing, and a particularly Republican problem. It’s kind of astonishing that Paramount, now assumed to be in Trump’s pockets, would put this out – it’s way bolder than most mainstream studio movies are about being and staying woke, in the traditional Black understanding of the term.

OH NO! IT’S WOKE? It’s a movie by Black creatives mocking the whiteness of horror movies. But if it makes you cool your stupid panic jets, they also make fun of DEI. And they say the n-word more than any movie I’ve seen in ages.

REVERSE RACISM! Shut up. You’re the reason they made this movie.

Okay, fine. Who are the best actors in these? Anna Faris is as charming as ever, and Olivia Rose Keegan does a great job playing Faris’ other daughter, by channeling both Faris and Judy Greer from the Halloween legacyquel. In Stop!That!Train, I was impressed by RuPaul, and Brian Jordan Alvarez as co-conductor Cal, because he’s basically doing a 1995-era Keanu Reeves impersonation the entire time.

What about the actual leads? Ginger Minj and Jujubee deliver their lines well, but even though it’s their characters who are supposed to lack confidence, I felt like the actors lacked some confidence too. Like, RuPaul owns every scene, even the ones where her character is supposed to be insecure. I seem to recall Ginger Minj being much sassier when she was fatter. Latrice Royal is the scene-stealer as Barb, a character who shows up everywhere in a new job each time. Shankman joked about a spinoff movie, and I’d be there for that. Also Rachel Bloom as the relatively deadpan control-room woman has the toughest role, playing it straight, so to speak, and does really well. As for the Wayans brothers, their characters are still one-note – pothead and not-so-closet case – but they make bigger choices, and ultimately even develop, just a touch.

Is the ZAZ style back, then? Stop!That!Train has more of the classic wordplay humor, while Scary Movie is likely to break its own rules for a laugh. Both love to swear. ZAZ were PG, mostly.

What does that mean, Mr. Equivocator? Yeah, it’s back. For now. Both of these movies are legit funny, as I’ve said a few times now. Adam Shankman and the Wayanses all feel like they’ve been freed from constraints to be as uncensored as they want to be, and thankfully that makes them funnier.

Give me your quote for the poster. Who are you, the publicist?

It’s a turn of phrase. No, it really isn’t. But okay: “The best Scary Movie since the first one!” [Actually, the only good one besides the first one, but they’ll never quote that part.]

Now do Stop!That! Train: “This race is no drag!” No, wait, that ain’t it.”Full-speed ahead funny!” “I never thought the director of Cheaper by the Dozen 2 could make me laugh once, let alone a lot!” They won’t use that one.

It’s true, though. Truth in advertising is no virtue; deceit in non-advertising no vice. Or something.

Did Barry Goldwater say that? Who? No. I hope nobody said it. It actually doesn’t make sense, now that I look at it again.

So you said you’d tell me later which one gave you misgivings. Scary Movie, obviously.

If it was obvious I wouldn’t have asked. If it WERE obvious.

If what were obvious? No, that’s the grammatically correct way to...never mind. Can you go away now?

Look, you’re the one imagining me. I assume you can stop any time.

Scary Movie opens June 5^th (but go see Masters of the Universe first). Stop!That!Train opens June 12^th. All images courtesy of Paramount and World of Wonder/Bleecker Street.

Check out the interview with Adam Shankman here.

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Adam Shankman isn’t a director I necessarily think of as a comedy genius, being the guy behind such studio programmers as Cheaper by the Dozen 2 and The Pacifier. I remember well, because it was a phrase we revisited many times since, my best friend coming out of the press screening of Cheaper 2 saying, “That movie sucked ASS COCK.” A better line than any in the movie.

However, now that I’ve seen Shankman in person and heard him speak, I must assume the studios tied his hands, because that man is a naturally funny fellow. And his latest, the RuPaul-starring disaster movie spoof Stop! That! Train!, might just be the funniest film of the year. When there’s no studio money on the line, and you make it fast and cheap, the odds are better that you can say anything you want, and boy, does this movie ever. There’s one gag bit of nudity with an obviously fake breast, but for the most part, the R-rating is for sassy, dirty jokes. Get people laughing hard enough, and the Sharknado-level special effects don’t matter.

At a screening last night at UTA, Shankman introduced the movie by saying, “This is the most important movie that’s ever been made. It’s, it’s been proven. I said to Mark Shaman who wrote Hairspray, I was like, because Hairspray wasn’t gay enough, I had to make this.”

To cheers of support from the audience, Shankman mentioned that production took just 19 days, with two weeks of prep time. “By the way, I didn’t know it was going to be in theaters when I said yes,” he said. “And then when they told me it was going to be in theaters, I said, really? Why?”

“And now I just, it’s so funny. I’ve just come to believe that this kind of movie is exactly the kind of movie we need to be celebrating more than ever before. It’s such a different kind of dopamine hit. And it’s so important to be sitting with people in a room filled with laughter. It’s not about distracting from all the shit that’s going on in the world. This is actually about a release valve. We need relief. And this, being communal, putting everything else aside, laughing, it’s just, its value is unquantifiable.”

“And so I, God, I hope you laugh. What if y’all think it stinks? That’d be actually fucking awesome.”

After the screening, Shankman talked some more, along with writer Christina Friel and actors Symone and Lisa Rinna.

Shankman recalled seeing the primary set for the first time, of a luxury train that finds itself speeding into a dangerous storm. “Just so you know how crazy this shit was, okay, they walk me down and go, do you want to see the train? And I was like, yes, finally. I walked down and there was just a plywood rectangle. And, on, on a stage in Pacoima. And, um, and I went, oh, okay. And they’re like, there’s gonna be the seats. We promise you it’s gonna be done in a couple days. And it’s just the plywood thing and there are no walls.”

“And they’re like, this is coach. And I was like, great, let’s move over, let me look at first class. And they said, this is also first class. And I was like, ‘I thought...’ They were like, yeah, we couldn’t afford it. So, so, the whole train is just one rectangle. Like, that whole thing. And we, I mean, we shot one thing for like six days and then we shot the other thing for six days.”

The other main location in the movie is the train company headquarters, where controllers try to guide the train. That wasn’t even a set. “The train headquarters was our production office,” said Shankman. “And the wardrobe room was one of the doors. And we just would have to like, you know, put a curtain over it. And then, we just put a pipe and drape around it and that turned into the presidential press conference [scene].”

There’s also a key scene that takes place in a train station bathroom, which was not the original plan. “I think it was set at a restaurant at Union Station,” said Friel.

“Yeah, at another place where she left. But then we couldn’t, Union Station was like, you gotta go,” said Shankman.

“You’ve taken up too much time here,” added Friel.

“And so, we were like, where are we gonna put it?” said Shankman. “And suddenly, they were like, well, we were at World of Wonder on the stages. And they were like, ‘Well, there’s a bathroom over here.’ So we had Deedee go back to the bathroom. And add the line, she’s like, ‘Weren’t you just here?’ ‘I like it here.’ That’s how this movie got made. So it was pretty heavy.”

Friel, who wrote the script with writing partner Connor Wright three years ago, had a bit more time — six months — to come up with it. “We were asked on the set of our Christmas movie, The Bitch Who Stole Christmas, another movie we did with World of Wonder — yes, another hard drama — to come up with a pitch for drag queens meets Airplane!” she recalled. “We came up with a pitch; World of Wonder was like, yes, we need to do it. And then we wrote the script, and Adam came on board, thank God, because he had the idea to do drag queens on a train, because it was too similar to airplane, which just opened up the whole world to have, you know, U.S. Rail Force. Stank Rail. You know, it just, it was really, really fun.”

Shankman had them on set every day to keep adding to the film. “Connor and Christina were sitting in the corner literally,” he said. “and I was like, okay, we’re going to need a joke for this.”

“Yeah, we would go off on our lunch break and be like, joke, joke, joke, joke,” said Friel.

“And then I’d say like, I need a couple lines and they’d send me like four pages of jokes,” said Shankman. “And I was like…’Too much.’”

Once the project started with RuPaul’s involvement, the many celebrity cameos naturally followed. “I did a little cameo on Running Point, on Netflix,” said Lisa Rinna, “And I went to the fitting, and Sal was doing the wardrobe. And Sal and I did my wardrobe, and he said, ‘You know, they’re doing, RuPaul’s doing a movie.’ And I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to, you know, do the costume designing.’ I said, ‘Well, I need to be in it, don’t you think?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I do.’ Next thing I know, somehow the casting calls my agent, and of course here I am. Of course I said yes. It’s like a match made in heaven. I didn’t even have to audition.”

“There’s no better lighting than this movie, right? No better lighting.”

“We’re in a very interesting time. I’mma just say it like that,” said Drag Race season 13 winner Symone. “And it’s good that we have this movie that we can offer. It’s what all of us share as a community. It’s good that we have this moment that we can share, but also you put it out in the world that we’re inviting everyone to come into our party, you know. So, I think it’s important. It’s our form of protest because, you know, we’re queer people in the film. We’re leading it. We’re not the butt of the joke. And, we look fabulous. We look stunning. I mean, look at that poster up there. So, it’s fabulous.”

“It’s fabulous doing Pride Month.”

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If you want to see a bunch of late middle-aged men shed a tear over a guy in a loincloth, take them to Masters of the Universe. If you are one of said guys, prepare to be overwhelmed in all the feels by your childhood remade right. The power is back, and Masters of the Universe has gotten the epic movie it deserves, nearly forty years after Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella heroically transcended a Cannon Films budget to make a memorable flop that failed to save Mattel’s flailing flagship boy’s toy line. Amazon/MGM has invested exponentially more money to make a version that feels as epic as a boy’s bedroom floor once did back in 1986.

There are many Masters of the Universe continuities, and they all conflict in major and minor ways, though over the years the property has developed what the Spider-Verse movies call canon points – key events that every iteration moving forward ought to do some version of. Director Travis Knight (Bumblebee) and writers Chris Butler, David Callaham, and the Nee brothers primarily draw from the ‘80s Filmation cartoons, but there’s a surprising amount of the 1987 movie included, as well as more obscure characters like Dian and Goat Man from other media. And like the more modern cartoons, it pretty much eliminates the secret identity concept, though there’s an elegant explanation for that at the very end.

It’s not entirely surprising, for both budgetary and audience identification reasons, that this story has Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) grow into adulthood on Earth. More surprising, perhaps, is that Adam growing up in exile away from his parents is a plotline only found in the Netflix CG series, one of the less popular iterations due to more drastic departures from other canons. Utterly guileless and honest to a fault, Adam can’t help telling people of his alien origins on planet Eternia, though the same qualities that make people think he’s nuts or high also make an effective conflict-resolutions expert in the human resources department where he works. Their motto, practically taunting him daily, is “I have the power...to be the best version of myself!”

Just as Gwildor lost the cosmic key en route to Earth in the 1987 film, Adam lost the sword of power while falling through a portal, and has been searching over a decade for it while still punching the clock at his passive-aggressive, politically correct workplace. Knight has fun mocking buzzword-heavy affected sensitivity here; later, he will also poke holes in Eternia’s warrior philosophy, before settling on a South Park-ish middle ground which acknowledges that both empathy and strength are essential.

Before all of that, though, and after green tiger Cringer has sweetly replaced the MGM lion in the introductory logo, we get a massive exposition dump about Eternia, the power of Grayskull, and the sword of power; and an extended sequence of Adam as a young boy, sporting the Filmation pageboy haircut and utterly flunking combat training.

The time spent with the kids had me worried for a bit. With garish colors and faux-medieval attire, it was starting to look like a bad Ren Faire. Things get better by getting worse, when the forces of evil finally attack, and blue-skinned space pirate Trap Jaw (Sam C. Wilson) gets an epic entrance before thoroughly whupping the ass of good-guy military leader Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba). Skeletor (Jared Leto behind a mo-cap skull) makes his big appearance, and Adam makes an exit, through a portal inside Castle Grayskull to his mother’s home planet of Earth.

While the arrival on Earth slowed things down in the 1987 film, here it’s where they start to pick up. Adam’s interactions with regular humans who just don’t get his obsession with characters named Ram Man and Fisto will feel quite familiar to those of us who recall trying to explain those very same characters to our parents, or friends who had long since lost interest in the toys they were made for. Adam’s roommate Hussein (Christian Vunipola), who has a secret fandom all his own centered on the movie The Notebook, sees Adam’s obsession as a nerd hobby, but to Adam it’s more than that – these characters are real to him. Sort of like they were to us, except in this case they’re REALLY real.

Adam ultimately finds the sword and gets back to Eternia, only to find his beloved home destroyed under a lengthy reign of Skeletor, whose ruling philosophy is more or less to break the toys everyone else wants to play with, and take the ones he likes. Not unlike certain other powerful leaders we could name, he’s still massively insecure despite being in charge of the planet, because he doesn’t yet have everything, nor a solid guarantee that the cool stuff won’t be taken away somehow, someday. Unlike real-world leaders, though, he has no delusions as to where he stands. When instructors tell students in acting classes that villains never think they’re villains, they’re not talking about Skeletor, who knows full well he’s evil, and relishes it (his 2002 canonical past as Keldor, brother of King Randor and victim of racism, is neither mentioned here nor specifically contradicted). Once Adam finally unlocks the power of the sword, it turns him into He-Man and sets him on a collision course with the dark despot who dethroned his parents.

Tonally, Masters of the Universe 2026 aspires to mix genuine heroism with tongue-in-cheek dialogue, like 1980’s Flash Gordon (complete with Brian May guitar licks and a classic Queen song), or more recently, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. It eschews the more outright childish comedy moments of the cartoon – don’t expect Crackers the Clown to show up – but Adam’s Earth-exiled perspective allows him an understanding of how ridiculous the situation seems. There’s humor and there’s irony – obvious Fisto jokes are once again obvious – but Adam himself remains sincere, and the stakes are real. It’s possible a couple of your favorite action figures do indeed get melted, with Skeletor using his havoc staff as a neighborhood bully might a magnifying glass in the bright sun.

Manosphere clickbaiters may well complain that this He-Man is clumsy and makes mistakes; this is his origin story, after all. Real fans will welcome the way the movie script rewrites one of the cartoon’s most notable moments from the episode “The Problem With Power,” without letting He-Man off the hook so easily this time around. Jared Leto’s Skeletor is so good that you’ll likely forget it’s Jared Leto, and I say that as someone who liked his take on the Joker. A theatrical villain akin to Disney’s Captain Hook, Leto’s Skeletor is closest, perhaps, to the Skeletor from the New Adventures cartoon, as pompously voiced by Campbell Lane. He might not have a line delivery as great as Frank Langella’s, but his physicality and appearance make him arguably the best overall. The script even throws in Alan Oppenheimer-style quips – Beast Man is a “hirsute halfwit,” while He-Man is a “musclebound Milquetoast.”

It’s more creative than some of the swearing other characters do — I’m no prude, though I remember being amused at He-Man saying “Drat!” in a comic, but I’m not sure MOTU needs to potentially alienate kids by having characters say things like “goddamn.” On a planet where they don’t even believe in God as such! Adam’s childhood pal Teela at one point says “Thank Zodac you’re alive!” alluding to a cosmic character not otherwise seen or mentioned herein.

Speaking of, Camila Mendes is the best and most gorgeous Teela to date, as a badass beauty who has had to harden herself. Idris Elba plays her father Duncan/Man-at-Arms in a place we’ve never seen the character before; usually an unflappable, fatherly genius, he becomes an alcoholic loser after Trap Jaw’s beating, unable to pick himself up as he insists his troops must.

Is the movie perfect? No, not even for me – I cringed like the aspiring Battle Cat at a major bit of Amazon product placement, and Castle Grayskull being right next door to Eternos city simply doesn’t make much sense, but it does save us multiple filler scenes of characters traveling, perhaps. And poor Moss Man! A minor character with no lines, he looks like he’s wearing a store-bought Halloween costume rather than being an actual earth elemental made of plants. Also Cringer only wears the Battle Cat armor in one scene, and Alison Brie, while adequate as Evil-Lyn and effective in showing hints of a masochism fetish, is nonetheless mildly miscast. Meg Foster could conquer her in a staredown with ease.

With that said, by the time the movie ended, I was overwhelmed with emotion in a way I can’t recall since maybe Edward Scissorhands back in high school. Knight and his writers didn’t just thread a tricky-as-hell tonal needle; they did so in ways that sometimes felt directed at me personally. And I’m not just referring to the fact that this script included things I thought only my headcanon included.

Here’s what I mean. There’s a scene early on where Earth-stranded Adam goes on a date, and he’s so honest that when he’s asked where he’s from, a standard date question, he tells the full Eternia story, which has to be a bit like hearing Scientology’s Xenu story for the first time and letting it sink in that someone really believes it. And suddenly, I felt seen in a very specific way. No, I’m not a Scientologist, but I’ve been that guy on a date so many times.

See, I grew up in Ireland, and the “Where did you grow up?” question is one I always answered honestly. The problem is I didn’t like growing up in Ireland, and American women mostly don’t want to hear that, because they’ve romanticized it in their minds. So it always made me a downer and a buzzkill, and I was never the type to learn how to just lie about it.

There’s another thing, too. My father left Ireland before me, and during summers and holidays when I would stay with him in the U.S., I had my Masters of the Universe near-complete collection, including the amazing Eternia playset. Vacation ended, and I’d have to go back to Ireland, leaving Eternia behind. It was vivid to me, and I missed it so much. When Adam returns and says “I remember all of you,” he’s speaking for every kid who had to leave their toys behind somewhere, and was made fun of for even talking about his love for them in absentia. I’ve never personally related to Prince Adam more.

There’s a joke at the end of all of this, which is that the goofier toy character names like Mekaneck were nicknames Adam made up when he couldn’t remember their real names. The further joke is that the film then never actually tells us their real names. Adam’s date, incidentally, is named Julie, which I’m pretty sure is a reference to Courtney Cox’s 1987 character; other Easter eggs are strewn throughout, including a comic shop called the Fright Zone, and a car company called Heroic Warriors Motors. Stay through the end credits for the real deep cuts.

There’s so much more I want to talk about, including a risky, awesome bit of surreal comedy during the final battle, but there’ll be time for that later. Just know that if you’ve loved this franchise for 40+ years, this movie is giving you that love back in spades, along with a timely reminder that empathy and kindness still matter. Heal your inner child and give him the power.

Eternia’s gonna make YOU great again.

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My reward for going to the dentist this morning was He-Man donuts. Perhaps, you say, that’s a bit like having a beer to celebrate a week of sobriety. In response, I say that if it were a Masters of the Universe movie beer, you aren’t likely to have another one for 30 years once June is over, so enjoy the fuck out of it. (This is, it goes without saying, NOT responsible medical or dental advice. That’s gonna be on some other substack, maybe, probably.)

If I were in charge of marketing synergy, I have to say, I might have chosen different items. Battle Cat cat food seems smart, though I have never found it at any store. But as I noticed the other day, a green wet burrito is already in Battle Cat colors. Why not embrace that, instead of a burger with bacon on it?

Still, as our own former Man-At-Harms Donald Rumsfeld once kinda-sorta said, you eat the food tie-ins that you have, not the ones you wish you had. Unless you’re a great chef and can make anything, I suppose. The ingredients are to the north, south, west, and east somewhere. So Krispy Kreme is doing Masters of the Universe donuts, and the only way that really works is if you take The Rock at his word that on his workout “cheat day” he eats about a dozen donuts, and he looks as close to a Masters of the Universe action figure as a person can. Indeed, at one time he’d have been my ideal choice to play He-Man.

Speaking of cheating, when you order a dozen of these — and there are three varieties — wouldn’t you expect four of each? Well, no, you don’t get that. You get nine MOTU donuts — three of each — and three plain glazed. By the power of bummer! For the dishonor of my sweet tooth!

The themed box is cool, though, with familiar catchphrases that replace a keyword with “glazed.” It’s like in college when we thought adding “in bed” to every sentence was hilarious.

I decided to build up gradually, and start with the easiest looking one to eat. It’s called the Cringer Claw, presumably because it will make your teeth chatter into submission.

What Krispy Kreme’s site says: “This softly heroic treat starts with our Original Glazed^® doughnut dipped and drizzled with smooth cookie‑dough icing, capturing Cringer’s sweet, comforting charm in every bite.”

What I tasted: a glazed donut in more glaze. It’s cookie dough flavored? Okay, if you say so. Cookie dough isn’t much of a flavor in and of itself, though, especially without chocolate chips — it’s more of a texture. So if you smooth it out into a glaze, it tastes like the vague flavor of a cookie, which is basically vanilla. I don’t like peanut butter, but the fact that the stripes look like peanut butter and aren’t may be annoying to some of you goobers.

I decided it was time to go full lord of darkness next.

What Krispy Kreme says about the Skeletor Double Chocolate: “This dark delight features an unglazed shell doughnut filled with chocolate custard, dipped in delicious chocolate icing and rolled in Skeletor cookie crumb for villainous crunch. Finished with a wicked Skeletor piece, it delivers the full power of Eternia’s most infamous sorcerer in every bite.”

What I tasted: modified Boston Creme Pie that was really messy.

I actually love Boston Creme Pies, but isn’t it a bit odd that this one is called “Double Chocolate” when the base donut itself is not a chocolate one?

The two chocolate parts are the crushed cookies on top, and the chocolate custard inside. And for a dark mage, they’re a bit mild. The chocolate custard is like regular custard with cocoa added, or perhaps the filling you used to find in Hostess rip-off chocolate pies. In other words it’s more like “vanilla featuring chocolate” than chocolate. Not bad, but if you want an actual cacao fix, it’s mild.

The cookies are essentially crushed Oreo/Hydrox, with some dyed purple and blue. Very messy dust that gets everywhere, but you know what it tastes like. No surprises.

The Skeletor head is tasteless fondant with a slippery texture once it’s in your mouth. Not really worth consuming, but it looks fancy. Kinda like Morbius and Tron: Ares.

Would He-Man fare batter, I mean better?

What Krispy Kreme says about the He-Man Caramel Crunch: “This mighty treat starts with our legendary Original Glazed^® doughnut, dipped in red caramel icing and swirled with cheesecake flavored frosting that channels the energy of the Power Sword. A graham flavored crumble brings a Castle Grayskull style crunch, and a triumphant He-Man candy piece crowns the creation, summoning nostalgic strength in every bite.”

What I tasted: confusion, wondering why the fuck they made caramel a “red” flavor. Dunkin Donuts recently did a Fruit Punch donut in the same color, and it was Oh Yeah delicious. Forget drinking the Kool-Aid; why not eat it?

So you bite into this thing thinking it’ll have some kind of “red” flavor, and it doesn’t. Just the taste of even more glaze. As with cookie dough, caramel is as much texture as it is flavor — harden it, and it becomes toffee. Make it a glaze, and it’s vaguely vanilla, just like cookie dough. I guess the swirl represents a swirl of power surging from the sword during his transformation.

Still, if you pick off the crumbles individually, they taste a bit like cheesecake, which is ironic, because He-Man is beefcake. Teela should have the cheesecake donut, because Camilla Mendes, duh. That said, there are so many different forms of sugar in this that if you give it to a little kid, they will have the power…to make your supervisory life hell as they sugar buzz like mad.

Somehow I have a high enough tolerance that I didn’t feel sick after all three donuts. However, I don’t recommend the process. I needed a good bitter, sour-dirt tasting coffee to cleanse the palette. As my mother used to say about Cadbury Creme Eggs, “They’re SIIIIIICKLY!”

As for that He-Man “candy piece,” again, tasteless fondant. But a nice print. Get me some official MOTU cake decorations like this before my birthday (July) and I’ll be happy. I think. Hate to predict for sure.

I didn’t try the three plain donuts. They didn’t earn their place in the box, or in my mouth. I’m sure they’ll be a passable breakfast on a day when I get up sooner than I want to, which is every day, come to think of it.

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Disney has been a universal symbol of American corporatization and commodification for decades now, so there’s very little that’s more punk rock than defiling it in some way. Escape From Tomorrow, the horror movie stealthily shot at Disney World, was something of a disappointment in that regard – the tactics were entertaining, but the actual story, not so much. Stolen Kingdom doesn’t need to graft a cheesy story on top of its illicit forays into EPCOT; it all happened, and the story is there already.

Blasting off with a punk rock-scored montage, the documentary introduces (or perhaps reintroduces, if you’re an avid Disney YouTuber) several content creators who have brought cameras where civilian cameras aren’t supposed to be in Florida’s Mouse Monarchy. They have differing motivations: some like the liminal spaces of abandoned buildings, while others want to capture every inch of soon-to-be-closed attractions. The thrill of the trespass is enough for many, but at least one is a thief.

If legalities weren’t a problem, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine themed episodes of Jackass devoted to this sort of thing. The risks are enormous, especially since all involved are documenting most of what they do. Naturally, Disney fans love to see old props from rides before their time, or hidden areas they know they aren’t meant to ever set eyes upon, so there will always be clicks for the folks who choose to provide that content. Where it gets dicier is when the hobby involves stolen goods. People collecting park memorabilia usually don’t ask where it comes from or how it was obtained; at best, they’re willfully naive. At worst, they’ll look at the videos and actually ask for something they see there, promising a hefty payday in return.

Stolen Kingdom is mostly stitched together from interviews with some of the best-known Disney infiltrators, or at least the best-known who have been unmasked so far, and their footage, some of which has not been shown before. Disney imagineers are so good at creating immersive rides that it’s easy to fantasize about stepping off the vehicle and into the artificial world – following those who are actually doing it, camera in hand, is vicariously thrilling. The myth of omnipresent Disney park security, while arguably true today, was certainly not in effect a couple decades ago. Disney fans have heard all the stories of cremation ashes being dumped on the Haunted Mansion – you’ll see something in that ballpark here, and don’t be surprised if it induces Disney to start putting cameras in restroom stalls.

This isn’t just a real-life found footage film, though – it’s building to a mystery. One of EPCOT’s most popular shuttered attractions was a show called Cranium Command, which was simply boarded up and left as-is for years. Its primary animatronic, a cartoonish military recruit named Buzzy, presided over the giant, robotic interior of a cartoon conception of a human head.

Then one day his clothes and hands went missing. And after that, Buzzy himself. Disney works a lot of magic with perspective, so even though Buzzy always appeared to be a small character, he was actually the size of a relatively short human, but much bulkier and denser. No one person could likely have hauled him away, and there’s enough circumstantial evidence that Disney didn’t simply just archive him. So which of the Disney breaker-inners did it? And if not any of them, who?

Director Joshua Bailey is a lover of hardcore music and Disney – he himself once worked at the parks, and was part of the punk scene, so this is arguably the movie he was born to make. He got Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty to create original music, and of course licensed the classic Dada song “Diz Knee Land” for the end credits, which uses the name of a theme park as a synonym for juvenile detention. (“Junior Disneyland Hotel” certainly used to be street slang for Juvenile Detention Holding.)

But while the Boomer generation often demonized Disney, and Gen-X dismissed it as childish, Millennials have an altogether different relationship. Perhaps as a result of living through nonstop crisis after crisis, and seeing Marvel and Star Wars brought into the fold, it represents more childhood security than brand fascism. These punkers aren’t breaking into Disney world to flip off the man; more often than not, they’re doing it because they love the brand and want to know everything about it beyond what they’re told. (That’s Chris Hardwick’s definition of a “nerd,” which I disagree with, and I suspect these guys – they’re all guys, because of course they are – might too.)

The most obvious Buzzy suspect, Patrick Spikes, at one point suggests he’ll be the most famous part of the history of Disney World, which identifies another mindset at work – they all want to be part of their favorite brand, but on their own terms. That’s a bit like having your cake and eating it too: you don’t join the Borg and demand to have autonomy thereafter. They’ve learned from seeing the previous generation initially refusing to sell out and then gradually having to, but what if you could force your way into the machine by seizing control over however small an aspect of it as you can?

Theft, it seems, is not the way. Those who steadfastly refuse to take souvenirs understand that it becomes addictive – heist movies always have one last big score, but in real life, there’s always another “last” big score until there isn’t, and justice, however slow-moving, catches on.

Disney may be catching on, too. As a company they’re notorious for burying their own history, often in the name of staying a trusted family friendly brand, but sometimes simply in the name of tossing old attractions in favor of the newest thing. So long as they have archives to hide, the obsessive fans whom they cultivate with non-stop merchandising will want to see what’s concealed. Are the urban explorers doing the consumers and archivists a service by demonstrating the value of corporate history?

That might be overstating it. In the meantime, the thrill of the transgression is best enjoyed voyeuristically, in this form, from people who’ve already paid their price.

Stolen Kingdom is currently on a nationwide roadshow tour. Check the official site for dates and tickets. Images from White Lake Productions and Bright Sun Films.

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It’s become apparent to me recently that several critical types whom I consider my peers, and “about” my age, don’t understand why a big epic, mega-budget Masters of the Universe movie exists. And it makes me wonder once again about the perception of time at different ages.

When I was a kid, certain sci-fi shows would obsess me and my friends, for what seemed like ages. Blue Thunder! Automan! Otherworld! Starman! Now in my adult years as a writer of nostalgic pieces for TV Line, I look back and see that all of them were canceled after one season.

True Masters of the Universe fandom that lasted emanates from those who had the toys, which were available from 1981 through 1987. That’s not even the entirety of the Reagan administration, but six years is your entire elementary school tenure. It’s two more than high school. Hell, if you go to a two-year college, it’s high school and college combined. And MOTU were a god-tier toy line, towering over all other figures with jacked physiques, archetypal special abilities, and for much of the line, unique play features on each one. The Eternia playset – three giant towers guarded by a moat you could fill with water, and connected by a motorized monorail – was INSANE. The toys always came first – the TV cartoon and the movie were playing catch-up to the high-concepts that were the figure designs.

But if you were the wrong age for those toys – and in Ireland, kids were pressured to grow out of toys and into sports by age 10 or thereabouts, which did not work on me – I guess “He-Man” is just a slightly silly cartoon and a Cannon Films B-movie that looks like a ripoff of Star Wars and Beastmaster.

Now, even among kids who knew the toys first, the Filmation He-Man cartoon is the best-known iteration. The new movie’s stars, Nicholas Galitzine and Camilla Mendes, knew about the property from memes, like Prince Adam singing 4 Non Blondes, or Skeletor telling a dirty joke and running away. Those too are based on the Filmation versions. As I’ve said before, I think it’s wise to lean into that iteration as your starting point for a mass-appeal movie.

But it’s just a starting point. I love the new “final” trailer, but it opens with text to remind you the cartoon was 40 years ago. Since the tone of this new movie looks similar to 1980’s Flash Gordon, which most people my age recognize as an unimpeachable classic, let me ask you something. How old of a property was Flash Gordon in 1980? The answer is a number larger than 40. Did I know this, as a six year-old? Hell no I didn’t. I just knew it looked like an incredibly cool movie. Which it was. And is.

I don’t see anything wrong, therefore, in a 40 year-old IP becoming a movie. But none of the MOTU 2026 trailers has even really tried to sell the concept to newbies. Everyone who is pop-culturally savvy knows the “I have the power!” catchphrase; how many know what it actually signifies and why it’s important? Even the 1987 movie understood this, beginning with a voice-over that explained the importance of Castle Grayskull to control of the universe. I don’t know what a kid today gets from “Office worker is actually from another planet where he fights a skull-faced dude.” I do think the He-Man/Skeletor battle we’ve seen clips of smartly channels action anime tropes with its energy effects and slo-mo freeze frames. That might interest some casuals.

Naturally, I want this movie done well. Handled correctly, this should be a franchise spanning at least five films (working sequel titles: The Evil Horde, The Snake Men and the Powers of Grayskull, The New Adventures, and King He-Man). I’m not naive, though. I know what the tracking is, and it’s usually right. Those of us who are Masters of the Universe fans, who know that the toy line has continued in different forms to this day, and that there have been multiple sequel and remake cartoons, are a passionate bunch. We are all in, but we are not enough. Transformers movies didn’t require knowledge of the lore if all you wanted to see was cars turn into robots. What does MOTU have that is cool on its own, without relying on lore knowledge?

Well, at heart, it’s basically Shazam, and that movie worked. It’s fantasy meets sci-fi, which works for Star Wars. Is any of that coming across loud and clear? I can’t even find the toys in my neck of the woods, nor even the tie-in cat food that was supposed to be coming. Barbie movie dolls were hard to find at first too – is Mattel just missing the demand on these every time? Why can’t I get a toy with my fast food meal instead of just (admittedly delicious) food items at Denny’s?

I said after the first teaser, and will do so more clearly, that there should be a trailer that answers questions. What is the significance of Eternia, and the power of Grayskull? Who is He-Man? Who is Skeletor? Why, besides good vs. evil, are they fighting? It’s like wrestling – you can go to a big show completely cold and immediately get the gist of who the good guy and the bad guy are, but if you’ve followed their storylines for a while, you’ll really want to watch that particular event, as opposed to the many others like it. Kids will like all of it, but in a cinematic world where big fantasy battles are commonplace, they may miss it. You don’t have to sell me, a guy who gets every single reference in each frame, on this property.

It sounds, from advance reactions, like the MOTU movie has successfully pulled a Flash Gordon, embracing camp and sincerity in equal measure. That’s a tough balance, and it’s no secret that Flash Gordon needed the guy who also pulled that tone of for Batman 1966 and King Kong 1976 – Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who had the magic touch in writing adventures that worked for kids but were full of self-aware humor only the parents would catch. What he wrote revealed new layers to fans as they aged.

When I saw Flash Gordon as a kid, I loved the heroic adventure. When I saw it as a teen, I loved its weirdness. As a young adult, I dug the innuendo and cultural references. And most recently, as a middle-aged dude, I loved Flash’s kindness and forgiving nature. He literally gives every opponent a second chance, and at least half of them take it and become his new best friends. He-Man should be that same way.

Just for fun, let me make even more explicit the parallels between 1980’s Flash Gordon and the extended He-Man universe:

(Images via Universal/Filmation/Amazon-MGM)

Sadly, Flash Gordon was not a hit in its day either – we wanted Flash Gordon 2, we treated the Filmation (yes, Filmation!) Flash Gordon cartoon as if it were one, and now we love our 4Ks. People we’ve shown it to over the years are sorry to have slept on it the first time.

Amazon, Mattel...don’t give them a reason to sleep on this one.

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WARNING: I consider Blu-ray reviews of movies that had a theatrical run to be fair game for spoilers.

Reminders of Him is a pretty movie, and I mean that in many senses of the term. From its wide mountain vistas to its made-from-scratch bar that used to be a bookstore/coffee shop, to a seedy apartment building ironically/pointedly named “Paradise” that still looks better than some studios I’ve lived in, it’s a super-romanticized vision of lower-class rural America, as perhaps only an English director could see it. Its stars are beautiful too: Maika Monroe is who she is, and does not look like somebody who just did six years in prison; former CW star Tyriq Withers looks like about a 50% more handsome version of Pete Davidson. He frequently takes of his shirt; she pretends she’s about to take off hers a time or two. There’s even a kitten, one that’s less metaphoric but much more successfully exploited for the d’awwws than the one in Sorry Baby.

This is a movie that looks great. Sadly, predictably, the story proves to be as overly neat as the movie’s Hollywood-beautiful poverty (if I didn’t hate the misuse of the term “porn,” I might say “lowbrow-porn”). This, of course, may be the point: a weepie romance with glamorous stars where it all works out in the end is precisely the sort of movie “they” don’t make any more. Is it because the market has changes? As the decided non-target for the genre, I can’t say, but I’ve heard Netflix is full of this kind of stuff, only it’s shot boringly flat like generic TV, or so a lot of the reviews seem to complain. Reminders of Him is cinematic in all the best visual ways, with clear thought behind every camera move, color, and aesthetic choice – virtually every location is either built from scratch or heavily augmented by the production to create a specific look. If you like this sort of thing generally, it’s giving you the grandest version.

I may have been spoiled by Sean Baker movies, though. I like my lower-class slumming to feel seedy, and if I’m looking for a reluctantly criminal mom living in a motel, The Florida Project is more my speed. That said, as a half-English person who grew up overseas, I fully get the romanticizing of small-town America. Small-town England is, like, a gas station, a church, and maybe a pub in the middle of a bunch of fields. Small-town America still feels connected to the larger world in a different way, and is bigger than that. Director Vanessa Caswill has a track record of English TV miniseries-es, and is evidently good at what she does. It’s only her taste in stories to tell that I find arguably questionable. The movie is based on a novel; Caswill read the script before the book, and liked it enough on the spot.

Maika Monroe is Kenna Rowen, a name that to my ears sounded a lot like “Gena Rowlands” the first time it’s said aloud, which may or may not be intentional or my mental wishcasting. Frankly, if a big studio decided to try to make a Cassavetes script, throwing all the money at it, removing the improv, and enforcing a tidy ending while missing the original point entirely, this could be the result. And by the way, I’m not saying that’s an invalid choice, necessarily.

Kenna did her time for vehicular manslaughter, having crashed her car with her boyfriend Scotty (Rudy Pankow) in it. She found out later that she was pregnant, had to give birth and give her daughter away in prison, and now wants to see the girl, named Diem, despite her grandparent guardians (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford; yep, they’re playing grandparents now) hating Kenna probably more than anyone in the world.

When she encounters handsome ex football player Ledger (Withers) at his bar, she doesn’t instantly recognize him as Scotty’s best friend, nor he her. There’s an instant spark, mainly because they both look like movie stars, but she runs off after hearing his name and recognizing his Dukes-of-Hazzard-orange pickup truck. It’s not long before he figures it out...and then falls for her anyway, probably, again, because she looks like Maika Monroe. Somehow I think the story wouldn’t be as believable if, say, Taryn Manning in her Orange Is the New Black makeup were in the role of Kenna. Or Crazy Eyes.

The trailer implied he falls for her first, then learns who she is, which might be more plausible. I give the movie credit for departing a little from the book on this one, and giving him full agency to take the crazy risk of banging the estranged mom of his dead bestie whose daughter he has helped raise alongside grieving, angry grandparents. How ever will he extricate himself from that one?

Too easily, it turns out.

The movie makes a smart choice in hiding the details of Kenna’s crime from us for most of the movie, as this allows us to sympathize with her as an underdog who can’t catch a break. You might think that when the truth finally comes out, it will be a shock to us that tests our newfound understanding. You’d be wrong – the accident has just about as many mitigating circumstances as it’s possible to have and still result in a punitive sentence. And since this is a movie, everyone ultimately understands.

This is also the kind of movie that, when it wants to speak blunt truths about how Ledger kind of sucks, puts them in the mouth of a girl with Down Syndrome, to make the brutal honesty more adorable. Monika Myers is great in the role, but she has been handed a trope of a character. Caswill pointedly wanted there to be no villains in the story, which is likely why one of the deleted scenes features Kenna’s mother (Anne Hawthorne) being gratuitously awful. The others included on the disc are minor – one belabors the Tinder joke, another shows Ledger working on his house, and they add little to the story.

Short behind-the-scenes featurettes are fun enough, especially for fans of Colleen Hoover, the original writer, who was on set. More interesting, though, is the commentary track, which I couldn’t find accessible on Movies Anywhere, but it can be accessed both from the extras menu and audio options on the disc. Caswill talks in depth about every visual choice, and it’s clear she thought a lot about every aspect of the film, which pays off in a final product that, again, feels like cinema, even when watched on TV. Now, if she had an actual good script to put all that thought into, she’d really be cooking. It’s clear that she thinks this is that script, or at least is a good trouper and pretends that it is.

It’s also clear she thinks the movie is funnier than it is – aside from Myers with the blunt quips, I mostly found it to be sadness piled on sadness, in a layer of hotness. And then everything works out, after everyone has cried about it. I get that such is the catharsis of melodrama, and I enjoyed the bookending metaphor of her initially vandalizing a roadside memorial, to literally carry the cross that she only puts back at the end. I’m not sure that what any audience wants these days is movie stars trying to slum it by playing working class sufferers and looking perfect while doing so.

If you do, though, this excels at that, and looks as good overall as its stars.

Reminders Of Him is now on Digital and Blu-ray™ and DVD as of May 19. All images courtesy of Universal.

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In the original Star Trek pilot that never made it to air, Captain Pike finds himself trapped in an alien menagerie, held in a virtual cage tailored to his every need. Being a stubborn human, he resists nonetheless; later, in an episode that did make it to air, Pike returned fully paralyzed by radiation burns, and having changed his mind about the whole deal. What had once seemed like imprisonment would now be freedom from his body, and perfectly suited to his interests as a hero and a lover.

The original pilot, ironically for our purposes, was called “The Cage.”

I’m halfway convinced that Spider-Noir is a virtual confinement cell tailored specifically to Nicolas Cage, who stars in it. He plays a character who’s a hybrid of superhero, film noir gumshoe, and German expressionist monster, all genres and types that we followers of the Ragin’ Cage-n’ know are among his favorites. The setting is an imaginary, alternate-universe 1930s, and Cage walks and talks like a combination of Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Count Orlock.

Nobody else in this universe does. It’s reminiscent of the choice Daniel Day-Lewis made in There Will be Blood to do painstaking research into period-appropriate accents so that all his intonations would be impeccable. Then, because nobody else in the cast bothered to do that also, he just comes off sounding brain-damaged. Spider-Noir just lets this go for five episodes before actually offering an explanation, and it’s one of the few things not listed on the do-not-spoil list Amazon sent me. So here goes: When Cage’s Ben Reilly first got his spider powers, he forgot how to be human, so he had to relearn it by watching movies and imitating the characters in them.

Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that this wasn’t in the script originally, but rather Cage’s specific acting choice, canonized in the show once everyone he told about it thought he was hilarious?

We know why. Because he does stuff like that. If it wasn’t his idea, it was a damn good imitation of the sorts of ideas he often seems to have. Meanwhile, the rest of the cast talks normally, and surprisingly modern-ly (Kirby’s wonderful theme tune, “Saving Grace,” is more modern retro than old-timey). It’s an alternate universe, so they can do that, yet somehow it has all the same movies, full of stylized slang. At times, Ben uses cheap disguises and fake voices a la Chevy Chase in Fletch to barge his way into where he shouldn’t be; one of his fake voices is the stereotypical Edward G. Robinson, “Nyaaah, see?” that every imitation comic used to do half a century ago.

Would you believe he does scenes in his underwear drunkenly using spider-powers for his own private amusement? Of course you would.

The initial premise is like the TV Black Lightning by way of The Shadow and The Phantom movies of the ‘90s. Ben is the secret identity of a retired superhero called The Spider, who was basically Spider-Man in a fedora and trenchcoat, and with organic webshooters. He retired without anybody knowing who he was (he thinks) after he failed to save the life of the woman he loved because he was busy getting drunk at a bar when his spider senses kicked in. So now he drinks even more, but it’s the 1930s, so everyone does. The Spider-Noir watch-along drinking game need only be that you drink when someone onscreen does too. Not since Rick and Morty has a show depicted this much boozing and not insisted on having its heroes decry the behavior.

The primary criminal in town is Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson), who’s usually Italian in the comics but played extra-Irish by Gleeson, as if somebody from the auld country told him “Janey Mack, your accint’s barely noticeable, so it’s not, like!” and he rose to the challenge going, “Ye tick eejit, ye! Oi’ll feckin’ show yous!” The character has no superpowers, but the highest whiskey tolerance of anyone in the city, including Ben, because again, he’s playing the most Irish person who ever lived.

Others with super powers do show up, however, and they’re what prompts Ben to have to use his again. We’ve been asked not to say much about these characters, but Spidey fans will undoubtedly recognize the name of Flint Marko, for example.

Significantly less like her print namesake is Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), who’s more based on Anna May Wong, the ‘30s movie star having a moment now, what with a forthcoming biopic, a recent Barbie doll, and a sort-of depiction in Babylon. Here she’s the femme fatale who hires Ben, while he’s also being hired by Silvermane, hoping not to cross the streams but inevitably finding them intertwined. Nonetheless, it’s fairly clear that whatever foul play is afoot, Silvermane is the big bad somehow, and Ben needs to outsmart him if he can stay sober enough to do so. Spider-Noir works most as a TV show, rather than a long movie, in the way it offers soap-opera like twists each episode to keep the two from just out-and -ut killing each other. It isn’t like Daredevil: Born Again in delivering a fight scene each episode, but there is at least one guaranteed Nic Cage Loses His Shit moment in every installment, which will make for some fun YouTube reels as soon as the show’s over. The way he adds extra vocal slurring to his basic character slurring once the mask goes on is some chef’s kiss stuff.

On the whole, I’m not crazy about the way franchises tend to insist on casting voice actors for animation to potentially play the role in live-action as well, as James Gunn is doing for DC Films. It leaves a lot of talented voice actors by the wayside, and only seems to work in one direction – Disney clearly didn’t want to pay Temuera Morrison to play all the Clonetroopers, and gave us Dee Bradley Baker in digital brownface instead. Yet someone like Frank Welker doesn’t look like all the characters he portrays, and he’s great at them; if Casey Kasem could only play characters he looked like, we’d never have Shaggy. That said, when Cage was cast as Spider-Noir in the animated Spider-Verse movies, I think there was hope all around that any potential live-action version would retain him. It did, and it rules.

Presuming this is that same version of Spider-Noir, it adds shades to his animated avatar, metaphorically, and indeed literally. Spider-Noir is available in “Authentic Black & White” or “True Hue Full Color,” and honestly, it’s a toss-up which one to go with. Both were shot with the same camera but processed separately – I suggest alternating episodes, which makes the inevitable recap intros doubly worth watching, as it’ll show you how what you watched in B/W looked in color last episode, or vice versa. B/W is higher contrast, in a way that makes the show’s digital [I assume] effects look like they were done the old-fashioned way. “True Hue” is over-saturated to a slightly artificial, stylized degree, looking a bit like hand-painted celluloid, or perhaps Dick Tracy with a bigger palette. This feels like the sort of thing Tommy Wiseau was aspiring to do when he shot The Room simultaneously in film and digital, so he could choose the better one later – but it actually works, probably because the folks in post production at Prime Video aren’t ageless Polish Michael Jackson dress-alikes who don’t understand ordinary human behavior or film technology.

There’s not a whole lot we’re supposed to say about the plot or even specific characters, but I do want to single out Karen Rodriguez as Ben’s long-suffering secretary, behaving as any of us would who love Nicolas Cage but would probably go nuts having to work for or with him. Andrew Robinson is a lot of fun in a role I have to be vague about, while Lamorne Morris’ Robbie Robertson is basically the surrogate Peter Parker with no powers, in the role of up and coming reporter who also has to deal with racism along the way.

One of the problems a Spider-Man detective story faces is the same as those facing Batman movies – the true villain is inevitably a familiar comic-book character, because the fans want that, rather than some brand-new invention or a total no-name. There is some mystery, hence all the spoiler embargoes, but it can’t be all about surprise reveals when the big bad is so obvious. Instead, like a vintage serial of the era, Spider-Noir generates suspense by making you wonder how Ben will get out of the most immediate pickle he has gotten himself in. Cage has been doing that gloriously since at least Raising Arizona, and shows no signs of stopping now. If you’re not a fan, however, this may not be the place to start.

It may be Cage’s fantasy prison, but like Rorschach says, we’re locked in there with him. From my vantage point, it’s a blast.

Spider-Noir launches on Prime Video, May 27, at 12am PT/ 3am ET. All images courtesy of Prime Video.

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Fans have waited almost 40 years for a Masters of the Universe movie in live-action that could fully adapt the world of Eternia in live-action. The 1987 movie was a fun adventure but mostly set on Earth for budgetary reasons; the animated The Secret of the Sword was several TV episodes edited together.

But the new film isn’t the first Masters of the Universe movie director Travis Knight has made.

“I made my own He-Man home movie when I was a kid,” he said. “I commandeered my dad’s video camera and I was He-Man, of course. I didn’t really look the part. I had the haircut, but I didn’t really look the part. But no, it’s been a huge part of my life. It was a huge part of my childhood. And so to be here 40 years later and actually be able to tell the stories with these characters that I’ve loved since I was a kid, it really, it’s a very moving experience for me, I have to say.”

“And probably the most moving thing was the day that Nick did that famous incantation where he transforms into He-Man for the first time. And I was like, I was welling up. I was getting really emotional just because it was such an incredible thing to see this character brought to life on the big screen.”

Cast members in attendance, including Idris Elba and Alison Brie, immediately indicated they wanted to see that first movie, but Knight shook his head decisively, saying, “Nobody needs to see that, no!” So we’re probably not getting it on the DVD (if indeed there is one, rather than the MGM-Amazon movie existing on Prime Video forever).

Nicholas Galitzine, who plays He-Man, knew about the characters mainly from memes and cultural osmosis, but he fully understood the impact of the signature line, “By the power of Grayskull…I HAVE THE POWER!” and talked a bit about the day he got to say it.

“It’s one of these funny things because it’s so obviously synonymous with the IP,” he said. “There would be a lot of crew members on set or cast members who would say, well, have you been practicing the line? And it’s this thing that can quickly sort of mount a lot of pressure. You want to meet people’s expectations of it. But I mean, genuinely to me, I was quite reluctant to rehearse it too much at home because I really, I mean, we were talking a bit before about the emotionality of that line and what it really means. And I think just generally as an actor, if I feel like something is too in me, it doesn’t feel raw, which I think is what it suddenly is that time.”

“I mean, I think we obviously tried it a few different ways and given I transform a couple of times in the movie, there’s a sort of a different quality to the first one and the second one. And that’s obviously partially down to Travis telling that story and editing. But yeah, it was suddenly daunting. It was the biggest soundstage I think I’ve ever been on in my life. And I just was looking out and seeing just a wave of expectant faces. And so you do it and you’re like...”

“It wasn’t about the line. Everyone was just looking at your half naked body,” interjected Knight.

“Yeah, that’s true,” said Galitzine, who joked about the audition reading, “It was a one-on-one, me and Travis in the shower. Just one more, please, one more. Let’s keep workshopping this.”

“Doing that incantation on that day, I mean, I remember being very emotional as well. What does it mean to have the power? This is a guy who really has been gaslit for most of his life. No one believes he is who he is. Despite having this kind of unbreakable sense of hope, which is kind of bashed almost every day of his life, he really, I remember saying that incantation, I mean, that moment is just so many moments of rejection and earning it, earning the right to say that line. And so it’s, as you say, everything in the movie, having the hardships of his life before that inform that really powerful moment.”

Galitzine recalled his long journey to becoming a movie star, over 13 years. “For a lot of English actors, there’s the kind of the added step of going out to LA to get agents, to do pilot season, and really, we have this thing called, you know, the ESTA, the visa, which is a 90-day visa. And I used to book the full length of this visa, have no idea where I was gonna sleep. And so I stayed on a few couches in North Hollywood.”

Alison Brie clearly did her homework to play Evil-Lyn, Skeletor’s right-hand woman and occasional treasonous opponent. “The tone of the script was incredibly clear and really fun,” she said. “And I mean, even that is a throwback to the original series. Like, I think what I was really excited about by this character is the relationship between Evil-Lyn and Skeletor, and how contentious it is, and how funny it is. The original Evil-Lyn is a really funny character because she is sometimes his most loyal ally and also his least loyal foe.”

“You know, she is ready to turn on Skeletor at the drop of a hat. I also think in my first meetings with Travis, I talked about there being, within the love-hate, like, you know, even when he’s causing her pain, she sort of enjoys that because she likes how evil he can be, you know? So it was really, it was about collaboration. And I think Travis was such an incredible director. I mean, you know, what Morena [Baccarin] was saying about trust and us feeling like, feeling his fandom and his love for the franchise. And also kind of being able to reference things from the original cartoons.”

“I feel like we would talk all the time and go like, and what if we keep this laugh going? Travis was so open to go try it. Let’s see if it’s working. And Jared too. We had so much fun on set, kind of mining the ups and downs of the Skeletor-Evil-Lyn relationship. And it’s just so juicy.”

As for Skeletor, Jared Leto did actually wear the full blue muscle suit and cape on set. “He was in the full Skeletor, an incredible suit. That was the blue muscles. That was, we were looking at that everyday giant boots, cloak, hood, you know,” Brie said. In place of the CGI skull, however, his face was covered in blood [presumably fake, but with Leto and his infamous method-acting, who knows?] “So we wouldn’t be looking at his face. Red blood on his face, so that he still looked terrifying to all of us. And he really did.”

Perhaps nobody was a bigger fangirl on set, though, than Morena Baccarin, who plays the Sorceress of Grayskull. “I spent a lot of time of my childhood playing He-Man and She-Ra with my brother,” she recalled. “So I had, internally, the history. I knew everything about them.”

“I mean, the costumes were incredible, and once I put that on, But Sorceress, although an iconic character, was not my favorite growing up; it was obviously She-Ra, because, come on. But walking into the [Castle Grayskull] set and seeing that, and walking through, you could literally walk through it, go down the steps, see the sword just resting where it should be. It was a moment I remember, sorry, I took a photo and I wasn’t supposed to, but I took a picture of it and I sent it to my brother, and I was like can you believe this? We’re sitting there texting each other back and forth. ‘You’ve been acting for 20 years, but now you’ve made it.’”

The steps came with issues, though, as anyone who has tried to pose their Mattel figures on a Snake Mountain playset might understand.. “The sets were so accurate that some of the stairways and hallways were a little treacherous,” said Brie. “When you’re walking up them, you’re like oh my god. Going up Skeletor’s throne of bones was a little precarious.”

“You don’t wanna be walking backwards down some uneven steps while Hafthor Bjornsson wields a six-foot axe at your head, which is what we did,” said Galitzine.

“Alison had to do that in heels and a cape!” chimed in Camilla Mendes. “Okay, okay, I didn’t have my heels on,” conceded Galitzine.

Mendes may have been channeling their relationship in the movie, in which Teela is initially the leader of the characters toy collectors might call the Heroic Warriors. “I think they both have something to learn from each other,” she said, of Adam/He-Man. “But I do think in the beginning, Teela’s sort of like the leader of the group until I feel like both of them can find their inner power, because obviously Duncan becomes disconnected from himself in a way, and Adam still hasn’t quite found his power. So Teela in the beginning really is leading the charge and giving direction to them because [Man-at-Arms is] useless for a bit. And kind of so is Adam.”

“So Teela’s very resourceful and she’s very much a leader. She leads the charge for a bit until both of them are capable of accessing their strength.”

Masters of the Universe opens in theaters June 5th All images © 2026 Amazon MGM Studios Content Services LLC

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This is insanely specific, but if you are old enough to have wondered who the hell Amanaman was when his action figure came out and was the coolest thing ever in the original Star Wars toy line, The Mandalorian and Grogu was made for you.

If that means less than nothing to you, you’ll still be okay. The Mandalorian and Grogu is a straightforward, straight-ahead action-adventure quest movie in the Star Wars universe, without any deeper themes or lore ties. [“The old protect the young. The young protect the old,” presetned as a theme in the trailers, is actually just a throwaway line in the final product.] Sure, if you know purple-skinned Zeb from Rebels and his Mandalorian cameos, his presence may mean more, and if you watched The Book of Boba Fett, you’ve seen the Hutt Twins before. What counts, though, is which side they’re on, and that’s pretty quickly apparent in every case.

I’m old enough to remember when Clerks came out and derided Return of the Jedi as “just a bunch of muppets.” I was just out of college when the Star Wars Special Editions came out, and CGI Jabba the Hutt ruined our childhood. In that light, it takes a hell of a lot of chutzpah for a guy about my age to make a Star Wars movie that is almost ENTIRELY muppets and CGI Jabbas. Plus one guy in full body armor who is occasionally played by Pedro Pascal.

Then again, The Mandalorian is the show that cast Ahmed “Jar Jar Binks” Best as the Jedi master who saved young Grogu from the Jedi Temple massacre of the prequels. Redemption of things fans think they hate is kind of the Mandalorian’s business.

If you were a kid my age, even if the movie Return of the Jedi disappointed slightly, the toys did not. The action figures that came out in advance of the movie were the most bizarre aliens of the saga – our disappointment in the movie was that they were mostly all crammed into group scenes and didn’t actually get much to do. I know I share that feeling with Mandalorian director Jon Favreau and new Lucasfilm head Dave Filoni, because they’ve set out to give justice and screen time to versions of all those aliens, over the course of their tenures on Star Wars stuff.

For me, the generic human figures were never as interesting as the creatures; in The Mandalorian and Grogu, it’s like Favreau grabbed all the coolest action figures of the wildest aliens, and made a story about them. No boring, plain people allowed, unless they wear weaponized full body armor. Or are Sigourney Weaver showing up for maybe a week, to mostly do dialogue scenes in one location. As in Predator: Badlands, aliens can be violently dispatched while keeping a PG-13 rating intact.

Predator did it better, because they got to make up new lore, but Mando and Baby Yodey, as they’re known informally in my house and possibly yours too, do just fine in their own extended, enlarged TV episode. It’s shot for Imax, which is a mixed blessing – spaceflight scenes are great, but the fights, which are mostly shot in closeup, TV style, might benefit from a smaller-screen look. Familiar sets like the Razor Crest, and CG aliens like Hutts, also look a little more fake when enlarged to super-size, but at this point you’re either bought in to the universe or your aren’t.

Don’t worry about spoilers with this movie, as there’s little to spoil. The Mandalorian Din Djarin, space bounty hunter for the good guys in his weaponized armored suit, and with a 50+ year-old baby Jedi in tow, goes on a mission to grab a target. It proceeds like a video game: clear one stage, go to the next. Get new information that recontextualizes things? Then it’s time to revisit an older level and do different things there. Rinse, repeat until you get to fight the final boss. There’s even an interlude where the player, er, the viewer, gets to see a level played out through the secondary protagonist, as a side quest.

When various entertainment journalists did a set visit, Favreau told them that the name of one villain would sound very familiar. He wasn’t lying, exactly...but let’s just say it has nothing to do with pre-existing legacy characters.

This might be the most violent live-action Star Wars movie yet; it’s also the most plot-light, sticking to its Lone Wolf and Cub roots. Jeremy Allen White, so terrible in The Iron Claw as Kerry Von Erich, a professional fighter and son of a famous SOB, redeems himself here playing Rotta the Hutt, basically the same role, but as a giant mocap space slug. Indeed, he justifies the use of CG Hutts here, as we actually see him fight in ways that would be unfeasible for large puppets. Elsewhere, George Lucas’ fetish for small aliens (think Jawas, Ugnaughts, Ewoks) is realized in puppet form via the Anzellans, Babu Frik’s race of little droidsmiths. Babu was one aspect of The Rise of Skywalker that everyone actually seemed to like; his brethren drew laughs at my screening, at least.

And then there’s Grogu. We’ve seen him out in public so much that it feels like maybe he’s been overexposed, and some of the mystery spoiled, but back in his own element, and on a feature budget, he gets a lot more done. No longer is he just a cute thing tagging along – he’s an intelligent fighter and healer now, though he still doesn’t talk. I’m certain some of his traits have been digitally enhanced, but wonders are worked here with puppetry, and if you ever believed in him before, you will again.

Consider this movie the anti-Andor: it’s not about anything much, fascism or otherwise, but it’s also mostly lacking in boring humans (Stormtroopers barely count as humans). It also has actual fun music that sounds like it could be in-universe pop; Ludwig Goransson gets to be a bit creative here; if you stay through the credits, the only reward is to hear him having some fun with the familiar TV theme.

If Din Djarin and Grogu stepped into Andor, they could probably single-handedly overthrow the Coruscant government. This is the kind of story conceived on a living room floor with Kenner figures and vehicles, and I’m a sucker for that sort of thing when it’s toys I remember having. Neither the best nor worst Star Wars, it’s refreshingly unpretentious in its desire to just kick ass while throwing in a couple of your favorite vintage vehicles (look out for one of the classic mini-rigs finally getting a scene!).

For better and worse, incidentally, I’d venture to say this is a story that’s almost impossible to classify as “woke” or “too political.” And believe me, I know certain segments of Star Wars fandom will try really hard. But if you’re gonna try to come at Pedro Pascal and Sigourney Weaver as DEI, good effin’ luck with that.

The Mandalorian and Grogu opens in theaters Friday. All images courtesy of Lucasfilm.

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I lost track of Rick and Morty, the heady animated comedy about an irresponsible alcoholic space genius and his nervous grandson, shortly after season 4. Not because I didn’t love it – I absolutely did. An editor once admonished me that it was unnecessary to bash the MCU when talking about R&M, but I’m sorry – it nailed the multiverse concept earlier and better, to the point that Marvel pursued its writers. It’s mixture of heady story concepts with sublimely silly premises was perfect, perhaps epitomized by the Pickle Rick episode, in which the absurdity of a main character becoming a (conveniently marketable) talking pickle became both a meditation on familial confrontation avoidance and a riff on MacGyver and Die Hard.

Then cocreator Justin Roiland was exposed as a creeper with a pattern of trying to seduce teenage girls, and other unwilling coworkers. Roiland wasn’t just a writer – he was the voices of Rick and Morty, and multiple additional characters. Dan Harmon, one of the rare comedians to get MeTood and successfully take accountability before returning to work, clearly knew what he had to do, and Roiland was cut loose. I wasn’t ready to come back to the show at that time, suspicious of new voices, and worried I either would or wouldn’t miss the brilliant creep, and either way focusing on the show itself didn’t seem entirely in the cards.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying I did the right or wrong thing. That is simply how I felt at the time. Rick and Morty was a show my wife and I both loved, but the Roiland thing turned her further off it than I was.

I recently watched an episode of another post-Roiland show, Solar Opposites, and found it quite entertaining. I had no Roiland-era memories to compare it to, in that instance, but the sensibility behind Rick and Morty was there. So when I was offered screeners for Season 9, I decided it was time to check back in with my old friend, now reformed. Would the magic still be there? I suspect some of you out there might have taken a similar hiatus, so I felt like maybe I’d test the waters for you.

First off, the voices. Ian Cardoni nails it as Rick, to the point that I wouldn’t likely recognize a difference if I weren’t looking. Harry Belden overdoes it just a touch as Morty, but I got used to it.

The weirdest thing about Season 9 is that it leads with the worst episode in the bunch. There’s a list of plot points for each episode that we’re asked not to spoil, and for that first one it’s basically everything about the premise and characters involved. I think all I can safely say is it’s something of a “lore” episode, on a show that’s as likely as not to have utter contempt for its own lore at any given moment. Rick and Morty is better at acting like something new has always been canon when it never has; Mr. Poopybutthole set a precedent that other episodes follow this season, with characters who have actually never – yet narratively always -- been in Rick and Morty’s lives. Among guest voices, Owen Wilson is used magnificently as one of those retconned-in characters.

At its best, however, Season 9 has some episodes that are just as perfectly crafted as I remember. Whether Harmon and his team clearly recently rewatched Kill Bill and decided to base an entire episode around the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique; created a typically Rick story that has him wiping his memory so he can take a bowling vacation under a new identity; remade a version of The Simpsons’ Kamp Krusty episode with insane levels of death, drugs, and profanity [none of my screeners had the swear words bleeped for cable]; or blended a combination spoof of Avatar, Ferngully, The Lion King and Planet of the Apes; the best of these episodes so intricately plot both the story and the jokes that they can feel epic within a half-hour timeslot.

Obviously when I see differences in nuance, I don’t know if they crept in suddenly over the last few seasons, but Morty is growing a lot of agency this time around. One episode specifically has him switching empathy levels with Rick, but it’s not just that; he’s far more willing to make tough decisions. And by “tough,” I often mean “selfish” – a typical Rick and Morty plot structure might have one or other of the protagonists, or both, either creating or finding some idyllic scenario in space or another dimension, and inevitably ruining it completely, for purely selfish ends, frequently with a massive body count. The season finale explicitly links Rick’s genius IQ to his sociopathy, which in turn is caused by his alcoholism. That dubious superpower is enhanced this time around by the fact that he has used dimensional portals to make his vodka flask literally bottomless.

Likewise, Morty’s increasing self-esteem is linked to newer levels of ruthlessness, though he remains overtly emotionally needy (as does Rick, but on a much deeper and more hidden level). One might call this irresponsible storytelling – both of them are now terrible examples of how to be, as is Morty’s sister Summer, who’s becoming just as narcissistic. Save for one thing: the massive mounds of mutilated corpses left in their wakes makes clear that actions have consequences, even if not for them specifically.

Cartoons often promise anarchy for humor, and it’s often easier to compartmentalize if it’s a cat and a mouse trying to kill each other. There’s a certain appeal to watching humans behave badly with no consequences to themselves or their livers; if you doubt it, consider the sheer number of people who can’t get enough of watching the current folks in government to see what insanity they’ll do next. At least Rick and Morty aren’t real, and are trashing dimensions and creatures that will never exist, as far as we know. Under eternity and infinity, everything that can happen will eventually, but likely not in our tiny corner of the universe, in our lifetimes.

So why do we root for such reckless, endangering jerks? It obviously helps that most of their body counts are nonhuman alien or fantasy creatures, and the humans they tend to endanger most are variants of themselves. Like alcohol to Homer Simpson, Rick is also the cause of and the solution to all his family’s problems – his gadgets and enemies list may get them in trouble, but when all seems lost, it is his genius, and his Inspector Gadget-like weapon limbs, that will most likely save them, and nobody else. The mix of family contempt and loyalty is perfectly calibrated, as is the way both Rick and Morty epitomize an adolescent “everyone is stupid except me” mindset that’s mostly true within the show’s reality...and fan base.

Too bad Roiland forgot he doesn’t live inside a cartoon. On the whole, though, the show doesn’t miss him. Rick may be irreplaceable as the universe’s smartest man, but toxic men who only think they are are a dime a dozen.

I believe I will keep watching.

Rick and Morty Season 9 will premiere May 24 at 11:00pm ET/PT on Adult Swim. New episodes will be available to stream weekly on HBO Max and Hulu beginning June 15. All images via Adult Swim.

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Operation Monster Force is a toy line that’s like G.I. Joe Classified mixed with Universal Monsters. Six-inch military figures, with supernatural and fantastical elements to make it like Van Helsing in the army.

That alone didn’t sell it on me. Them creating a wave that could be modified into a tribute to Palitoy’s Action Force villains…that did.

Before we go any further, if you don’t know about Action Force or its primary villain, Baron Ironblood, go back and read this first…

Are you back? Now read this, the official Crimson Moon action figures’ storyline:

In 1974, deep in the Transylvanian mountains, the ancient cult known as the Order of the Crimson Moon, led by the malevolent Count Ironmoon, stands on the brink of realizing their dark ambition: unleashing a legion of werewolves to establish a new world order of chaos and fear. Through arcane rituals and forbidden science, Ironmoon and his devoted followers seek to harness the power of lycanthropy, turning ordinary humans into fearsome werewolf soldiers bound by blood and terror.

As the Order’s influence grows, cracks begin to form within their ranks. Tensions escalate when a prophecy surfaces, hinting that one of their own holds the power to overthrow Ironmoon. Suspicion and paranoia spread among the Order’s leaders, leading to secret alliances and betrayals. The once-unified front of the Order crumbles as power struggles and hidden agendas come to light.

The Order of the Crimson Moon teeters on the edge of collapse, the fate of the world hangs in the balance, hinging on the choices of those within the shadowy cult.

Amidst this rising tide of darkness, a disparate group of individuals with unique abilities, Adrian Van Helsing and Dalton Darkstone, monster hunters with a mysterious past, Johnny Spectre, a master of the occult and dark magic, and The Face, a masked vigilante — come together to unravel the mysteries of the Order. The heroes face a race against time, traveling across continents to gather ancient artifacts and forgotten knowledge so that they can counteract the Order’s dark magic.

The choice of 1974 is interesting. It’s not a year in which I could find any significance for G.I. Joe or Action Force, but it’s very significant to me, since it’s the year I was born.

“Count Ironmoon” is a hilariously obvious take on Baron Ironblood — I’ve joked many times that Count and Baron are the two aristocratic titles that always signify evil in movies. There’s never a good Count or Baron. However, to actually make Baron Ironblood, you need to buy three Crimson Moon figures.

Before we get there, let’s start with Wolfsbane, who needs no other figures to become his Action Force alter-ego. He’s also the first one I opened.

So, let’s talk about the packaging, using him as an example. The boxes look simple, and are deceptively so, as they’re hiding most of the accessories in little baggies behind the figure.

The tray inside reveals, in case you didn’t notice, that the skull and crossbones isn’t the traditional pirate version, nor the Action Force Enemy version, but rather a werewolf skull. But it’s small, so that detail is tough to pick out on the figures from a distance.

Most figures are held in by one tie-wire and two translucent bands. So it’s not 100% collector friendly packaging though the inclusion of ziplock baggies for the accessories is a fan-friendly touch that I’ve only ever seen before with Mezco 1:12 figures.

Have you noticed yet that in the cartoon drawing on the back, Wolfsbane is white, but the figure is clearly a Black man? This may be a deliberate in-joke, as Wolfsbane is loosely based on Destro from G.I. Joe, canonically a Scotsman but voiced in animation by a Black man emulating James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader voice.

Wolfsbane’s Action Force doppelganger is Red Jackal, who was a repainted Destro, with a new bio as an Eastern European whose mask hides disfigurement. The figure comes with one set of metallic “robot” hands, to make a supposed robot soldier character, but if you pop those off and use normal gloved black hands, the forearms look like Destro’s battle bracers rather than full robotic forearms. As for that robot head, well, it fixes an age-old problem. Destro’s mask is meant to be a static mask, designed for torture but worn with honor. In the cartoons, however, it moves like a face. This has stymied moviemakers in live action, who came up with “nanoprobes,” but this figure’s metal face looks like a Bayformers sliding-plate face that could move in live action, realistically.

One thing to note about alternate heads in this line is that they also come with alternate necks (with one exception). You’ll pull the head off first; the neck takes more work, but can be angled to pry off without too much finger pain. It’s designed to come off, but be just tough enough that you’ll wanna make sure first.

Wolfsbane’s gauntlets feature multiple side panel options. The default look like mini missile launchers:

Turn them around, and you get a plug-in hole. The most obvious part to plug in is the launching mini-missiles.

However, there are also machine gun plugins that look like crosses at first. And you can also plug the gunfire effect, or the smoking gun effect — both meant for his pistol — into these as well.

Or you can replace the whole thing with a flat panel (note right arm). His gun, like every gun in this line, has a removable stock.

His cool stuff doesn’t stop there Like Destro, he comes with an opening weapons briefcase, which contains removable, opening cannisters of werewolf serum. Or if you’re playing Action Force, biological weapons. Unlike Destro, it doesn’t become a backpack. However, all these characters do have pegholes in the back that look compatible with Classified backpacks. None comes with any back gear, though.

And a knife fits into his leg holster. His thigh straps have pegholes that are presumably for other modular weapons in the line.

Articulation is the same as G.I. Joe Classified with one exception: the ab crunch is replaced by a ball joint.

There’s a lot of cool stuff packed in with this figure, and there needs to be, because you probably have Destro at home. These figures are $40, and come with a display stand, lots of accessories, a bonus head or more in many cases, and ziploc-style baggies for gear. Wolfsbane in particular is worth it, as he has more than double the stuff of a typical Joe.

Here he is next to Mezco Destro:

For what it’s worth, the gun blasts and smoke are compatible with G.I. Joe weapons.

The alternate heads, not so much. Crimson Moon have much larger pegs. You can balance their heads on Joes or Marvel Legends, but you’d want to fill them in for customs.

And this is where the Order of the Crimson Moon cultist figure becomes interesting. Because a clear reason for his existence is the scuttlebutt that Hasbro no longer allows figures of G. I. Joe’s Cobra Commander with his original animated-series hood. Hasbro refuse to even comment on the question, but Super7 have said the figure is off limits. The popular theory is that it looks too much like a Klansman, in an era where there’s real fear the Klan could return.

So of course the cultist comes with THREE hooded heads. And two necks.

Now, obviously these aren’t in Cobra Commander blue. But if you have a red figure, like the Crimson Guard, you can’t just head swap, either. You have to neck swap.

With G.I. Joe, this means boil and pop. Dip the figure in boiling water for about a minute and pull out his neck. Then push in the Crimson Moon neck and head. It will fit nicely.

If you want to use the suited body of the cultist for G.I. Joe’s Tomax or Xamot, you might want to try the same tactic. I want mine intact, so I didn’t pop the neck, but it might — MIGHT — work. Just the head makes a bit of a bobble-head.

I imagine this suited body has been used before. The hooded robe comes in its own baggie with a silica packet, and it’s wired for action poses. The default red mask almost looks tentacled in its folds, like Cthulhu.

The spell book is super-intricate for its size. He comes with one open, one closed, and a dagger.

Now, do we want to make Baron Ironblood? Let’s take it step by step.

Count Ironmoon himself provides the body.

Ironmoon comes with a removable hat, uncoiled electro-whip, coiled whip that hooks (very loosely) on his belt, pistol, blast and smoke effects (included with every figure who has a gun), and extra hands, including the finger point of doom.

The torso gear is a rubbery overlay. There’s a lot of parts sharing in this line, but it’s earned and subtle. Like, of course they’d have the same gloves, boots, and collars. Torso overlays cover up the mostly shared torsos. Boots have sculpted soles and foot pegs.

The next step may be for perfectionists, because you might want the Baron to mask all the time, but if you want his face to be correct under his mask, you’ll need the head of Major Noir. And the neck, because their skin tones don’t quite match. And the soul of Sam Neill, who seems to have served as inspiration. (This is him without his removable black hat.)

Major Noir is obviously Action Force’s Black Major, who will never likely be made by Hasbro either, even if the rights get cleared up, because he looks like a Nazi.

The original Black Major didn’t wear an eyepatch, but he could get wounded, of course. Anyway, if you do the head and neck switch it’s closer.

But the Major Noir figure also comes with some other heads. One is the Red Shadow helmet in black.

The other, which includes matching hands, is a werewolf head.

He also has a knife, sheath, and the same gun as Count Ironmoon, with effects and removable sheath. As with all these figures, the upper and lower body overlays are separate, so they can all move at the waist.

The third figure you need to make the Baron is the Legionnaire: a werewolf zombie (as opposed to a zombie werewolf) that comes with the Baron’s classic helmet as a “containment mask.”

When I say werewolf zombie, I seriously mean he is a human zombie that can transform into a wolf zombie, with interchangeable parts.

Although the wolf hands aren’t that zombified, if we’re being honest. But the figure’s body does have notable bite wounds, so if you want to make him a battle-damaged Shadow, by giving him Major Noir’s extra Shadow head, he will be the worse for battle wear.

Now, if you doubt that the containment helmet wasn’t even meant for this figure, look how it loosely balances on the human zombie head…

And then note how snug it is on Count Ironmoon with Major Noir’s head, as was obviously meant to be…

The red translucent eye guard pops out, for two possible looks. In the Action Force comics, it always seemed that he had glass over the eyehole. On the original toy, however, it was an open slit. So you pick your style.

The last figure in the bunch is the Trooper. He comes as a Werewolf trooper, with claw-bared and gun-holding hands…

But he also includes Red Shadow parts. And because of his black straps, he’s actually a specific one: Red Vulture, the vehicle driver.

There are two other figures in this series that I did not get — a palette-swapped Trooper in a black uniform with red straps, and a deluxe trooper, for five dollars extra, who comes with a jetpack, flamethrowers, and an exclusive Red Laser head (originally a repainted Helmeted Cobra Commander in Action Force). I’d like that Red Laser head and some troop bodies, but I can’t just spend forever.

Let’s look at the characters again as Action Force/G.I. Joe Classified simulacra…

Overall, these are nice fits with the Classified line. If you could only have ever dreamed you’d get Classified Red Shadows, you’re eating good with these (but bring on Muton, Kraken, Red Wolf, and Skeletron). They’re loaded with useful accessories, and the baggies to contain them.

I may have mentioned before that one of my favorite presents ever was a repainted HISS and Destro, dubbed “Hyena and Red Jackal.” It’s time to reenact that in pictures.

But before then, let me note that as of this writing, every figure in this review, previously only made to order, is available at the original price at BigBadToyStore.

In the comics, Baron Ironblood eventually became Cobra Commander. So let’s leave on that note.

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