More from He-Man’s Dean Stefan, part 3

Dean Stefan talks about changes made from the 1980s “Masters of the Universe” to the 2002 “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” as well as fan reaction to the project.

Matt Price: Adam and He-Man are different in this series, much moreso than in the original series.

Dean Stefan: It was a very conscious decision to age him up and to, more importantly, make him different looking from Adam, so it wouldn’t beg the obvious question, gee, they look exactly alike, why don’t his parents recognize him? And even the sword transforms a bit. Even though it’s Adam’s sword it becomes bigger when he becomes He-Man. Part of that was knowing the audience was more sophisticated, our Cartoon Network audience would be a little older. And similarly, we didn’t make Battle Cat/Cringer talk. And that was the big debate among fans, why doesn’t he talk. And we just felt that it skewed a little young to have a talking animal. And similarly, the animators and the sophistication of the animation, we felt like they could express everything a cat would say by expressions. Whereas in the older series, for all its charm, I don’t think they had the luxury of great animation and super-expressive face movements.

And the other big thing that the fans didn’t like was that Marlena, Adam’s mother, was not from Earth in our version, where she was in the original He-Man. To me that was a no-brainer. As soon as you bring in Earth, it begs the question, what time era are we in? If it’s Earth it takes it out of the world of fantasy, into we’re up on another planet, rather this is a universe that exists unto itself.

I think a lot of that stuff, like Marlena being from Earth, came about later in the original He-Man series. … They were making stuff up probably more as they went along, we had the luxury to map it out and figure out an arc for the season.

And also, going forward, we had other arcs that we never got to implement.

Matt Price: What was the fan response to “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe”?