Search

FAQ

US Titles

UK Titles

Memories

VaporWare

Digest

GuestBook

Classified

Chat

Products

Featured

Technical

Museum

Downloads

Production

Fanfares

Music

Misc

Related

Contact

Featured CED VideoDisc No. 20 - Spring 2001

For the featured CED on the Animation Genre, I wanted to pick conventional cartoon material originating during the CED era that was also highly popular at that time. These criteria effectively limited my choices to He-Man, the Smurfs, and Rainbow Brite. For me, the obvious choice was He-Man, as I personally find this program a lot more interesting than the other two. Plus it has the advantage of being actual shows from the afternoon TV series. I was tempted to use "Rainbow Brite" because it uses that rainbow motif that was popular with Amiga, Apple, Atari, ColorTrak, LaserVision, Magnavox, RCA, and SelectaVision back in those days, although NBC seems to be the only corporation still willing to use it. With many of these logos including CED Magic the order of colors is determined by jumping into the Color Wheel and picking every other color around the ring. Even the Filmation logo on the He-Man CED's has a modified rainbow motif.

What I like most about "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" is how well it creates an alternate universe, not unlike Star Wars. This point seems to have been entirely lost on the producers of the 1987 movie, which transferred most of the main characters (Battle Cat and Orko excluded) to present-day earth. And unlike that movie, the main characters in the serial are surprisingly well-developed for a television cartoon show. The "moral lessons" at the end of each show were a nice addition, although they were sometimes lame. An interesting bit of trivia about the show is that it came about from Mattel's original plan to market a line of action figures after Conan the Barbarian (the most expensive 2-disc CED ever). But after deciding that movie was too violent, they created He-Man to stick with the original action figure concept. This was a good choice, as the company got a lot more action figures out of the cartoon than they ever could have derived from the Conan movies.

The remainder of this CED feature has pictures of the main characters and places from the "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" CED's, as well as a table of all the animation titles available on CED. If you watched the He-Man series back in the 1980's, test your memory by guessing the name of each character or place before clicking on it.

The Good
The Evil

• He-Man in the Internet Movie Database

• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Fan Site

• The Guardians of Grayskull WebRing

• Previous Featured CED

• Next Featured CED

• Main Featured CED's Page

Home