20 Fun Facts about MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was one of my favorite toys and cartoons back in the 1980s, and a live-action movie was made in 1987 that I was lucky enough to have enjoyed as a kid. I freakin’ loved that flick! As a nine-year-old, I couldn’t have asked for anything more epic. Unfortunately, the older I got the more ridiculous and stupid this movie became. Regardless of the fact that it’s a poorly made adaptation, the kid in me still loves the hell out of it. For this week's Fun Facts list I decided to revisit the movie and list twenty things that you might not know about it. There's a lot of great stuff here that I previously didn't know about.
- The actor who played Blade, Anthony De Longis, trained Dolph Lundgren to use a sword, and he choreograph the sword fight between He-Man and Blade as well as the climatic duel between He-Man and Skeletor. Skeletor was played by Frank Langella in the film, but during the final fight De Longis stepped into the role.
- De Longis said that due to the 50-plus pound weight of his Blade suit, when he would remove his boots, he would have to pour out his sweat at the end of every day he was shooting the movie.
- Meg Foster, who played Evil-Lyn in the film, wore a costume that weighed 45 lbs. She apparently sustained bruises to her groin from the breastplate she wears throughout the shoot. The actress said that he breastplate restricted her movements a lot, which is why Evil-Lyn is never sitting during the film. Foster as also said that the discomfort from the costume helped her performance. The weight and design forced her to puff out her chest during every take, which generated the character's slinky posture.
- A lot people thought that Foster wore contact lenses in the movie that gave her character the crazy cool, eerie look. She didn’t wear any, though, those are her actual eyes, and they have blue and grey irises with tiny pupils that give her that striking appearance.
- There are a lot of people that think the movie is an adaptation of the cartoon, when in reality the movie was based on the action figure line. Producer Ed Pressman was interested in the property and picked up the movie rights before the cartoon even aired.
- Director Gary Goddard planned to dub over Lundgren's lines with another actor because of his limited acting experience and thick Swedish accent. He also wasn’t fluent in English at the time. But, with the film running behind schedule, Goddard decided to use Lundgren's natural voice instead.
- The Throne Room set of Castle Grayskull was so big that the wall between two adjoining sound stages was knock down to make room for what was built. It was the biggest set built in Hollywood in over 40 years, at that time.
- Cannon Films, the production company who made the film, originally planned to make a Spider-Man movie. Instead they decided to take the money and split it up for two other films; Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Masters of the Universe. The plan was to take the profits from both these movies and make a big-budget Spider-Man film. Unfortunately, both movies bombed at the box-office.
- Lundgren refused to reprise his role as He-Man in a planned sequel when they offered it to him. He felt that playing the character was the “lowest point as an actor.” After he passed they gave the role to big wave surfer Laird Hamilton who had a small role in a movie called North Shore.
- The Masters of the Universe sequel was actually written, and director Albert Pyun proposed to producers that he would make the sequel and a Spider-Man film back to back at De Laurentiis' studio in Wilmington, North Carolina. “The sets for the two movies were built, the costumes were made, both films had been fully cast, and the budget for Masters of the Universe Part 2 was set at $4.5 million. The Mattel toy company also gave their approval to many of the characters that would appear in the sequel.” Pyun would also be using the same high school sets for Kevin and Julie later when he would direct Spider-Man. The films never got made though because Mattel and Marvel revoked the rights to both properties due to non-payment by Cannon Films, and they went out of business.
- Apparently in the sequel, He-Man returned to Earth disguised as a professional quarterback, and Skeletor disguised himself as “an evil industrialist known as Aaron Dark who destroyed most of the world before He-Man can arrive on Earth to stop him.” The sequel ended with the Earth devastated as a post-nuclear world.
- Even though Lundgren wasn’t happy with the part of He-Man, Langella said that playing Skeletor was one of his favorite roles. Apparently his young son was a huge fan and was running around the house shouting "By the power of Grayskull," so he took the role for him. The actor even wrote some of his own lines, one of them being, "Tell me about the loneliness of good, He-Man. Is it equal to the loneliness of evil?”.
- Actor Tony Carroll's prosthetic teeth for Beast Man were so large that he was unable to close his mouth when wearing them. It made him drool so much that it filled his chin-piece full of saliva which weighed it down.
- Mattel mandated early in production that He-Man was not allowed to kill anyone on screen. To get around this they made Skeletor's troops into robot soldiers. They never point this fact out in the movie.
- Mattel ran a contest where the winner would get a role in the film. With the movie being in a rush to be finished in time and already over budget, the director managed to squeeze in the contest winner. The winner was Richard Szponder, and he is featured as "Pigboy" who hands Skeletor his staff when he returns from Earth.
- Goddard tried to dedicate the film to American comic book artist Jack Kirby in the closing credits. But the studio took the credit out.
- "In the official Masters of the Universe comic book adaptation, an alternate ending is used that was written for the movie but never filmed. In the comic, after the final battle between He-Man and Skeletor, Man-At-Arms comes from the depths of Castle Grayskull carrying a NASA and US flag. The NASA flag has 'Starfinder 5. July 10, 2221' written on it, revealing that the first humans on Eternia were actually from a future American space mission."
- In the early drafts of the script for the movie, The Snakemen and She-Ra were included. She-Ra’s costume was “a futuristic white and gold suit consisting of a gold crown, a long sleeved top that revealed She-Ra's cleavage and midriff, a gold chain-mail skirt and knee-high boots.” The characters had to be cut out, though, due to the film's limited budget.
- For the miniature shots set on earth, the special effects team at Boss Film Studios reused several buildings left over from the productions of Blade Runner and Ghostbusters so they could fill out the background.
- This is one of the first movies that included a post-credit sequence with Skeletor saying, "I'll Be Back!"
Here's the original trailer for the film: