Steven J. Fisher

Bill Reed

She-Ra decides to help people help themselves when she hears about the villagers of Devlan being picked on by the wicked Horde robot, Dylamug. Will her optimistic assurance that the regular people of Etheria can be taught the courage necessary to rise up and fight their oppressors prove unfounded and naive? Nah; this is a kids' show!

Princess Adora (She-Ra), Frosta, Broom, Madame Razz, Kowl, Bow, Glimmer, Spirit (Swift Wind)

Dylamug

insomniac Etherian, various Etherian citizens (including harpist, Darius, Darius's wife, Kristala), Horde soldiers (including Orvic, Ursk, Glendos), trumpet bird, Twiggets (including Sprocker, Spritina, Sprag)

Horde auto-reaper, glonders (Horde hover bikes)

It's a noisy night in Devlan. The sound of carousing emitting from the town's tavern is so offensive that regular, non-partying citizens can't get an honest night's sleep. One such pajama-ed sufferer takes himself to the inn to complain about the noise and finds himself confronting a party of Horde soldiers and their leader, the robotic (but still plenty cruel and hedonistic) Dylamug. Dylamug forces the poor man to dance a jig on the inn table, in his nightcap and everything, by firing lasers at his feet. When the innkeeper, Darius, tries to stop the bullying Hordesmen, he gets more of the same treatment - and a pie in the face to boot. His daughter Kristala comes over to give the soldiers a piece of her mind, and for some reason they decide to leave without any further troublemaking.

In the morning, a lovely clear day comes to the Whispering Woods, where Frosta has spent a pleasant evening's visit with her friend Princess Adora. Before taking her leave, Frosta keeps a promise to Sprocker the Twigget by using magic to drape a nearby hillside in snow, so the Twigget can sled down it. Afterwards, Madame Razz attempts to treat the various rebels to a breakfast of eggs, but ends up dropping raw eggs onto everyone's heads, then flattening them with a giant pancake. Fortunately the pancake tastes just fine.

With a meal in her belly, Adora is ready for a morning ride - in the sky, as She-Ra. While she and Swift Wind are taking the air, they spot young Kristala in danger. The girl is attempting to get help for her people by hiking to the known home of the Great Rebellion, but in the process has wandered into a field - and the path of a self-driving auto-reaper. She-Ra lands to bust up the dangerous machine. When she gets an idea of Kristala's mission, she flies the girl back to the rebel base in the Whispering Woods to hear her full story.

She-Ra, the Twiggets, Madame Razz, and Broom listen to Kristala's tale of the persecutions of Dylamug. While Kristala (and, for that matter, the other rebels present) are expecting a full rebel response, She-Ra argues that the villagers will do best if they can learn to fight for themselves. Leaving a message with Razz to impart to Bow and Glimmer on their return, She-Ra heads back to Devlan with her young charge, confident that she can put the fighting spirit into the cowed villagers.

On the way into town, She-Ra and Kristala spot Darius, who had gone out to look for his daughter and been frozen by the approaching Dylamug and his thugs. Defrosting the fellow and carrying him back to the town square, She-Ra arrives in time to overhear the Hordesmen passing an order to the Devlanites to pile all their valuables in the center of the village to be taken away - or else. After Dylamug and his men drive off, She-Ra counsels the gathered townspeople on civil disobedience, but they reply they are all too afraid of reprisals to fight back. Nevertheless, our heroine announces her intention to resist the Hordesmen on their return, with or without assistance.

Sure enough, when the bad guys come to collect their pile of treasure, they find She-Ra waiting to kick some hover bikes to bits, while the Devlanites cower and watch from the nearby buildings. Her Grayskull powers keep her in the game for a while, but eventually a sneak attack from Dylamug brings her down. At this point young Kristala rallies the gathered townspeople, shaming them into finally taking up arms against the soldiers. With their help, She-Ra is able to run the Horde out of town. Bow and Glimmer finally show up, having painfully extracted the name of the beleaguered town from a forgetful Madame Razz, but find that the villagers have already managed to free themselves from their oppressors. Thank goodness for that!

• Kristala: She-Ra, how come a beautiful place like this has to be run by mean people like the Horde? / She-Ra: Well, sometimes things are like that. But if we all work together, we can change things.
• She-Ra: If our rebellion is to grow and succeed, villages like Kristala's are going to have to learn to stand up to the Horde themselves. ... / Madame Razz: She-Ra! Are you saying we're not going to help Kristala's village? / She-Ra: We're not; but I am. And I hope I can convince them to help themselves not to be afraid.
• Dylamug: It is amazing how easy it is to take advantage of people who are frightened. Ha ha ha ha ha!
• Unnamed Devlanite: She-Ra, you've given us back our self-respect. ... When good people stand together, they can work miracles.

• She-Ra mounts Swift Wind and flies off: Just after transforming

One full
Variation - For the first time, the transformation is shown with a Grayskull background painting that includes the open Jawbridge lying at Adora's/She-Ra's feet. This is what will become the standard mid-episode transformation sequence from here on out, so I won't consider it a "variation" after this.

5:23 - Loo-Kee's head can be seen peeking out from behind a tree on the left side of the screen as Sprocker sleds past in the foreground.
Did I spot him? No!

Loo-Kee identifies today's villain, Dylamug, as a bully. He advises us to let our parents or some older person know if we're ever picked on by a bully.

Hordak-less episodes in Season 1
Changing hearts and minds

• One could argue this is the first "real" episode of She-Ra: Princess of Power (POP), since the previous five are just re-edited excerpts of the Secret of the Sword movie introducing the series. This will be the first episode to feature regular components such as the embedding of Loo-Kee and the concluding PSA.
• The air date I've used for this episode (taken, as usual, from a Wikipedia article listing them) puts it weirdly out of sequence with those of the surrounding episodes. This isn't unusual in the world of MOTU, where air dates and production codes seem to travel on entirely different planes of existence; but it seems out of keeping with POP, where air dates seem to largely proceed in parallel with production codes.
• The opening shot immediately establishes the fact that, like Eternia, Etheria has multiple moons. This fact will prove important to the plot of 67015's "He Ain't Heavy."
• Based on the sign out front of the noisy tavern, we seem to be making a quick return to the Laughing Swan Inn, the first place Adam and Cringer stopped on their eye-opening tour of Etheria in 67001. The interior looks the same, and the identical harpist from the Swan is in residence. However, this will prove the first case of blatant recycling in the POP series, since it turns out we're now in Devlan, not Thaymor. Who knows: maybe the Laughing Swan is a chain, like Hardee's! (If it is, they have one in Gailbreth, too; see 67017. We'll see the familiar swan logo yet again in 67030 and 67038 - and many more times after that.)
• The first appearance of the bizarrely sadistic Horde robot, Dylamug. (In fact, this episode is the only one in the first season to feature him.) He's a big boxy fellow who seems to delight in humiliating Etherians. Though he was certainly never released in the original waves of Mattel toys, he was eventually produced as part of the MOTU Classics line. Dylamug's face is divided into three horizontal strips, which apparently were intended to be "dialed" to produce different expressions (along the same lines as Man-E-Faces), though we don't see this mechanism in action in the episode.
• I think Darius, the unfortunate innkeeper at Devlan, looks like the actor Burt Reynolds - at least how Reynolds used to look in 1985, when he was a handsome leading man and this episode aired. Darius's character design definitely varies from that used for the innkeeper of Thaymor's Laughing Swan.
• A couple of regular citizen character models here will be familiar to MOTU scholars; one standard-looking fellow who shows up in the tavern and in later crowd scenes is very similar to MU024's Mallek.
• The soundtrack makes use of familiar themes from MOTU in addition to original incidental music.
• In the SOTS movie, the only Twigget to be mentioned by name was Sprag (see 67001). Here we immediately meet two more named Twiggets, Sprocker and Spritina. All three of these named Twiggets will prove regular recurring characters in the series. Sprocker is a heavyset Twigget making a sled; Spritina is a willowy beauty. Their introduction is followed quickly by the first appearance of Frosta (the first, that is, unless you count her showing up in the opening sequence).
• Just in case it wasn't obvious from her name or the color palette of her outfit, we're shown that Frosta has the ability to produce snow (and presumably other snow-adjacent materials). She also mentions that her home is named Castle Chill. This is the most in-depth information we'll get on Frosta for a long time; she won't appear again until a pair of brief cameos in the back-to-back stories for 67019 and 67020.
• Madame's magic: Seemingly keen to establish herself as not only the inheritor of Orko's ridiculous reputation, but also perhaps in a bid to surpass the Trollan, Madame Razz starts her day by pelting everyone with a salmonella surprise for breakfast - topping Orko's single batch of eggs on Duncan's face in the MOTU pilot. She then buries everyone under a giant pancake.
• Although it probably shouldn't have been a surprise given Cringer's example, I still found myself astonished at the fact, revealed in the opening half of this episode, that Spirit can talk in his un-transformed horse state. This was something that was not clarified in the first five episodes, where Spirit seemed to be a typical non-conversant Earth horse until the "honor of Grayskull" zapped him.
• I'm not sure how unusual this will prove, but note that Adora only gets a few minutes on screen in this episode (from around 4:25, when the character first appears, to 7:55), since she changes into She-Ra for her morning ride and stays that way for the rest of the story.
• Transformation variation: This episode marks a strange difference in the mid-episode transformation sequence, setting it apart from the one we see in the episode opener and in the occasions where it occurred during the SOTS episodes (67003 and 67005). Interestingly, the variation is identical to the one that crept into the ending credits of MOTU partway through Season 2. The background painting of Castle Grayskull that appears behind Adora, which in earlier iterations has been shown with its Jawbridge open but no visible Jawbridge on the ground, gets the flat-painted open Jawbridge seen in MOTU's variant background painting. As I noted in the transformations section, this version of the sequence will now become the regular one seen throughout the remainder of the series, even though it doesn't quite match the one used in the episode opener.
• The Hordesmen who start up the dangerous auto-reaper and then head off to the nearest tavern mention a "Force Captain Kacker," who doesn't appear in the episode but reminds us there are other force captains aside from Adora on Etheria.
• We see Razz and the Twiggets passing the time by playing some kind of board game with cone-shaped pieces. It will be interesting to see whether this game makes a reappearance in the series, like the monster-filled "space chess" seen a few times in MOTU! (Update: nope. This is a one-time appearance by this game, at least in Season 1.)
• Interestingly, young Kristala appears to have never heard of She-Ra, though she's aware of the rebellion - and the same proves to be true of her fellow villagers. This seems to properly place us at the beginning of She-Ra's career, in contrast to prevailing conditions in MOTU, where He-Man and many other recurring series concepts are firmly established from day one. Perhaps this signals the potential for an actual larger story arc, with developing characters and an evolving history! However, consider the contrasting evidence of Frosta, who is shown at the beginning of the episode to have just had a sleepover party with Adora. This marks the pair as good friends, despite the fact that we've never met the ice princess before.
• In similar news, Loo-Kee's ending segment has him introducing himself by saying "it's me again," as though we're already well familiar with the fellow, even though - from the perspective of the DVD sequencing - this is his first appearance in the series. Loo-Kee will from here on out become a regular feature at the end of every episode, first asking the audience whether they managed to find him, then revealing the frame from the episode where he was hidden. He then moves from his hiding place and delivers the PSA. Unlike in MOTU, where the PSA duties were shared out among various characters, POP will leave that function entirely in Loo-Kee's capable, moralistic paws. The one exception: a very special PSA delivered by He-Man, She-Ra, and Orko, to end 67018.
• Are you desperate for more hot Dylamug action? Well, the character will appear twice more in the series, but the episodes won't come until near the end of the second season; and he's as hard to find as Waldo (or Loo-Kee) in his next appearance, in 67087's "The Inspector" (though I'd highly recommend that episode on its own merits). Dylamug's most involved return role will be his last, as part of a group of Horde bad guys in 67090's "Shades of Orko."

• You'd think that a Horde soldier's job would be to boss around farmers to make them clear fields and hand most of their crops over for Horde consumption. Instead, in this episode we see Horde soldiers running their own auto-reapers, and no farmers in sight. It's possible the reaper is just destroying crops as some kind of punitive measure against a recalcitrant farmer?
• The exchange between Kristala and She-Ra, where the little girl asks the heroine why the Evil Horde is in control of their world, is almost a philosophical discussion on why evil exists and bad things happen to good people. (See the transcribed conversation in the Memorable lines section.) It immediately reminds us that POP, with its dictatorship and enslaved populace, will necessarily tell a darker story than MOTU, where the good guys are already the victorious establishment, and the bad guys are the irritating rebels.
• I don't think I'm imagining things or projecting my own already-formed assumptions by seeing some added sophistication and maturity in this series as compared to MOTU. I noted this in particular in the scene where She-Ra announces her intention to convince the Devlan villagers to rise up against the Horde themselves, and not involve the rest of the rebels. Though she doesn't voice it aloud, you can see Madame Razz's doubt over this decision, and sense some differing of opinions among our heroes.
• Dylamug's voice does not remain consistent throughout the episode. In particular the scene where he and the other Horde soldiers confront Darius in the road has some Dylamug lines that seem to be spoken in a gruffer, less robotic voice.
• In one of the scene transitions in the final third of the episode, we see the Crystal Castle, over which the swirling sword of protection flashes in. But the castle is missing the giant ruby-like gem that's usually in its base. In its place is a grayish interior, possibly a doorway with a short staircase. I guess the gem moves aside to make the main entrance? This image will be a common scene transition background, but I found it unusual since it varies from other depictions of the castle. (We'll see this door in operation in 67022.)
• There is a really weird statue in the town square of Devlan. It depicts (very a la Frank Frazetta) a male warrior brandishing a sword, with a scantily-clad female draped over his shoulders. Dylamug melts the statue to prove a point, presumably implying that the villagers produced this dubious piece of art themselves and will be upset at its destruction. But what exactly is this statue supposed to represent? You could be forgiven for interpreting it as a raider engaging in some rapine, because that's what it looks like to me. I guess we were supposed to see it as a hero defending himself and his lady friend? But it's a stretch! (Oddly enough, this memorable statue will make a reappearance in 67042's "Enemy With My Face.")
• Clearly the people of Devlan are hiding a gold mine somewhere, because they amass an absolutely gigantic mound of treasure in their town square. It also seems Dylamug's demand has gotten him more than he bargained for: his men on their compact hover bikes haven't brought any flatbeds, containers, or wagons with which to carry away the treasure. One wonders how they would have solved this logistical problem if they hadn't been so rudely interrupted.
• In the long Filmation tradition of delaying the introduction of secondary character names, we don't learn the evil robot is Dylamug until the final confrontation, when She-Ra names him as though she's already very familiar with the big lug. (Perhaps Kristala identified Dylamug during her off-screen recitation of Devlan's woes?)
• On the other hand, Dylamug himself needlessly throws a bunch of Horde soldier names at us when he orders his men to attack She-Ra, giving us (as transcribed from my DVD captions) Orvic, Ursk, and Glendos. I mean, why bother? They're all about to get exploded.
• The battle with the Hordesmen does bring up a question of whether the soldiers are living biological creatures under those suits of armor, or just robots. Clearly Dylamug is a robot: if his general physique wasn't clue enough, you can see several vacuum-tube-like pieces foresting the top of his gigantic head. But what about the grunts? Will it be safe for our heroine to smash them to bits? It's unclear here - but see the next episode, 67007, in which the soldiers will unreservedly be labeled robots. I have a feeling the humanity of the soldiers will be a recurring, problematically inconsistent issue in the series. Of course, in MOTU and POP, robots are often seen betraying strangely human characteristics (consider the crying Zaktons at the end of MU047, for instance); but it seems particularly odd to imagine robotic soldiers digging into some dessert pies, as they appear to be doing at the beginning of this episode. (Also remember that He-Man was able to dress in a soldier's armor in 67003, something you'd imagine would be much more difficult if it was just the outer shell of a component-filled robot.)
• Animation error: in the final battle, one shot of the villagers huddled inside the inn has the red-headed Mallek clone drawn without eyebrows on his face.
• Bow and Glimmer have to harry the location of She-Ra out of Madame Razz because they didn't hear Kristala's story, having been away from the base for most of the day. So where were they? Out fighting the Horde, or maybe picking up some prescriptions and doing a little shopping? We don't find out. It's also odd that they work so hard interrogating the one senile member of the party, when they could have just asked Broom, who clearly remembered exactly where She-Ra had gone.
• She-Ra's struggle to rouse the very unwilling villagers to fight against their oppressors is highly reminiscent of Adam's attempts to get some local help in overthrowing the villainous space pirates of MU090's "One for All." However, the Devlanites' eventual turnaround proves much more realistic, emotionally effective, and satisfying than that of the inhabitants of MU090's unnamed village. Of course the fairytale ending of this story, with its rejuvenated villagers determined to stand strong against the Horde, remains overly simplistic. A real dictatorship like the Horde would be obliged to exact some very bloody reprisals on the Devlanites after such an uprising, to make them an example to any other village considering similar defiance. This inevitable consequence would prove a dark lesson for the naive She-Ra, rather than what we get at this episode's conclusion: the newbie showing up the experienced rebels Bow and Glimmer with her revolutionary ideas about converting hearts and minds.
• Soundtrack error: At least on my copy of the DVD, as the end credits begin rolling there is a single, loud scratching noise on the soundtrack.