The method to the madness, your true inspiration, now comes to light.
For ten years, I’ve been studying Kevin Feige as a f*ckin’ fan. How the f*ck do you do this? How the f*ck do you give me my childhood back and make me love it even more than I loved it the first time? You make me feel young watching this sh*t, man. So, I said to the writers’ room, “We’re just gonna model this. We’re gonna do the Marvel method, not like they did in the comic books, where you write the dialogue later. We’re gonna do the Marvel Cinematic Universe method, which is that we’re gonna give them their exact childhood back and accentuate it. We’re gonna do it better than the show that they saw and reach into their f*ckin’ memories and show them their memories of this thing.” Because if people watched the teaser and are like, “Oh my god, there’s so much action, it’s just like my childhood.” I urge them to go back and watch the show that we’re sequelizing. There was no action. They couldn’t.
Exactly. There was no swordplay in the old show, and no real followthrough on peril, and no actual deaths.
Yeah! Right? Nobody got to stab or anything like that, so what we’re showing them is a heightened version of their memories. There are all the characters as you remember them. They’re all designed the same, and their relationships are all the same, but we can actually have them hit each other and stab each other. People could die, and there are real consequences and stakes for that sort of thing. So, the idea in the writers’ room was, “Look, we have to have it ready for the audience, so when they watch it, they’re like, ‘Holy sh*t, my toys are exactly where I left them. Let me have fun again.'” And you know, they’re adults, so they can deal with a more grown-up story, so to speak. And I hope everyone loves it as much as I do, I know that won’t be the case, but I know they’ll love this more than anything else I’ve ever done, as a whole.
So, when the teaser came out, a false rumor spread that there wasn’t much He-Man in this show. How did you deal with shutting down talk that this was The Teela Show?
It’s been hard. I couldn’t say certain things, and in the absence, people filled in their own details. There was a post that somebody made on Twitter. They were like, “I heard from an inside source that says this is
The Teela Show. Teela proves that she’s a better He-Man than He-Man. She gets the sword, and she’s got a girlfriend.” I was like, “Look, I wish you were there with us in the writers’ room. That would have been fun, but I can honestly tell you that is not the f*cking show. You were lied to.” Then they saw the teaser and were like, “Teela’s all over it!” And I was like, “Yes, but if you are familiar with the show and are as big of a fan as you say you were, then you’ll remember that in every single episode of
Masters of the Universe, Teela was right there, fighting for Adam, protecting him, or fighting side-by-side with He-Man.” The same thing with Evil-Lyn and Skeletor. People are like, “Is this woke?” And if this is woke, then they were woke in 19f*cking83. Because we’re literally doing the same sh*t.
I love the He-Man names.
