Fun Video Segment Offers Fascinating Behind-The-Scenes Story of The MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE Movie
If you've never seen the documentary Toy Masters it's a film definitely worth checking out. The doc focuses on the classic He-Man franchise and the story of behind the toy line, cartoon series, and movie.
Regardless of how bad the 1987 live-action movie was, I still love it, and I have very fond memories of watching it over and over again while eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. I was recently reminded of this Toy Masters doc when I saw an article pop up on THR, that focused on Dolph Lundgren and how he only had three chances to nail the dialogue or his voice would be dubbed. I included the segment from the doc below that focuses on the movie and it feature members of the crew talking about the crazy film production! It's a fascinating story!
Apparently, everyone was worried about Lundgren's voice because it was so hard to understand him. In regards to that Paul Cleveland, a Mattel marketing executive said:
"I saw the rough cuts, I listened to Dolph Lundgren's voice and I just about had a heart attack. It's OK if He-Man has a little bit of an accent, but you have got to be able to understand him."
They couldn't dub his voice, though because it was in his contract that he got three attempts to get it right and he barely scraped by doing that. They also get into how the film production was shut down before the movie was even finished! Director Gary Goddard talked about how he actually ended up finishing the movie, saying:
"Even though we shut down the set, I got Skeletor and Dolph and the [director of photography] and I got them to let me shoot some footage of them battling ... it was a very quick choreographing job. We kept the lights out. We back-lit them so we had enough so we could piece together the battle."
If you're a fan of Masters of the Universe and you've never seen this before, you're in for a treat. It's been years since I watch this movie. I think I'm going to attempt to show it to my kids this week.