Cora’s Comments on the latest Masters of the Universe clip and a Few Words about Nuremberg

For starters, the co-chairs of the Nuremberg in 2028 Worldcon bid have announced that they are withdrawing their bid, because the timeframe is just too tight.

I know that this must have been a difficult decision for them, since they already put a lot of work and also money into their bid, but I do think they made the right call in the end. For more about my feelings about the Nuremberg bid and why 2028 was not the right year for it, see this post.

That said, I do hope the Nuremberg team will bid again for another year, because I do want to see another Worldcon in Germany.

In other news, the long awaited Masters of the Universe live action movie will open this week.  I’m going to attend an English languge preview showing at the Savoy Movie Theater in Hamburg on Wednesday, June 3, which is only two days away. There will be a spoiler-free review at File 770 and then a detailed, spoilerish discussion here.

Meanwhile, a new clip from the movie has been posted online by Discussing Film.

The clip starts with Skeletor, who has apparently just conquered Eternos, calling for Evil-Lyn. We then see a longer version of the scene of Evil-Lyn sauntering across the bridge with the city burning behind her that we already saw in the trailers. She comes to a halt next to Skeletor and says, “Well said, Lord Skeletor. Poetry.”

There’s a cut and we see that Skeletor is surrounded by his various henchpeople and Skel-Knights. Randor is on his knees before Skeletor, held by Spikor and Karg. Note that Karg is Skeletor’s prison warden and torturer according to the Classics bios. “Take him away!” Skeletor orders, while Randor struggles in vain against his captors.

“A new dawn”, Skeletor declares, “Eternia shall witness my rise.” He raises his fist and erupts into a typical Skeletor villain laugh. His eyes glow and Randor’s crown is on his head.

While Skeletor is laughing and basking in his own glory, his assorted henchpeople are looking at each other, not exactly sure what they are expected to do now. Are they supposed to laugh or cheer or applaud? We also get a good look at the various henchpeople, including a very menacing looking Spikor who even drools.

Meanwhile, Skeletor notices that his henchpeople are not reacting as expected. He drops his fist and turns to Evil-Lyn. “That’s it. I finished.” “Of course, my Lord,” Evil-Lyn replies hastily. But Skeletor isn’t done yet. “When I raise my fist like that, I’m done”, he says, “That is the crescendo.” “We’ll know for the future”, Lyn replies.

It’s a fun clip, which shows Skeletor in all his pompous and self-aggrandizing glory as well as his frustration with his henchpeople, whenever they don’t do what he wants. And yes, Skeletor looks good, as do his henchpeople. Spikor in particular is nightmare fuel.

The clip also shows how much Skeletor relies on Lyn, who has always been the smartest of the Evil Warriors, and how he bullies her and the rest of his henchpeople. Alison Brie’s version of Evil-Lyn, meanwhile, feels like an exasperated secretary with a very demanding and volatile boss, which does make sense, considering I still mainly assocuate Alison Brie with her role in Mad Men (though she wasn’t a secretary in that show, but one of the long suffering wives). Besides, Skeletor is extremely volatile and Lyn is often the first target of his wrath. That said, based on this short clip, I’m still not entirely convinced by Alison Brie’s Evil-Lyn compared to the excellent performances of Meg Foster, Lena Headey, Linda Gary, Grey De Lisle and Kathleen Barr in other iterations.

While the clip is fun, the responses to it were depressing. On Twitter – where much of Masters of the Universe fandom still hangs out – the reactions were overwhelmingly positive. And it wasn’t just from die-hard Masters of the Universe fans. Yes, you have a few naysayers as well, usually of the “Wah, there were pronouns in the trailer and some characters are black now and someone said toxic masculinity” variety, but the main reaction was positive.

Meanwhile, on BlueSky – which is normally supposed to be the nicer, kinder social media site – the reactions were not just overwhelmingly negative, but downright hateful. “Skeletor’s voice isn’t like in the Filmation cartoon” – “This looks terrible.” – “It looks like AI slop [even though we know that most of the sets were physical]” – “Who is this for?” – “This will flop and Scary Movie Whatever/Amazing Digital Circus/Backrooms/Obsession/some other low budget horror thing will trounce it at the box office.”

It was honestly infuriating and I also don’t understand the negativity, especially not from the supposedly nice and kind social media site. It’s almost as if these people want Masters of the Universe to fail and I just don’t understand why. I understand not caring about a movie and not understanding why others want to watch it. As I said before, I’m not sure why The Devil Wears Prada 2 even exists, let alone why it’s apparently a huge success. But why would you deliberately want a movie to fail rather than just ignore it?

Also, lots of people have said that they wanted to see Skeletor be campy and funny. And now they get a clip of Skeletor being funny and campy and they’re not satisfied either. Besides, Alan Oppenheimer’s portrayal of Skeletor in the Filmation cartoon is just one of many Skeletor versions we’ve had over the years and none of the others copied Oppenheimer’s distinctive high-pitched Skeletor voice. There’s also Campbell Lane’s underrated New Adventures Skeletor, of whom I detect a bit of influence in Jared Leto’s portrayal, Peter Pasetti’s icily menacing Skeletor from the German audio dramas, Frank Langella’s Shakespearean Skeletor from the 1987 movie,  Brian Dobson’s genuinely nasty Skeletor from the 200X cartoon, Mark Hamill’s unhinged and sadistic Skeletor from Masters of the Universe Revelation/Revolution and Ben Diskin’s pompous and darkly funny Skeletor from the CGI cartoon. They’re all slightly different, all good and you can see many/most of them reflected in this newest version.

Anyway, all these people have achieved is that I now have a deep seated resentment against Scary Movie Whatever and The Amazing Digital Circus (which I hadn’t even heard about before until I saw the listing pop up on movie theater sites when I booked my ticket for Masters of the Universe) and Obsession and Backrooms, movies I had no feelings, neither negative nor positive, about before. I have to admit that I have been annoyed by all of those low budget horror movies for a while now, because they’re the bane of my existence, when doing the Speculative Fiction Showcase link round-ups. Because there are so many of them – at least one releases every single week – and they usually get at least two reviews and need their own category and I have zero interest in any of them, plus the trailers usually look utterly ridiculous. However, I just keep my opinion about all of those horror movies to myself (though what I’ve seen of Backrooms looks cheap and fake and apparently there are doubts if the twenty-year-old YouTuber actually directed it without massive help from more experienced filmmakers), rather than shit on them and the people who like them. Besides, occasionally you do get a really great one like Sinners.

Also, if Scary Movie Whatever is expected to do much better than Masters of the Universe, then why am I seeing zero promotion for it. Yes, my algorithms are geared towards Masters of the Universe, so of course I see more posts and videos about it. However, I regularly check the various entertainment and SFF news sites for the Speculative Fiction Showcase link round-up and all I’ve seen about Scary Movie Whatever is a single trailer and a photo of a novelty popcorn bucket shaped like a bong (whereas Masters of the Universe has popcorn buckets shaped like Castle Grayskull, Skeletor’s throne, Battle-Cat and a drink up shaped like the Power Sword, so the merch is much cooler as well). There’ve been no early reaction round-ups, no premiere photos, no clips, no interviews with cast and crew, nothing. If it wasn’t going head to head with Masters of the Universe, I probably wouldn’t even know it exists. So tell me again why a movie with zero promotion is expected to do better than Masters of the Universe?

According to that stupid Rotten Tomatoes site, which is a cancer on cinema, Masters of the Universe has a 75 percent positive score, which is supposedly good. I couldn’t say, because I never pay attention to that site and hate the whole concept of it, but I have seen plenty of movies I disliked get over 90 percent. For comparison, that terrible looking Backrooms film has 89% – for actors that deserve better running around piss-yellow sets. Plenty of reviews from “important” outlets were also lukewarm to negative. Of course, I’ve also seen lots of positive reviews, but those were often from smaller sites, whereas the lukewarm to negative ones were from the likes of Variety or The Guardian. And that stupid Rotten Tomatoes site of course doesn’t count many of the smaller sites. I’ve also seen reviewers that enjoyed the movie being accused of being paid shills, while the naysayers are apparently one hundred percent genuine. It’s frustrating, because it seems as if some reviewers are deliberately putting down Masters of the Universe and The Mandalorian and Grogu, just because they apparently aren’t the target audience or they are sick of superheroes/Star Wars movies/joyful films.

This isn’t the first time this has happened in recent years either. In 2017, US reviewers absolutely savaged Valerian and the City of a 1000 Planets (which was a massive success in its native France and elsewhere in Europe), mostly because they were tired of blockbuster movies and not familiar with the source material and also wanted the French to go back to making arthouse movies, cause countries outside the US are only allowed to make one kind of movie. And while Valerian has issues, mostly that the male lead was miscast, it’s not nearly as bad as those reviewers made it seem. Even earlier, we had John Carter, another movie that was actually good, but sabotaged both by Disney, who were contractually obligated to make it, but wanted the director to go back to endless Pixar sequels, and clueless reviewers, who apparently had never heard of Edgar Rice Burroughs and kept criticising the movie for supposedly copying ideas Burroughs had pioneered. I also suspect that the supposed superhero and Marvel fatigue is more driven by reviewers being tired of those movies than audiences, cause while there were a few misfires (the deadly dull Eternals is probably the worst), many post-Endgame Marvel movies were actually good, including the much maligned The Marvels. Ditto for some DC movies, though DC had a worse hit/miss rate during the Snyder era.

In many ways the situation was better pre-internet, where snobby reviewers sneered about all of the fun science fiction and fantasy and action movies, if they deigned to notice them at all, but audiences usually didn’t give a fuck and watched and enjoyed the movies anyway. Those sneering reviewers are still around – I vividly remember the infamous “Captain America is not a horse” of Captain America: Civil War by a German reviewer who assumed the movie was a sequel to The Horse Whisperer, because Robert Redford and Scarlet Johanssen were in both movies – but pre-internet no one outside the readership of that one magazine or newspaper even knew what they had to say.

It also feels so futile, because even when you shout from the rooftops that something is good and that everybody should read/watch it, it still doesn’t seem to have any effect except that you will get called a paid shill, too. We’ve outsourced our opinions to Rotten Tomatoes and YouTube grifters.

Anyway, I’m still looking forward to the movie, but the lukewarm to negative reviews by “respectable” outlets (I honestly saw some critic say it was the worst he’d ever seen, which is wild in a world with so many genuinely terrible movies) and and claims that Masters of the Universe will bomb and that it will rank behind Scary Movie Whatever, piss-yellow Backrooms, Obsession, Digital Circus and whatever ither slop is out there have dimmed that joy somewhat. And this makes me angry, because I could use some joy. But apparently, my generation is expected to watch action movies with Liam Neeson or Bob Odenkirk for the men or inspirational breast cancer movies about female friendship for the women. We’re not allowed to have fun or nostalgic joy, cause movies are made for Gen Z now and they apparently only like low budget horror crap.