The Missing Tooth #8
Masters of the Universe, entertaining children, and the cruellest review ever.
Good morning!
It really shouldn’t have taken three months to get together my thoughts on Masters of the Universe.
But here we are.
There is also a terribly sad poem by Linda Pastan, the cruellest review I’ve ever read, and the never-ending struggle of entertaining children.
All best,
N.
PS Comments and corrections are always welcome. It’s the only way I’ll learn.
The Show Goes On (and On)
“Do something funny!” Edie shouts.
“Yeah!” Bea chimes in. “We don’t like you when you’re not funny!”
They’re joking of course, but only half.
Bea and Edie know that I’m a bottomless pit of half-baked creativity, able to create ill-conceived stories and bizarre characters at the drop of a hat. And—age four and eight—they’re not too concerned if what I say makes sense or is even any good.
I’m like they’re own personal YouTube, constantly streaming questionable content on demand.
There are the epic bedtime stories of Edie, the noble—yet tempestuous—knight and her gentle dragon sister Bea. Or Cashman! a serial audio play I perform in the car about a sentient twenty-cent coin.
An offhand comment from an old woman at the supermarket bred Be A Good Girl For Daddy, a fake podcast hosted by the dowager Madame Pamplemousse.
Pamplemousse—played by me—is an etiquette coach for young ladies and Bea and Edie play the various guests whose feminist attitudes to womanhood torment Pamplemousse (“No no no! You shan’t find a husband if you pick your noses! Ladies pick flowers, not noses!”)
My days are spent writing stories, singing songs, and making up brain teasers from scratch.
What button do you push to make Edie laugh?
What switch should you never flip?
Dad and Bea were playing hide and seek. Dad hid on the dining room table. Why couldn’t Bea find him?
I feel like I’m stuck in a Twilight Zone ironic hell where I’m tortured by the thing I crave most: unfettered creativity and attention.
I worry that I’m beginning to associate creativity with obligation and that my ability to think critically about what I create is slowly being eroded by the low standards of my children.
It’s exhausting.
I moved the dining room chairs to sweep under the table yesterday afternoon, placing them in two rows in the lounge room. When I went to move them back, I found the girls sitting, one each row.
“Time for the Daddy show to start!”
There were two encores.
*Answers: 1) A belly button 2) The Nintendo Switch 3) Bea and Dad were playing Roblox’s Hide and Seek and Dad was hiding in the fruit bowl on the dining table which has a secret portal to the top of the bookcase.
He-Man and the Masters of The Universe
Masters of the Universe is back. More than thirty years after the sword-wielding, walnut-stuffed condom known as He-Man first made his debut on Saturday morning television, Netflix is streaming a new animated series with Kevin Smith at the helm.
I was obsessed with the original cartoon as a six-year-old and so checked out the first episode.
I did not care for it one bit.
Not, as the howling man-children of twitters insist, that it ruins the original series by focusing on a disgusting, girl-germs-infested woman, but because I’m an adult now and Masters of the Universe is pretty fucking dumb.
The premise reads like it was written by a four-year-old filling in the blanks in a game of Mad Libs: A PRINCE turns into a BARBARIAN and fights a SKELETON with the help of his PET TIGER, SPACE SOLDIER and TINY WIZARD.
It did, however, get me wondering how this bizarre mix of barbarians, sci-fi, and fantasy got made in the first place. How does a muscle-bound Conan The Barbarian rip-off end up alongside sassy skeletons, cyborg monsters, telescopic necked spies, and moss monsters?
The short answer is: to sell toys.
But the long answer is much more interesting.
In 1976, Mattel’s CEO Ray Wagner turned down the chance to produce Star Wars toys, unhappy with having to pay George Lucas $750,000 upfront. When that movie was a hit, Wagner turned to his designers to create their own sci-fi fantasy line of toys.
Toy designer Roger Sweet created the first prototypes by adding huge clay muscles to a generic Big Jim action figure. Sweet gave Wagner three choices, a Middle Eastern barbarian, a spaceman, and a tank-headed soldier. Sweet said:
“I simply explained that this was a powerful figure that could be taken anywhere and dropped into any context because he had a generic name: He-Man.”
Any hint of alienating the white, middle-American families the toys were aimed at was stripped from the design. He-Man’s dark skin and hair were made fair. The “Lords of Power” was deemed too biblical and was changed to "Masters of the Universe.”
When it was suggested the toys be launched through a DC comic line, it was pointed out that "five-year-olds don't read" and an animated series was quickly developed. (a mini-comic was eventually produced.)
Every decision was made to cast as wide a net as possible, offending no one and appealing to every taste, every character cobbled together from a mix of popular tropes and toy trends.
For example, Man-At-Arms was introduced to take advantage of Star Wars’ popularity. As a weapons inventor, the space soldier opened the door to any number of sci-fi weapons and vehicles.
Other characters were pulled from existing designs. Moss man is DC’s Swamp Thing. Battle Cat is a repurposed Big Jim tiger toy. The pint-sized sorcerer Gorpo, his facial features hidden in a thick robe, appears to have been lifted wholesale from Ralph Barski’s 1977 film Wizards.
Perhaps this potpourri of characters and tropes is why the show was a success. Masters of the Universe doesn’t just put toys on TV, it plays with them with the same chaotic energy and indifference to logic as a child. If Toy Story’s Andy had been given a barbarian and a skeleton instead of a cowboy and a spaceman, Masters of the Universe would be exactly the type of game he’d play.
It is easy to dismiss the show as a product of corporate greed and marketing but it’s impossible to ignore the joy Masters of the Universe brought children throughout the eighties. The fact that it is remembered fondly enough to justify a new series thirty years later shows it is more than a cynical cash grab.
Ultimately, the success of the brand doesn’t come from what they created but from the imaginations of the children who watched and played with the toys and the adults who remember those good times with affection.
The cruellest review I’ve ever read
The cruellest review I’ve ever read comes from a 2010 biography in London Review Books by Michael Hoffman, a writer who describes as “a roving genius of literary criticism” in the blurb for his collection of essays.
Hoffman’s target was Stefan Zweig, the early 20th-century Austrian novelist and travel writer whose work was the inspiration for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Zweig and his wife took their own lives in 1942.
In his biography, Hoffman wrote:
[Zweig] left a suicide note which, like most of what he wrote, is so smooth and mannerly and somehow machined – actually more like an Oscar acceptance speech than a suicide note – that one feels the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it, and the sense that he doesn’t mean it, his heart isn’t in it (not even in his suicide)
Despite reading the review over two years ago, I’ve not been able to get that paragraph out of my head. I can’t understand the mental processes someone would go through to carefully craft a sentence so thoughtfully cruel and deliberately spiteful.
There’s plenty of cruel words in the world. But most of those are blurted out of anger or with a harshness that is unintentional. It’s rare to see someone so skilled with the English language take the time to do harm so calmy and methodically, like a skilled torturer in a spy novel.
Ethics
In ethics class so many years ago
our teacher asked this question every fall:
If there were a fire in a museum,
which would you save, a Rembrandt painting
or an old woman who hadn’t many
years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs
caring little for pictures or old age
we’d opt one year for life, the next for art
and always half-heartedly. Sometimes
the woman borrowed my grandmother’s face
leaving her usual kitchen to wander
some drafty, half-imagined museum.
One year, feeling clever, I replied
why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews
the burdens of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt, old woman,
or nearly so, myself. The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter — the browns of earth,
though earth’s most radiant elements burn
through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond the saving of children.
- Linda Pastan
What I’m Reading
The Lady In The Van by Alan Bennett
Conflicted: Why Everybody's Talking and Nobody's Listening by Ian Leslie
Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson