Cora’s Thoughts on the Masters of the Universe Teaser Trailer

A few days ago, I was chatting with a friend and we were talking about the fact that the first trailer for the Masters of the Universe live action film was overdue, considering we’re less than six months out from the release date.

Meanwhile, Avengers: Doomsday, which releases in December 2026, is getting a battery of bizarre teasers which only confirm that everyone and their sister is in this movie and that both Thor and Steve Rogers have just announced their candidacy for the Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award.

At the time, I thought, “One day, I will wake up or come home from somewhere and open social media and there will be a trailer.

Well, that day was today. So here is the trailer. Or rather, it’s a trailer for the actual trailer (cause that’s apparently a thing now), which is coming tomorrow:

So what does Cora think of the teaser trailer for the Masters of the Universe live action movie?

Well, I’m glad you asked (or not), because here are my thoughts:

This first teaser seems to be going for the same kind of meta nostalgia approach as the Barbie movie did, which does make kind of sense from a marketing standpoint, considering how massively successful Barbie was and how lots of film industry folks and critics seem to view Masters of the Universe as a companion piece to Barbie, since both are based on Mattel toylines, even though Barbie is a very different property than Masters of the Universe.

Barbie does not have a defined story. Barbie can be whoever you want her to be, because Barbie is supposed to represent every little girl out there. In the 1980s, the tag line in every commercial was literally “We girls can do anything… like Barbie”. Of course, who counted as “every little girl” and what was considered “we can do anything” changed and expanded over the decades. Initially, only able-bodied white skinny girls were able to see themselves reflected in Barbie and “anything” meant being a nurse, teacher, ballerina, fashion model or secretary (and a bride, of course). But even in her first decade, Barbie became an astronaut, eighteen years before Sally Ride though two years after Valentina Tereshkowa, and acquired a black friend who could wear the same gorgeous fashions. By the 1980s, there were Black, Asian and Latinx Barbies as well as an array of Barbies in international costumes. By now, there are Barbies of different body types, various races, hair colours and also disabilities such as the recently released autistic Barbie. And yes, I may have to get that one, because I come from a family of four generations of people on the autism spectrum, though only two of us have ever been formally diagnosed. And while I never had a fidget spinner (I have jewellery for that), have never used noise-cancelling headphones (I can’t tolerate headpones due to sensory issues) and never needed one of those symbol tablets to communicate (and I only know these as laminated booklets anyway), autistic Barbie has my hair colour, hair style and I had several dresses like that as a teenager, so she is more like me than the blonde Superstar and Malibu Barbies of my own childhood. Plus, I like that autistic Barbie exists for every little girl out there who needs her.

He-Man is not the male equivalent to Barbie and never was. There is a male equivalent to Barbie and that’s Mattel’s Big Jim line from the 1970s and 1980s, which did influence Masters of the Universe, because several ideas and actual parts were borrowed from Big Jim for Masters of the Universe. For those who don’t know, Big Jim was literally a male Barbie, a twelve-inch doll that you dress up to have adventures and be a spy, soldier, outdoors man, sailor, kung fu champion, athlete, lumberjack, big game hunter, etc… It was a cool concept and I have no idea why Mattel discontinued him. BTW, I have some doll clothes pattern magazines from the 1970s and 1980s and they always have patterns for Big Jim clothing along with clothes for Barbie and more traditional baby dolls. My Mom bought those mags, but unfortunately she wasn’t great at sewing, so all she ever made were some knitted or crocheted doll clothes. I actually taught myself to crochet and sew, so I could make those clothes. And I did.

Masters of the Universe, meanwhile, has a defined story or rather several. He-Man isn’t someone who can be whatever you want him to be. He is Adam, Prince of Eternia and defender of the Secrets of Castle Grayskull, who transforms into He-Man, when he holds aloft his magic sword and says the words, “By the Power of Grayskull, I have the Power.”

He-Man has a family, friends, enemies, a love interest, a beloved pet, a castle and lots of vehicles, but they all have defined names and roles. And yes, kids still played with those toys however they wanted to and lots of people report that for them, character X was a hero or a bad guy, regardless of what the official material claimed. But most kids still used the official storyline or one of them, since there were several competing continuities (mini-comics, Filmation, audio plays, 1987 movie, various comics) even in the 1980s, as a jumping off point for their own adventures, including some the original creators never planned for (e.g. my action figures kept falling in love, got married and had babies, which the toys were not set up for). Masters of the Universe still offers a huge variety of characters, including a remarkable number of disabled characters, even though that’s never spelled out, and the message is still very much, “You can be a hero. You can be more. You have the power.” But it’s a different kind of play and a different kind of toy.

The main challenge of making a Barbie movie was “What story do you tell about someone who can be everything?” and Greta Gerwig met that challenge admirably. Masters on the Universe, on the other hand, already has a story or several. The main challenge of making a He-Man movie is “How do we translate the story that millions of children around the world watched on TV, listened to on cassette or read about in comics and played out in their living rooms, the story that they imagined in their heads a thousand times, to the big screen?”

So will the movie meet that challenge? The jury’s still out on that, but let’s take a look at the trailer for the trailer.

The teaser trailer starts with an old-style cathode ray tube TV. There is the MGM logo with the lion (sadly not Battle Cat, though that would have been cool) and a montage of 1980s imagery: Someone pushing a floppy disc into a computer, a colourful sugary cereal, women doing aerobics exercises. I’ve seen people complain that the specific cereal shown (which I’m not familiar with at all) only came along in the early 1990s and our PC in the 1980s used 5.25 inch floppy discs – 3.5 inch discs didn’t come alone until the late 1980s/early 1990s. In fact, when Masters of the Universe first came out in 1982, the old 8 inch floppy discs which looked like vinyl records were more common. We never personally had a computer which used those, but the ships my Dad worked on did, so I’ve seen them lots of times. But what they’re going for here is not the actual 1980s, but more of a 1980s vibe as imagined by subsequent generations. And unlike other toy-based/supported properties from the same era like Transformers, G.I. Joe (actually dates from the 1960s, but the G.I. Joe we all remember is a 1980s creation) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Masters of the Universe is primarily associated with the 1980s these days, because it had fewer reboots than the others.

There is also a voice-over by a gentleman with a baritone voice, which feels instantly nostalgic, because movie trailers all used to be like that well into the twenty-first century with a baritone voice summing up the premise, starting with “In a time of…” The voice sounds a little like the late John Erwin, who voices Adam/He-Man and plenty of other characters in the Filmation cartoon, though I’m not sure if it’s really him, considering he died a year ago. But kudos on the film team, if they did get him to record that brief voice over.

The voice-over states, “Not long ago, when times were simpler: This was a healthy breakfast, this was a powerful workout and this was a hero”, cutting to a clip of the Filmation He-Man saying “I have the Power”. Again, this makes sense, because the Filmation cartoon is probably the most iconic image of He-Man and the one that most people will recognise.

Now as someone who actually lived through the 1980s, I balk at this “when times were simpler” thing, because the 1980s were neither simpler times nor good. In fact, the 1980s were fucking terrible.

The 1980s were a time of mass unemployment, the West German mining, steel and shipbuilding industries died all at the same time, while politicians kept telling us that there was an economic upswing or at least that it would come soon. Environmental pollution was terrible. Forests were dying, acid rain was eroding ancient buildings, smog choked the air, toxic waste scandals happened all the time and there was a hole in the ozone layer. AIDS was killing a shitload of people and once again, too few politicians cared, because they were the wrong sort of people. Having sex, so simple and carefree for those who came along just a few years earlier, was suddenly like playing Russian roulette and really not worth it.

Then there was a constant parade of freak accidents, disasters and mass casualty events killing a shitload more people. Chernobyl is the big one and since the winds blew from the East, fallout rained down all over Europe. But there were so many others: The Challenger explosion, the Herald of Free Enterprise capsizing, the Bradford City stadium fire, the Hillsborough disaster, the Heysel stadium disaster, the King’s Cross fire, the MGM Grand fire, the Stardust fire, the Ramstein air show disaster, the Lockerbie bombing/crash, the Korean Airlines 007 disaster (shot down by the Soviets), the Iran Air disaster (shot down by the Americans), the Martina sinking in Hamburg harbour, which is so obscure almost no one remembers it, though 19 people died, the eerily similar Marchioness disaster, which is somewhat better remembered, the Mount St. Helens eruption, the so-called Gladbeck hostage crisis, most of which didn’t actually take place in Gladbeck and which cost the life of three young people, among them 18-year-old Silke Bischoff who went to my school. In short, going to a football match could be deadly, getting on a ferry or a harbour tour boat could be deadly, getting on a plane came with a risk of crashing, getting shot down or hijacked, visiting an airshow could be deadly, discos, hotels and department stores could randomly burst into flames, that flour mill in the harbour might explode at any moment and even getting on the bus home could mean you got taken hostage (and possibly raped, though that has never been proven) by failed bank robbers and shot during a botched rescue attempt.

And yes, maybe these disasters loom larger in my memory, because I was a kid and these were the first time I witnessed such things happening on TV and in the magazines, which inevitably offered descriptions of all the awful things that had happened in loving detail. And in fact, some disasters I thought happened in the 1980s actually happened in the late 1970s or early 1990s. But nonetheless, a lot of these weird freak disasters have not actually happened again in later years. I suspect part of the reason is by the 1980s, safety standards were utterly outdated and it took terrible disasters to get them up to speed.

Politically, the 1980s were a gray leaden era of out of touch old men (and Maggie Thatcher) in gray suits presiding over a world that mostly hated their guts. But though seemingly everybody hated Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl or Maggie Thatcher, for some reason they still kept getting voted back into office. Their equivalents beyond the iron curtain weren’t any better, but since they didn’t have free elections, the people there didn’t vote for them voluntarily. There were protests all the time – against nuclear weapons, the Brokdorf nuclear power station, runway west of Frankfurt airport, etc…. – and footage of protesters getting beaten up, shot with water cannons or tear gassed were on TV all the time, telling little Cora that protesting may be a right, but it was also fucking dangerous, which I guess was the intention.

By the late 1980s, things got better. First, truly terrible, murderous dictators toppled one by one and then the whole damned Eastern bloc collapsed and the iron curtain fell. And for a time, it seemed as if things could continue to get steadily better. First, we – meaning the people of the Earth – got rid of the really terrible dictators, then we got rid of the leaders of the Eastern bloc and the iron curtain and next, we’d get rid of the Reagans, Kohls and Thatchers. Yeah, well, that never happened. Thatcher and Reagan were both gone by 1990, but Helmut Kohl, whom no one ever liked, would go on to govern for another eight long leaden years.

And above all, there was the everpresent threat of nuclear war, which we mostly didn’t bother with, because we all knew we would die anyway, if that happened. Though we still got a barage of films showing us soap opera cliché people getting incinerated or dying off radiation sickness in loving detail. Nowadays, the weirdest thing about films like Threads, The Day After or Where the Wind Blows is that the people are actually following all those weird instructions from those Protect and Survive pamphlets and run for the shelters, when the bombs drop, because back in the actual 1980s, everybody knew that stuff was bullshit and we all knew we’d just go outside and watch the mushroom clouds before dying.

So yup, the 1980s were not a simpler time at all, even if you were a kid. There’s a German Masters of the Universe fan and YouTuber who keeps going on about “his wonderful, carefree childhood”.

And whenever he says that, I think, “Dude, you’re two years younger than me and literally grew up in the Ruhrgebiet, while the mines and steelworks were dying. How the hell can you say your childhood was wonderful and carefree, when the striking and protesting miners were on your doorstep? Did you never see the protests while out and about? Did you never see the mines and steelworks go dark one by one. Were you never terrified that your parents would lose their jobs?”

On the other hands, the 1980s also had great music, great films, great TV-shows, great comics, great cartoons and some of the best toys ever made. It was all escapism, of course, but back in the day we needed it and we needed those stories about the heroes who would make everything right, stories that told us that we, too, could be heroes, could be better, could be more.

The 1980s imagery in the trailer also very strongly leans into a kid’s experience of watching TV on a Saturday morning – and those aerobic workout programs were on daytime TV a lot during the 1980s – while eating colourful sugary cereal. Now we didn’t really have these super-colourful cereals in Germany – we had Kellogg’s and in fact, their German plant was right here in Bremen, but we only had Cornflakes, Frosties, Smacks, Rice Crispies, Choco Pops and Crunchy Nut, not Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms or Apple Jacks. I also didn’t eat cereal all that often, though my Dad consumed Frosties and later Crunchy Nut with great enthusiasm. When he died, I gave four boxes of Crunchy Nut to my neighbours with young kids. I did watch the Filmation cartoon on TV, though for many Germans their foundation He-Man experience will be popping an audio tape into the tape deck before falling asleep. But they’re going for vibes here and for many people, these vibes will trigger the respective memories. And those times were happy – until the news came on.

After the “weren’t the 1980s great” intro, the trailer cuts to Nicholas Galitzine with an adorable deer-in-the headlights look. Behind him, you can see a shelf of what looks like action figures or statues. Now He-Man isn’t actually an easy role to play, because whoever plays him needs to nail both the sweet and slightly dorky Prince Adam and He-Man. the strongest man in the universe, who still won’t seriously harm a fly. The trailer and some of the behind the scenes material gives me confidence that Nicholas Galitzine has nailed Prince Adam, though we have seen almost nothing of his He-Man so far.

We see the Power Sword, which looks absolutely fantastic, and the baritone voice-over is back again, saying that “Perhaps, now more than ever, we need that kind of hero again”, while we see Adam reaching for the sword.

And frankly, the baritone voice-over is right. In the 1980s, we desperately needed escapism and the heroes and heroines that our favourite films, TV-shows, comics, cartoons and toylines gave us. The 2020s are pretty damn terrible as well, in some ways more terrible than the 1980s, and the politicians are worse even compared to the very low bar set by the likes of Helmut Kohl, Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, Erich Honecker, Deng Xiao Ping and the rotating cast of Soviet leaders. So yes, we need a hero and maybe the sweetly innocent hero that Adam/He-Man always was is exactly what we need.

Finally, in the last five seconds or so, we get a couple of actual shots from the movie. There is a shot of Adam, Teela, Duncan, Roboto and Cringer standing on the ramp of some kind of flying vehicle between two giant statues. These four are very much a family – Teela is Duncan’s (adopted) daughter, Roboto is his mechanical son and Teela’s brother (though Roboto is voiced by Kirsten Wiig, so maybe Roboto is now Duncan’s mechanical daughter and Teela’s sister, though Roboto does not look remotely female), Adam is pretty much a surrogate son for Duncan and Cringer is Adam’s and Teela’s beloved pet/fur baby/sibling. The family aspect of Masters of the Universe has always been important and I hope we see it continuing in this film.

This brief scene is our first glimpse of Idris Elba as Duncan as well as of Roboto and Cringer and they all look great. The usual suspects are complaining that Duncan/Man-at-Arms is now a black man, in which case I wonder under what rocks these people were living, because Idris Elba’s casting was announced months ago. Besides, Idris Elba is a great actor and I have no doubt that he’ll make a great Duncan/Man-at-Arms. Of all the many actors in this film, Idris Elba, Morena Baccarin, who plays the Sorceress, and James Purefroy, who plays King Randor, are the ones where I have not even a shadow of a doubt that they can pull off their respective parts. Finally, Duncan was knighted by Randor somewhere between Masters of the Universe Revelation and Revolution and Idris Elba was just knighted by King Charles, so we have one knight playing another.

Roboto and Cringer are mostly CGI, which does make sense. When Kirsten Wiig was announced as the voice of Roboto, the usual suspects made a joke about Duncan building himself a sex bot, but this version of Roboto is a bulky war robot and looks like the toy, particularly like the 200X incarnation of Roboto. Whether Roboto is voiced by a man or a woman is irrelevant and what gender Roboto has in the movie remains to be seen, since Kirsten Wiig’s voice will almost certainly be electronically changed. But anyone who tries to have sex with this version of Roboto (or any other, for that matter) will likely get crushed. We still get the usual suspects complaining about Roboto, which makes no sense at all, because Roboto looks instantly recognisable to me.

Next, there is some kind of aerial battle with Castle Grayskull and Snake Mountain both visible. Though Snake Mountain is not normally that close to Castle Grayskull, so some folks believe it might be the Eternia playset with the monorail track or even some kind of siege engine, since Castle Grayskull is clearly under attack. There’s also a horse statue in view, which may be part of the approach to Castle Grayskull. A Frank R. Paul style ring-shaped vehicle is chasing another vehicle. Some people believe that this is the movie version of the vintage Roton toy, which does make sense. There is also a vehicle which vaguely look like the Fright Fighter in that scene, which would be the first time ever we see the Fright Fighter on the screen. The weird vehicles were as much a part of Masters of the Universe as the action figures and it’s great to see versions of them in the movie, even if they don’t look exactly like the toys we had as kids.

Next, there is a brief scene of Idris Elba in a trenchcoat with a giant gun shooting at something from a flying vehicle and whooping. He doesn’t wear his helmet or armour here and his hair is longer than Idris Elba’s normally very close-cropped hair, so we’re probably looking at civilian Duncan here, similar to what we saw in Masters of the Universe Revelation. The giant gun is pure Duncan, of course. I’ve seen some people complaining that Duncan wouldn’t emit “woo-hoo” after firing his very big gun at something, but personally I don’t find it out of character.

Finally, we get a shot of Adam about to hold the Power Sword aloft. We don’t see the transformation or He-Man, but we all know what will follow.

So far, there is no glimpse of Skeletor, Evil-Lyn, Orko or any of the other Heroic Warriors, but I suspect we will see them in the full trailer tomorrow.

So does the film look good? Well, we’ll have to wait for tomorrow, but the roughly seven seconds of actual film footage we got do look good. And while I may have my reservations about the 1980s nostalgia bait approach of the teaser, I can understand why they did it. Besides, as the success of Stranger Things shows, 1980s nostalgia is huge right now, even though Stranger Things is very a version of the 1980s cobbled together from pop culture which has very little to do with the actual 1980s.

I have now written 4000 words about a 30-second teaser. If you want even more commentary, check out these reaction/commentary videos by Dad-at-Arms (who hints that we may get something else. maybe a glimpse at the movie toys, in addition to a full trailer tomorrow), Mega Jay Retro, Geek Dad Life , Das Filmkästchen, Ben Massa and Mighty Comics and Collectibles.

Germain Lussier of io9 also weighs in and mainly seems to be worried that the movie will be partly set on Earth. Again, I wonder under which rock he has been hiding, since we’ve known that part of the film would take place on Earth for months now.

Other comments I’ve seen compare the trailer to Guardians of the Galaxy as if that were a bad thing, even though Guardians of the Galaxy is only one of the best and most consistent Marvel sub-series.

Other people have also said that He-Man should be camp and glittery and gay. Again, this is mainly based on later day reactions and mainly on that stupid “Prince Adam sings the ‘What’s Going On?’ by the Four Non-Blondes” meme, which never made the slightest bit of sense at all, but somehow became a sensation on the early internet. Were a lot of gay people involved particularly in the Filmation cartoon and do some of candy-coloured visuals seem campy and gay-coded these days? Yes, of course, but the 1980s were candy-coloured and men, including confirmed straight men, really did wear pink shirts. Don Johnson made them fashionable in Miami Vice. Are characters names like Fisto or Ram-Man unintentionally funny? Of course, and there have been hints that neither character is straight since the 1980s. But then, most 1980s cartoons had gay undertones and even strongly implied gay couples raising kids, though we rarely noticed this as kids. And while Masters of the Universe and Princess of Power have always been LGBTQ friendly franchises and He-Man is a gay icon, a Masters of the Universe film doesn’t have to be glittery and campy and overly gay, though I personally would be thrilled at a Fisto and Ram-Man kiss.

I will of course share my thoughts on the full trailer and whatever other news we might see tomorrow, though it might be a bit belated, because I have to get up early on Friday morning, since I have an appointment. Though you might just get another road trip post out of that.