I barely remember the plot of 1980s He-Man, but I remember this very clearly: I loved it with the full religious intensity of a small child who had not yet been hurt by QR-code menus, broken Wordle streaks, or a streaming service asking, “Are you still watching?”

Christmas morning 1987, I tore into my presents hoping to find a He-Man action figure. Not GI Joe. Not Transformers. Not some educational wooden toy designed to build character and hand-eye coordination. I wanted a tiny plastic space barbarian with a Dutch boy haircut and the muscle definition of a Venice Beach steroid dealer.

That morning ended in tears. My mom had been unable to secure the most popular toy of the season. I still recall my hysterical Christmas tantrum with guilt. I epitomized every spoiled child meme as I rolled around on the floor kicking and screaming like a World Cup soccer player who was lightly touched by an opponent.

Today, this sounds like a normal parenting failure. In the 1980s, it was basically a hostage crisis. There was no Amazon. No Target app. No Facebook Marketplace guy named Kyle selling a “lightly used He-Man” from his garage for $80 cash only. There were just moms driving from Kmart to Sears, to Toys “R” Us, fighting other moms in puff-painted sweatshirts for the last remaining action figure like they were competing in the ThunderDome.

And I, the real victim, had to carry on without my He-Man.
Somehow I survived (barely).

It all seemed so normal then. A space barbarian with flowing blonde locks fought a villain with a literal skeleton face. Nobody explained why Skeletor was a skeleton, why He-Man wore furry underwear to battle, or why every crisis in Eternia could be solved by yelling at a sword.
That was just how 80s cartoons worked.

The writers would spend 22 minutes showing a tiger in armor, a floating wizard, and a man named Beast Man trying to overthrow the universe, then end the episode with a gentle life lesson like, “Remember kids, always tell an adult before playing near a construction site.”

I watched the new Masters of the Universe movie with Audrey tonight fully expecting it to be terrible. The source material was ridiculous. I can’t imagine being the poor screenwriter forced to digest forty years of He-Man lore and somehow poop out a movie script that makes sense to people who were not raised on lead paint, Tang, and Saturday morning cereal commercials.

But somehow, it worked.

I don’t know if it was the five beers I enjoyed during the movie, or the nonstop action that had Audrey hooked like a coke fiend waiting for the next line.

“This is definitely rated R!” she shouted (multiple times) as another demon creature got punched off a cliff by a guy named “Fist-o.”

It was not rated R. It was a hard PG-13. But I didn’t correct her because I am a responsible father who believes in encouraging enthusiasm, imagination, and mild ignorance when it benefits me.

I kept waiting for it to fall apart. I waited for the “actually, Skeletor has generational trauma” subplot. I waited for Hollywood to take a simple story about a blonde man screaming at a sword and turn it into a three-hour meditation on grief, diversity, and gender roles.

But they didn’t.

He-Man did He-Man things.

He punched monsters. He yelled about the power of Greyskull. And evil was defeated through a combination of friendship and aggressive upper-body strength.

Somehow, it worked.

In my old age, I have become much more cynical about movies. I used to watch one, sometimes two movies in theaters every week. Other than Alien Resurrection — with that awful half-human, half-alien baby thing that still looks like it was designed by a committee of people actively trying to ruin my life — I can’t think of many movies back then that I truly despised.

Now I can barely finish anything.

I will walk into a movie with a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score (‘cough’ La La Land) and halfway through start whispering to Claire, “Do we have to stay? Could we just leave? Think of how much the babysitter is costing us!”

I can never tell if I have become more critical or if movies have become much, much, much worse.

Probably both.

But I enjoyed this He-Man movie.

It kept Audrey interested. It fired just enough dusty neurons in my brain to remind me how much I loved that show as a kid. And for two hours, I was watching a muscular lunatic in a metal harness save the universe with a sword and a catchphrase clearly written by someone with a poor grasp of the english language.

Which left me with only one important question:

How stupid was I for liking this as a kid?

The answer, apparently, is VERY.

But maybe that was the point.

Kids don’t need everything to make sense. They don’t need backstory, world-building, emotional realism, or a villain with a nuanced position on interdimensional governance. They just need a skeleton guy to be bad, a blonde guy to be good, and a magical sword to occasionally shoot lightning for reasons no one should ever investigate.

So yes, I like He-Man.

I liked him when I was a kid sobbing under the Christmas tree because my mother failed to defeat the national toy shortage. I liked him tonight while Audrey screamed “THIS IS RATED R!” at a PG-13 movie like she was watching contraband cinema in a prison yard.

And if that makes me dumb, so be it.

By the power of Grayskull, I have had much worse personality traits.