She-Ra, Princesses of Power
Based on She-Ra: Princess of Power by Filmation, Mattel
Developed by Noelle Stevenson
Voices of: Aimee Carrero, AJ Michalka, Karen Fukuhara, Marcus Scribner, Reshma Shetty, Lorraine Toussaint, Lauren Ash, Christine Woods, Genesis Rodriguez, Vella Lovell, Merit Leighton & Keston John
I was noodling around, reading reviews on the Guardian. I don’t always agree with their reviews, but at worst I can usually understand the reviewers’ point of view. I was a bit startled to encounter a review of She-Ra: Princesses of Power. I knew it was based on the awful 1980s toy merchandising show, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I saw an episode of that once, and like Barney or the Tele-Tubbies, it struck me as a horrid example of what happens when marketing tries to suck in little kids. It was pretty dire. A reboot had all the same promise as being caught in a spacesuit with a panicked skunk. And if offered a choice between watching She-Ra or the skunk, I might pause only to ask, “Hooded skunk or Striped Skunk?”
The review, by Megan Maurice, was glowing, praising the nuanced and complex characters and a storyline “that’s gripping and plot-driven while also leaving you with the sense that you’d dive right in and fight alongside the rebellion if given the chance.”
OK, that sounds like something I might say about Avatar. For a re-invented show to jump from lamest of the lame to the status of a story-telling classic isn’t unheard of (Battlestar Galactica, for instance) and is too extraordinary to miss out.
So I watched the show.
Is it a 21st century answer to Avatar?
Nope. Not even close. The animation is primitive, the art very cartoonish, and most of the characters were pretty two-dimensional. The target demographic is little girls between the ages of 4 and about 10, and it’s laser focused on that particular group. Unlike Avatar, it doesn’t reach out to encompass a much larger audience through good writing and incredibly strong characterizations. So you have characters with names like Glimmer, Adora, Bow, Perfuma and Spinnerella. There’s a flying unicorn with rainbow wings because of course there’s a flying unicorn with rainbow wings. At least he’s a smart ass, pardon the joke. There’s a lot of BFF swooning and pinkie swears and the like. It’s enough to make you want to throw a hand grenade into the next pack of girl brownie scouts you see.
If that’s all there was to it, I wouldn’t have even bothered past the first couple of episodes, and I’m not about to recommend it to any household that doesn’t have at least one prepubescent girl sharing lock-down. It really has limited appeal outside that demographic.
But it is a good, solid bit of entertainment for that group. The baddies tend to be more interesting than the good guys, but then that’s usually the case of any story-telling venture, up to and including the bible. Catra is an interesting mix between Lady MacBeth and Princess Azula of Avatar. Shadow Weaver starts out as the Big Bad, but morphs into a questionable ally. The real Big Bad is Hordak, who is an alien stranded on their world and wants to either go home, or destroy the world he’s on. Like most beings of pure evil, he’s unsure what evil he wants to do most, resulting an a general miasma of incompetent fury and malice.
And buried under the giggles and pinky swears are some fairly sophisticated personalities. The show has a couple of same sex marriages, a queen with very un-princess like physique, and an satisfactory dynamic tension between the two central adversaries, Adora and Catya.
This is a show that is well done for little girls and nobody else. But insofar as that is what it meant to do, it does that very well.
Now on Netflix.