Written by TAKE the CHALLENGE!
A fantastic group of He-Man fans have taken the challenge to watch all 130 Episodes of the 1983 Filmation Cartoon Series “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe“ for 130 days straight, one episode per day. Join us!
Be sure to check out the RE-WATCH-A-THON celebratory memento shirts and mugs (long sleeve shirts options are available too).
Today’s Episode is:
Three On a Dare
| PRODUCTION NUMBER | EPISODE TITLE | DIRECTOR | WRITERS | PREMIERE DATE | RE-WATCH-A-THON DATE |
|---|
| MU88 | “Three on a Dare” | Marsh Lamore | Misty Stewart | October 15, 1984 | Feb 22 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Synopsis: The Royal Palace’s transmitter is damaged. Now there can be no radio contact, which means no help for Teela and her students when they end up being captured at Snake Mountain. | |||||
CLICK HERE to Watch on YOUTUBE (or watch it embedded below:)
OUR REVIEW:
A mildly entertaining but instantly forgettable episode where Prince Adam / He-Man gets to break into Snake Mountain and steal Skeletor's rainbow quartz (while still remaining the hero!) It is nice to see a large roster of Evil (albeit incompetent) Warriors and the patience Orko has been receiving lately is incredible. (5/10)
Comment, Review and Discuss below:
Tomorrow’s Episode is: “Just a Little Lie”
I LOVE this episode for what it is – fun, goofy MOTU adventure. I can overlook its (many) flaws because at the end of the day it’s Adam/Cringer then He-Man/Battlecat in an adventure in Snake Mountain that turns into a rescue mission against Skeletor and the “original 5” Evil Warriors. To me you can’t top the excitement/fun of peak MOTU when He-Man and Battlecat are chasing Trap-Jaw to free the captives while the He-Man theme plays.
But boy oh boy, this thing is filled with some head scratchers: the Beastman/Grayskull thing, the intercom in Snake Mountain, Skeletor telling Beastman he wants to take Teela himself then sends Evil-Lyn to do it, and of course as you mentioned the plot revolves around going into the enemies home to straight up steal. Feels like if the roles were reversed the heroes would probably act equally defensive. That said, I can personally forgive it because this episode always makes me smile.
@battlecat327 I always wanted to know why Snake Mountain shook at the mention of Castle Grayskull but I never could figure it out. I once looked at James Eatock’s book for the answer but it seemed like he didn’t pay attention to the scene. All he saw was Beast Man being afraid of the words Castle Grayskull and missed that the entire room was shaking and Skeletor reacted to it too.
This episode is fun. 7/10.
Meh episode
Considering this episode is about dares, I’m betting if it was made like 15 years later, there would’ve been a Christmas Story reference after that movie started it’s cable TV cult following.
A good portion of the worst episodes in my opinion have these prominent one-off kid characters. I get it. They want the target audience to relate and see themselves reflected in these roles. A lot of shows do this and kid audience surrogate characters can be done well (Orko, most Transformers human protags, etc.) but whenever the writing requires a human kid the audience and sometimes characters haven’t met it most of the time fumbles the bag.
But to be fair most of these episodes I’m watching for the first time.
Spoiler alert: we haven’t got to it in the Watch-A-Thon, but one exception to what I just said is the episode where He-Man takes a blind fan on an adventure. Love that one. It was sweet.
It was a good choice to make Adam a youthful teen in both 200x and Netflix 2021 and have a Shazam thing going with He-Man. I think it should be a standard of all new kid targeted MOTU media in the future (Nothing like Revelation or the new movie, just stuff like the two examples I just gave). It can be executed well. He-Man having the types of powers of Superman and Adam having a semi-Peter Parker like personality.
Kids would rather see themselves as the hero rather than the sidekick let’s be real
3 stars. Fun to see the original council of evil back, but it’s a very paint by numbers episode.