Castle Grayskull Statue

[palaeomerus]

Beast Man : "D-uh! Skeletor, He-Man has entered Castle Greyskull. But he's not gonna be safe in there for long. Should we make a ram and knock the..uh...I guess...it's not really a gate so much as a door...down and then fight him in the sort of high ceilinged room that is barely large enough to sleep 8 people? Or I could probably just climb up to the roof and get in via the roof access stairs.  "

Skeletor : " Come now, Beast Man! You're thinking like a thug. Broaden your horizons! Try thinking outside of the box like a proper villain! Wouldn't it be a lot funnier if we just bricked that door up and dug a mote around the castle and filled it with stinky water and leeches? Then we could throw dead birds and squirrels in the windows to ripen up the atmosphere in there! Neee-Yaaaa-HA-HA-HA-HA-AHAAAA! "

He-Man : " What the? What are you...Awwwww! Gross! Screw you guys! "

[Ramshackle_Curtis]

I had loads of he man toys, and so did my brother. Great. Buzz off was my favourite.







The attack track was pretty awesome too:

[Doomsdave]

A castle the size of a...two story garden shed?

Don't forget it was magic.  In several episodes it is hinted that Grayskull is Tardis-like inside. 

[Ramshackle_Curtis]

That poster is cool.

For real?

Hmm aprraently not, according to wikipedia! Well, I always thought they were similar, the weird hand drawn closeups and general style....

[beefcake]

I never understood why MoU toys were made of hard plastic yet most of their heads were a very spongy rubber. I loved pushing he-mans face inwards he really looked like a mutant.

[palaeomerus]

I never understood most of it. I mean I get why a muscular guy with a double axe and a half-sword is cool, especially a few short years after Filmation's terrible Blackstar was on the air. And he has a red spanish cross on his chest harness, so maybe he's a conquistador AND a barbarian for bonus cool points.

But then you get a green tiger who wears a bizarre mask, and a merman who looks like a melted panda, and a monkey face guy with plastic wings strapped to his arms, and and orange "beast man" who looks like he has clown make up. He-Man, Beast-Man, Mer-Man, Ram Man, Man E Faces, Man at arms...there's a whole lot of man going on in there.

The characters seem like they were designed by idiots. They'd come up a big muscled guy who wears the same fur diaper as pretty much everyone else (reuse molds! Whooo!), and he'd have rubber suction cups for hands and a suction cup on his head and his back, he'd be called "Suk-OR" and they'd have a commercial with kids sticking him to a glass sliding porch door and those kids would actually want that THING and ask their parents for it.

Or maybe I'm just a bitter 'Power Lords' booster. THOSE were some trippy toys. Just LOOK at those THINGS! It's like Roger Dean threw up surplus prog-rock album cover ideas directly into a child's mind and they somehow became toys! Nightmarishly insane toys! Toys that were way weirder than the "Super Joe" stuff from the 70's.

[Ramshackle_Curtis]

Curtis I bet you will find out the same tweeners or the same animation house worked on both cartoons. Ren and stimpy were farmed out after season 2 to korea if memory serves. You are 110% correct they are done in the same John K style.

Animation has its own pecking order. You have the Kings of shit who are called keyframe animators. They get to draw the good stuff. The shit of these kings are called tweeners who draw all the frames inbetween the cool ones and copy the keyframe animators style. The grunt work if you will. Alot of this is sent off to animation houses in South Korea who can churn out the tweens like no ones business. Thats why they can match the style so well. The same grunts who did the animation on both and at the end of the day were drawing R&S about 20 times as much as the original artists.

Korea became an animation hot spot due to Hanna Barbera. All the old school HB stuff like space ghost were animated over there due to the cheap cost. They also pioneered or mastered the art of minimal animation on the frame to keep costs down. Watch a space ghost. In some scenes only the mouths are moving everything else is static. I love it because I grew up with it but accept it is cheap and nasty compared to a mel blanc WB cartoon for example.

I dare say He-Man was done in south korea too.

Hah, Ive actually got a degree in animation! I wne to uni with guys who are now actually are Korean studio managers.....

[Ramshackle_Curtis]

Well, a bit of everything really. My final film was done on an amiga!

[Ramshackle_Curtis]

Yep. Had to get it printed onto film as well, so I had a 16mm film of a 16bit film!