The New He-Man Is Kind Like Superman? Cue the Angry Nerds

I’m going to age myself very rapidly here by revealing that I grew up during the heyday of iconic ’80s cartoons like He-Man, G.I. Joe, ThunderCats, you name it. What was the central point of all these shows? Moving toys, obviously. These were 30 minute commercials that worked like gangbusters. They were also PSAs, which was how the toy companies got past Congress and parents who were concerned about kids being pitched consumer products every afternoon. If you asked five-year-old Mike what He-Man stood for, he’d readily tell you some combination of being nice to others and not drinking chemicals under the sink. These were not hard messages to grasp.

Superman fits into a very similar mold, and yet, there was a collective freakout when James Gunn rightly leaned into the Big Blue Boy Scout persona by making David Corenswet’s version of the character unfailingly kind and caring. That’s exactly how Superman should be. This is a wildly powerful person who has incredible strength, but doesn’t want to use it unless he absolutely has to. Angry nerds in this particular era did not like that, and surprise, they are at it again.

With Masters of the Universe set to hit theaters in June, the live-action film is the subject of a new Entertainment Weekly feature that has the worst people on the internet fuming. What are they so mad about? This passage right here:

And while He-Man has strength and muscle in spades, there is another side to him, one that [Travis] Knight found more compelling.

“At the same time, he was talking about kindness. He was talking about friendship and compassion. He was somebody who cared. And he was essentially like a bronzed empathy coach in furry underpants,” the director continues. “It was unique. It was different. And certainly for a kid like me — I was a sensitive kid. I was an artist. I was kind of a weird guy, you might say, and I made friends slowly when I made them at all…. I was comfortable with my own company, and I had deep thoughts and deep feelings, but I had a hard time making those types of deep connections easily with others. And so that very notion that strength and sensitivity could commingle, it was seismic. It was like discovering you could own both a tank and a diary.”

That sounds exactly like the He-Man cartoon, alright. Again, this was a children’s cartoon with bare minimum violence where Skeletor or his minions picked on some poor creatures and He-Man showed up to say, “Hey, knock it off. Be nice.” Obvious inspiration aside, Conan the Barbarian this was not.

And, yet, in internet screeds that I’m not linking you have the saddest people alive saying things like, “Fans want He-Man not P-ssy-Boy” and “Masters of the Universe sounds like it was put together by producers who are My Little Pony sympathizers.” (Never forget: Everything is gender.) There’s also complaints about the tone being too Marvel by adding self-deprecating humor, a feature in every single blockbuster under the sun. Go back and watch an Indiana Jones movie and count how many times Indy is the butt of the joke. It’s a lot.

Again, I have to ask, have these people ever watched the cartoon? Everything about this movie captures that feel and ups the ante. He-Man is mowing dudes down with his sword in the trailer, something that never once happened in the cartoon. You’re going to get your fight sequences, bro, but there’s also going to be dimensions to these characters. The yucky girl will be heroic, too, and I know that’s the biggest issue here. We all remember the crying over Kevin Smith’s Netflix series.

If you can’t handle seeing things like kindness or strong women, maybe the real P-Boy is you?