By the time Kevin Smith signs off a 30-minute episode of Masters of the Universe: Revelation, he’s done more than just update a toy commercial from 1983. He’s built a mythology shrine out of 80s plastic, pop-culture deep cuts, and a little cinematic wish fulfillment. “They asked me to do He-Man and I thought, please don’t let this be a reinvention,” Smith told me. “Thank God it wasn’t. Because I can’t reinvent anything. But I can definitely write the next episode of a cartoon I watched when I was 12.”
And write he did—with blood, stakes, Shakespearean gravitas, and yes, stabbings. “That was the one thing my boss asked for,” Smith said of Netflix exec Ted Biaselli. “‘Give me the show I thought I was watching as a kid.’” In other words: less moral-of-the-week, more moral ambiguity. Less “Skeletor fails again,” more “What happens when Evil-Lyn actually questions her life choices?”
That level of fan faithfulness came with, predictably, fan fear. “If someone told me how big the Masters fandom still is, I might’ve passed,” Smith admitted. “People say, ‘Do you want to make Star Wars?’ Why? So I can have a million people tell me I ruined it?”
Instead, he went full nostalgia-surgeon. “You want to know how serious we took this? At one point, I had the Sorceress step just outside Castle Grayskull. Ted texts me immediately: ‘She can’t do that unless she’s in bird form.’”
Smith cackled at the memory. “It was that specific. But also that safe. Like, I couldn’t go off the rails if I tried. My two bosses were basically the high priests of Eternia.”
The show isn’t called He-Man for a reason. “Rob [David at Mattel Television] said, ‘It’s always been Masters—plural. That’s where the juice is.’” And so Smith went full ensemble, with a cast that includes Lena Headey, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mark Hamill, and, perhaps most delightfully, Henry Rollins. “Rollins auditioned to be Skeletor,” Smith said. “But we already had Mark. I was like, ‘Wait. Triclops is this mad monk now. Can you imagine Rollins doing televangelist cult leader energy?’ And he fucking delivered.”
The result is something oddly moving—characters you used to make smash into each other in the living room now wrestle with grief, purpose, and betrayal. “There’s no sex,” Smith clarified. “But there’s maturity. Like, ‘What if your whole life is a lie?’ That kinda thing.”
He credits powerhouse animation and Bear McCreary’s bombastic score with helping him land the punch. “Bear was like, ‘You guys played it like Argo, so I can’t give you fucking sitcom music.’”
It’s all part of Smith’s goal to give audiences what Marvel gives him: “That moment when you’re a grown-ass adult but you feel 11 again. For two and a half hours, this show is going to make you feel like you just found your toys exactly where you left them.”
If it sounds like Kevin Smith got sentimental, don’t worry—he’s aware. “Normally I make something and people go, ‘That was fine.’ This is the first time I’m at the center of something where people are like, ‘Please don’t screw this up.’ And I’m like... oh shit.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
