Bob Forward

Ernie Schmidt

While sailing on the high seas - err, skies - Princess Adora and her boyfriend, Captain Sea Hawk, are set upon by the wicked Horde Admiral Scurvy. The ensuing battle appears to result in Sea Hawk's beloved ship exploding - along with the Hawk! Too bad the heroic sailor is (allegedly) gone forever, and will never learn what happened to his famous father, the Falcon, a dashing pirate who disappeared twenty years ago and has never been seen since...

Princess Adora (She-Ra), Captain Sea Hawk, Spirit (Swift Wind)

Admiral Scurvy, Squall

pirates (including Swen), Horde soldiers, Davy Jones, Mysterious Stranger (The Falcon)

Solar Sailor, Horde dreadnought (tax galleon), rocket flyers, clipper ship

Sing "Anchors Aloft"! Come on, everybody! It's a lovely day to fly above the oceans in a solar sailing vessel, with your favorite blonde long-lost Eternian princess at your side, and your men cheering you on, singing while they toil. That must be what the great Captain Sea Hawk is thinking as it's happening to him. Adora just thinks he's the bees' knees - the greatest captain there ever was - but the Hawk corrects her: per his own personal scoring system, the best captain, the true GOAT, was the Falcon. A veritable Robin Hood of an ocean plunderer, blessed with an arsenal of magical weapons, this salty swab would rob the goods from Horde tax galleons and give the proceeds to the poor. But the Falcon (by the way, he's also Sea Hawk's father) vanished 20 years ago, and Hawk never knew him. A long-lost father, eh? Well, no chance that today's the day he'll pop up again, right? What are the odds?

Aaaanyway, Sea Hawk boldly professes that he's not the same kind of pirate as old dad, because he does his pirating for profit: as proof, he shows off a giant chest of gold, the result of many years of solid looting, all his. Adora doesn't think he's really all about the money, though, because his actions are aiding the rebellion and hindering the Horde. Whatever his reasons, he gets a chance to prove his prowess soon enough, when First Mate Swen catches sight of what appears to be a fat, defenseless Horde treasure ship sailing in the distance. The keen captain barks orders to his men, sending them rushing to prepare the Solar Sailor for battle. They quickly close in on the enemy; but it's all a trap! On board the Horde ship is the dastardly Admiral Scurvy, compulsively stroking his pet cat Squall and muttering his ambitions to take down the troublesome Captain Sea Hawk and his pesky ship once and for all. Under the admiral's orders, the ship transforms, revealing an armory of weapons hidden under its hull. It's actually a deadly Horde dreadnought, and it's full of Horde robot soldiers to boot! Scurvy orders the cannons to open fire, then prepares a troop of the troopers, riding one-man rocket flyers, off to attack the pirates, who are just realizing they've been had.

Princess Adora decides some superpowered help will be needed in this fight, and runs off to a quiet spot on the deck with beloved steed Spirit to do her transforming thing. She-Ra soon appears on Swift Wind, to Sea Hawk's great relief (though he does wonder where his girlfriend got to), and begins smashing up the attacking robots. She slices a few soldiers off their vehicles; then, changing her sword to a harpoon, she pierces and strings up a whole line of the Hordesmen. The stymied Admiral Scurvy orders the firing of his ship's gigantic stun cannon; but She-Ra deflects that with her sword-shield, and the bounced-back bolt destroys the weapon that fired it. Scurvy is incensed; but he has one more trick up his sleeve, or rather, under his eye patch. It's a laser, and it strikes the Solar Sailor right where it hurts. The earlier bombardment by the Horde ship's guns had already knocked a few ragged holes in the sails and the deck, but this final blast damages the ship's photon converters; it's going to crash! The captain orders his men to abandon ship, and they all crowd into the Sailor's grav boats; but where is Adora? For some reason, Sea Hawk can't find her anywhere, and even though She-Ra urgently assures the captain that the princess is safe... somewhere... he won't rest until he knows she's off the ship.

The exasperated She-Ra sees there's nothing for it, and loops back inside the ship's hold, where she changes herself and her horse back so that Hawk can find them and load them onto the last grav boat. Everyone is now off the doomed ship except for its captain; but the Hawk announces that he has no intention of disembarking. The last of Scurvy's men are even now coming to finish the job, and the captain is determined to lead them away from his men - and Adora. Bidding a fond farewell to his friends, Hawk steers his vessel away from the string of grav boats. Moments later, Swen and Adora watch in horror as the Solar Sailor explodes in mid-air. With tears coursing down their cheeks, the pair bid the captain a sorrowful goodbye: no one could have survived that crash, right? What are the odds?

In fact, as we swiftly learn after a tense scene transition (and likely, in its original airing, an exceptionally mournful commercial break), Sea Hawk did survive. We find him washed up on a beach, strewn with the wreckage of his disintegrated ship. Awaking groggily, the Hawk looks about him and bemoans his lot: his beautiful vessel, gone. He finds his precious treasure chest, but when the captain up-ends the container, he discovers it is now filled only with sand. He's barely mined the depths of his self-pity, however, before a tiny voice upbraids him. Hawk finds that the source of the voice is a mouse, dressed in pirate garb, who introduces himself as Davy Jones. Jones insults his new acquaintance mercilessly and without let-up, even as a Horde patrol approaches, but in the process directs him to a secret door in the rock, leading the pair to safety in some sort of underground lair. When questioned as to the purpose of the lair, Jones gets cagey and declares there are certain secrets he isn't able to divulge just yet.

Within the watery caves, Sea Hawk discovers a beautiful old sailing vessel, long-since wrecked and draped in seaweed. Climbing aboard, he finds a strangely glowing orb which the mouse tells him is a magic compass. Eventually overcoming his own embarrassment at the silliness of it all (I mean, he's already got a talking mouse in his shirt pocket, so how much sillier could things get?), Sea Hawk obeys the mouse's suggestion to request a vision from the compass, and asks it about the whereabouts of his men. The orb instantly displays a real-time livestream of his crew, all safely landed on the shore of an island, with Adora among them. The sailors decide they need to prepare for further attacks from the Horde, and Adora decides it will make sense to wander off and raise her sword in the air. But before she gets any further than "For the honor," Adora finds her sword of protection shot out of her hand! She and the other sailors are surrounded by Scurvy and his soldiers, ringing the rocky heights above them. When the spunky tars brandish their laser rapiers, making it clear they have no intention of going down without a fight, Scurvy orders them all shot where they stand. Thus, after a brief but withering hail of laser fire, they're all left unconscious on the sand!

The horrified Hawk turns from the terrible vision, desperate to run to his crew's rescue; but he's forestalled by the appearance of a mysterious cloaked stranger. The bearded, hooded man growls that the only way the captain will be allowed to leave is if he fights the stranger. Hawk has no desire for a duel; but seeing that the stranger is adamant, he charges. Our captain is a brave fellow, and he fights with a lot of heart, but he really has no chance against this stranger. It's hardly a fair fight anyway, since (as the Hawk quickly discovers) the hooded man has all kinds of magical gear: seven-league boots for hopping to huge heights, an impact ring for hard-hitting punches, and a photon cutlass that changes colors and can cut through anything - even Sea Hawk's inferior laser rapier. Disarmed and defeated, Hawk still refuses to give in, and still announces his determination to save his men. The stranger offers one more inducement to the captain's surrender: a giant chest of gold and treasure. All Hawk need do is give his men up to the Horde, the stranger promises, and he can have all this wealth. Faced with this temptation, Hawk finally has a chance to show his true colors, and he doesn't hesitate for an instant: he tosses the chest away. No treasure is worth the loss of his friends.

He's passed the test! The stranger - and little Davy Jones, who spectated the battle from a safe spot after Sea Hawk removed the mouse from his pocket - celebrate. Explaining that he staged the duel and offered the bribe in order to judge the Hawk's true mettle, the mysterious man lowers his hood, and confirms what the mouthy mouse has already hinted: the stranger is the Falcon, Sea Hawk's long-lost father. (What a shocker, eh? Eh???)

Want to know what happens next? Well, you'll have to wait until tomorrow's episode. TO BE CONTINUED...

• Pirates (singing as one, or thereabouts): We are solar sailors, the clouds are our home, singing anchors aloft. Like the wild winds we roam; we'll plunder for profit 'till the Horde is overthrown! / Captain Sea Hawk (as his men cheer him on): Sing anchors aloft, we'll win back our home; sing anchors aloft, we will win - back - our home!
• Sea Hawk: The finest captain in the world vanished 20 years ago. You remember him, Swen? / Swen: Aye, Captain: the Falcon. ... A great man and a great pirate. He had some wonderful magic weapons, but his greatest strength was in his heart. ... / Princess Adora: Did you know him, Hawk? / Sea Hawk: No. He vanished when I was very young. But I wish I had. He, uh - was my father.
• Sea Hawk: I'm a pirate to take gold, not to give it away. / Adora: Sure you are, Hawk. Then why are you delivering rebel supplies for free?
• Admiral Scurvy: My robots destroyed. My cannon ruined. But I'm not annoyed - nooo. I... AM... MAAAAD.
• Sea Hawk (kissing Adora): That was for not being dead. (Puts Adora bodily over his shoulder, to her dismay) And this is because we don't have much time.
• Sea Hawk: Oh, my ship; my beautiful flying ship. Not enough left of her now to make a toothpick with!

• Sea Hawk runs away from the viewer: Looking for a place to hide from a Horde search party

One full, one aborted
In the second half of the episode, Adora tries to transform for a second time, but only gets as far as saying "For the honor -" with her up-raised sword before it's shot out of her hands by the soldiers of Admiral Scurvy! Exciting.

11:07 - Captain Sea Hawk's beautiful Solar Sailor is disintegrated, the splintered remnants of its exploded hull strewn across a desolate beach. But Loo-Kee don't care! He's smiling out at us from among the wreckage in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
Did I spot him? YES!

Loo-Kee directs us to turn our thoughts back to Captain Sea Hawk's crucial decision in the conclusion of today's story, when the pirate chose his men over a chest full of gold. The elf predicts that, in our own lives, we will also find that friendship is more valuable than treasure. That's mighty optimistic of you, Loo-Kee.

Sea Hawk episode
Love is in the air: Sea Hawk and Adora's affection for one another is on full display in this adventurous tale!
Hordak-less episodes in Season 1

• It's She-Ra's only two-part story! This one is brought to us by Bob Forward, who (as a solo writer, at least) has become one of my favorite POP script crafters.
• If you don't already know and are wondering, yes, He-Man got a two-parter as well; it was the memorable story "House of Shokoti" (MU040 and MU041), brought to us by She-Ra co-creator and most prolific of POP/MOTU writers, Larry DiTillio.
• To my great surprise and amusement, after a martial musical flourish accompanies the title screens, the tune continues and leads into actual singing by the Solar Sailor's crew. It's rare that we get vocals in a She-Ra episode - and often, as with Bow's attempt in 67030, we're left wishing they'd not bothered. This song at least has the advantage of being performed with much enthusiasm.
• Yes, the appearance of the Solar Sailor and a crew of happy pirates means this episode will be graced by the hunky Captain Sea Hawk! The last time we saw Princess Adora's beau was in 67040's "Treasure of the First Ones."
• After the singing is over, we quickly learn that this is going to be another one of those "long-lost" plots, like 67046's "Micah of Bright Moon," where characters coincidentally reminisce about a vanished paternal compatriot who subsequently resurfaces. See also MU098's "Search for the Past." And of course, recall that Adora herself is one such long-lost character who suddenly resurfaced when the time was right (as told in the events of the SOTS storyline, AKA the first five episodes of this season). In today's case, the MIA subject is "The Falcon," the so-called finest captain in the world. Swen sailed under the great man, who had magical weapons and also just happens to be Sea Hawk's father.
• Falcon's back story gives us further confirmation of the very long time that the Horde has been attempting to occupy Etheria (an issue I've discussed previously, and as recently as the previous episode, 67018). Falcon vanished 20 years ago, but before he did, he was robbing Horde tax galleons. In a Robin-Hood-esque move, Falcon would give his loot to the poor.
• This timeline, by the way, also implies that our mate Swen is much older than he looks! Swen claims that he sailed with the Falcon "for many years," and those many years must necessarily have ended at least 20 years ago. If he's 40 now (and he's a very good-looking 40), that means he was 20 when the Falcon vanished. Let's say "many" is 8; that means Swen began sailing when he was 12. Not entirely out of the realm of possibility, but surprising all the same!
• We meet a new Horde villain in Admiral Scurvy, a perfect foil for our heroic captain. He has an evil cat pet to put him in the vein of James Bond's archvillain, Blofeld - or Inspector Gadget's archvillain, Doctor Claw. And in a hilarious touch, he has an old-fashioned eye patch to go over the robotic dome covering one quarter of his head. (Squall, the cat, has an adorable matching eye patch.) In fact, the admiral's seemingly prosaic eye covering is disguising a mechanical and effective weapon, as we eventually discover.
• Scurvy employs Horde captains with the same type of scuba-gear get-up that we saw the evil Octavia's men using in 67040. We also see more standard Horde soldiers riding the rocket flyers already featured in 67031's "The Reluctant Wizard."
• Fool Sea Hawk once, shame on Catra; but fool him twice? We see our pirate captain approach what looks to be a treasure-laden galleon, only to find that it transforms into a deadly Horde dreadnought. But Catra pulled this same exact trick on the Hawk in 67016's "Return of the Sea Hawk," when her prison ship proved capable of shooting weapons and guns out of all of its surfaces (complete with a very silly pre-manned rotating deck gun, a feature we don't see today).
• We recently saw She-Ra being so careful of her secret identity that she didn't want to come out of the same cave entrance that Adora had gone into (67056); today, without a second thought and without finding any better hiding place than an unoccupied portion of deck, Adora turns into She-Ra while on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Hawk is wondering where Adora got to almost as soon as she steps away. This will cause trouble later!
• Swiss army sword: Catching the sailor spirit in the salty air, She-Ra changes her sword into a harpoon with attached line in order to spear a succession of rocket-flyer-riding troopers. When Admiral Scurvy retaliates with a blast from his dreadnought's gigantic stun cannon, we find that She-Ra has already somehow changed her sword into its shield while we weren't looking, so she can reflect the nasty bolt back on its hurler.
• The last time the Solar Sailor went down, in 67040, the very idea of its crashing seemed an unavoidable catastrophe that would cause the seas to boil and Hawk's entire crew to be annihilated. Today, Hawk is much better prepared, and orders his men to some "grav boats" (oddly pronounced by the characters as "grov boats") so they can safely abandon ship.
• We meet another new character in the form of a piratical talking mouse named Davy Jones. He doesn't exactly make a good first impression, since this mouse's schtick is to direct an unremitting tirade of verbal abuse at Sea Hawk, which is even more irritating than Kowl's constant carping at Bow.
• I thought Sea Hawk's laser cutlass, which we've seen him using in all of his previous episodes, was a weapon unique to the pirate captain; but in the second battle against the Horde, we find all his men brandishing the same light-saber-ish weapon. I guess he got a bulk deal?
• Don't worry, the Hawk will also get to use his blade in the closing minutes of this show. In that fight, Hawk's mysterious opponent will identify the weapon as a "laser rapier," and his own - better - weapon as a "photon cutlass." Hawk continues his perfect record here, of being disarmed in every single sword fight he has. Poor schmuck.
• In addition to the photon cutlass, which boasts several colors and settings, Hawk's opponent (oh, who in the world could he be??) has a ton of magical goodies on his person, including seven-league boots and an impact ring. Wow, who did we learn about earlier in the episode that had a lot of magical weapons? Nope; can't remember.
• OK, no, it's the Falcon; obviously the strange bearded man is the Falcon, Sea Hawk's dad. You'd have to be monumentally dense to not have picked up on that (and I hope I'm not insulting my own younger self by saying this; I don't have any memories of having watched this particular story as a kid). It's a moment strangely reminiscent of the big shocker at the end of Empire Strikes Back, when the Falcon finally reveals himself after having beaten the tar out of his own son in a sword fight.
• In case you were wondering, as far as I can tell no official action figures were ever released of either Admiral Scurvy or the Falcon. Boo.

• Today's opening scene was quaintly charming and lovely - almost makes you want to find your nearest pirate ship and sign up, right? Swabbing the deck can't be that hard... But it does make you wonder just what Adora is doing, sailing around with her boyfriend. Is this a vacation for her? Is the Great Rebellion doing so well that her friends in the Whispering Woods told Adora she could just knock off for a few weeks? Sea Hawk, at least, can be seen as supporting the rebellion through his looting of Horde vessels; but what does the princess bring to this voyage?
• Note the interesting moment in the opening battle where She-Ra actually uses her sword as a sword. This is something that she is not usually allowed to do, because slicing and stabbing is bad and was likely considered too violent for 80s TV censors. It's part of the reason why our heroine is always changing her blade into something more useful. But today we see She-Ra swipe her blade down, accompanied with a sparkly burst and the crashing sound of an impact; the camera then cuts to some Horde soldiers plummeting into the sea, having been evicted from their rocket flyers. We don't see them actually struck by the sword, but we can put two and two together.
• Admiral Scurvy makes for a fairly compelling bad guy, if for no other reason that he proves so effective at his job. Though his stereotypical uber-villain look (eye patch, cat) is goofy, the character is definitely not played for laughs. He speaks in a grim, gravelly bass, makes angry, doom-laden pronouncements, and seems to suggest (regardless of the fact that we've never seen him before) that he's always had it in for Sea Hawk, gleefully crying "I have you at last" when he manages to bring down the Solar Sailor.
• Perhaps even rarer than She-Ra using her sword is She-Ra using sarcasm. When Sea Hawk refuses to leave his sinking ship, sure that he needs to go below and locate the missing Adora, the exasperated heroine, for once losing her cool, mutters, "Great!"
• What a dramatic moment when the Solar Sailor explodes - seemingly sending our beloved Captain Sea Hawk directly to Davy Jones's locker! In reality, the explosion merely sends him to Davy Jones, the infuriating pirate mouse; but for a whole commercial break, our young viewers were likely convinced that Adora's true love was toast, and that Filmation had committed the on-screen murder of a heroic character.
• You would think that Adora's earlier carelessness with her secret identity would have taught her a lesson about being more circumspect with her transformations; but no! In her second attempt of the day, Adora doesn't manage to finish saying her magic words, because she's stopped by a laser blast from a Horde soldier. Bad enough that She-Ra won't be able to join the fight; but it also means that our princess didn't adequately check to see whether she was being watched before raising her sword. She's become too complacent! This is a very interesting development, since I've noted in earlier episodes just how easy Adora has had it with keeping her secret (see commentary for 67012, 67058).
• In a scene of even more brutality than She-Ra's earlier sword swipe - though it's handled with the same subtlety - Admiral Scurvy orders his men to fire on Adora and the pirates. We watch as the Horde soldiers on the heights rain down laser bolts, and a subsequent shot shows all our heroes laid flat on the sand, rendered unconscious. And this is after we watched Sea Hawk apparently be blown to smithereens. Yikes! This is a dark story!
• This episode suddenly reminded me of another nostalgic cartoon from my youth, though one much more obscure than He-Man or She-Ra. I'm talking about The Pirates of Dark Water, a Hanna-Barbera production that aired from 1991 to 1993 (though it somehow only managed to have 21 episodes, according to Wikipedia). I remember it as being an amazingly complex, rich, epic, fantasy/sci-fi/pirate adventure series, with fun characters, fantastically creative concepts, and barrels of action. Unlike MOTU and POP, however, I never rediscovered the series in my adult life, and I'm afraid to find how it will have aged were I to watch it again. We'll see! Maybe once I'm done with these series I'll need something else to catalog...
• So why does the Falcon have three different voices? When he's cloaked and fighting Sea Hawk, he has a deep, evil-sounding voice, similar to Scurvy's. When he's picking Hawk back up off the ground, his voice becomes oddly high and robotically distorted. When he finally takes his hood off, his voice changes once again, to a more standard "dad" voice.