Douglas Booth

Marsh Lamore

The spirits of the evil Demos and his queen Tyrella use ancient masks to return to human bodies and attempt to steal the incredibly powerful Sword of the Ancients. Can He-Man stop them before they gain this weapon that, apart from his power sword, is the most powerful in Eternia?

Prince Adam (He-Man), Man-at-Arms, Orko, Sorceress, Teela (PSA only)

Skeletor

robot bird, Aran, Oona, Demos, Tyrella, Aru, Sword of the Ancients

Wind Raider

Adam, Orko, and Duncan are walking through the jungle looking for the lost City of the Ancients, working off of information from the Sorceress as to its location (and hoping to plunder its secrets "for the good of all"). They find it, but are spied upon by Skeletor through the means of a robotic bird. Looking for minions to help him, Skeletor is interrupted by young Aran and Oona. Presumably a brother and sister, they have some magic powers and prove themselves resourceful and spirited enough to gain Skeletor's favor. He sends them off to the city. Our heroes, particularly Orko, wake up some sinister magic that is lurking in the city; but they don't know what Oona and Aran know: there is a basement entrance where the really good stuff is kept. The heroes follow the intruders underground, but are not in time to prevent Oona and Aran from putting on some magic masks they find. The pair are possessed by the last rulers of the city: the evil wizard Demos and his witch queen Tyrella! Seeing this new threat, Adam sensibly decides it is time to turn into He-Man.

Demos and Tyrella put our friends in some major danger by awaking Aru, the protector of the masks. By the time He-Man and company manage to flee the beast, Demos and Tyrella have run off. Our heroes visit the Sorceress, who informs them that the wicked pair must be after the Sword of the Ancients, an incredibly powerful weapon which is stuck in a block of quartz in the basement of Snake Mountain (again, basements are where all the good stuff ends up). Skeletor, all unaware of the prize in his own house, is over-powered and imprisoned by Demos and Tyrella. When the heroes show up, they have to let him out in exchange for learning which way the bad guys went.

It becomes a desperate race to claim the weapon of legend, with Demos and Tyrella using all their magic to try to fend off the heroes. It looks as if Demos is just about to yank the sword from the stone, but He-Man (having dropped his own sword during the fighting) slips in at the last second and with his impressive biceps takes the prize. It turns out the sword can talk and appears to be partial to good deeds. It melds with He-Man's power sword and drops back into his hand - presumably our title character having become even more impossible to defeat than ever. Seeing which way the wind is blowing, Skeletor portals his way out of there. The claiming of the sword undoes the possession of Oona and Aran, who awake very chastened and determined to switch to good. He-Man very charitably offers them a ride to the better parts of Eternia...

End with a Joke: You could, at a considerable stretch, consider the last exchange of dialogue before the PSA a kind of joke ("You're going to like the bright side of Eternia!" "Funny - it seems brighter already"). Otherwise, the best candidate for an ending joke is Orko accidentally vanishing Teela to wrap up the PSA.

• Aran: If it leads to power, no task is too great.
• Demos: Behold! The sword! / He-Man: And by the power of Grayskull, beholding it is all you're going to do.
• Sword of the Ancients: It was foretold that I would join with another mighty sword - and that one has now appeared.

• Skeletor laughs, head back
• He-Man from above, runs to mid-screen and pauses, battle-ready: The opening part of this animation is used to get He-Man in position to catch a falling Orko
• Skeletor shakes his fists, three-quarter view
• A look through widespread legs: He-Man landing near Duncan
• He-Man punches the viewer: More than once as He-Man punches several rock walls
• He-Man runs at the viewer, bug-height
• Skeletor shakes his fists, front on from below: Used to show him holding He-Man's power sword
• He-Man juggles his sword: After the melding with the Sword of the Ancients

One partial (missing Cringer/Battle Cat sequence)

Brought to you by Teela (and Orko)
Teela says when you mess up, you shouldn't cover it up or lie about it - you should admit it. Orko claims with amazing chutzpah that he never makes mistakes; then immediately proceeds to make one by causing Teela to vanish instead of himself. At least he admits he was wrong!

Historians, archaeologists, and digging up old cities: This is the first episode in this somewhat mushy category. We don't meet any official Eternian historians or archaeologists, since it's just Adam and Duncan doing the exploring; but I think it still falls into the category. The next episode in this category, MU032, will introduce us to Eternia's Royal Historian, Hovar; and we will meet Eternia's official archaeologist Melaktha in the memorable MU040.
Evil power couple awakens: This story connects in several specific ways with MU035, under this category.
Everybody deserves a second chance: This category is reserved for stories in which evil characters become good, like Oona and Aran do by the end of this episode.

• In the category of "things that come out of Orko," a hand with scissors comes out of his hat to help clip him out of a tangle of jungle vines.
• One wonders whether the "ancient ones" who built the city are any relation to the "Eternian elders" mentioned by Lyn in MU007.
• Another chance to see Skeletor do some spying via his desktop dome.
• Nice to see some typical Orko hijinks which result in a pot of water upended over Duncan's head.
• Duncan says "Can't you do anything like a normal alien?" which is the first time Orko has been described using such a word.
• An unusual episode in that Cringer and Battle Cat are completely missing, with no explanation given. Maybe Cringer managed to complain so emphatically about having to wander through the jungle that Adam gave up and left him at the palace. (For the record, Cringer will appear in 52 of the 65 episodes of this season.)
• Orko actually has his powers "knocked out" in this episode, after having been zapped by the evil sorcerers.
• Guess what? Duncan thought the Sword of the Ancients "was only a legend." We've heard that before! (See MU002 and MU007.)
• The Sorceress uses her cool viewer window to show the heroes what's up about the Sword of the Ancients. It looks suspiciously like her time corridor from MU003 and MU008.
• We are told that next to He-Man's power sword, the Sword of the Ancients is "the most powerful weapon on Eternia." I have a feeling this will be contradicted by a later episode. (It's a bit of a semantic stretch, but see for instance MU036.)
• Intriguing and tantalizing that Tyrella claims Skeletor "looks familiar." Although maybe it's not that she knew him way back when; she could just spend a lot of time looking at human skeletons...
• Over the course of the series, we'll discover that Skeletor has several exciting things hidden in his basement, not just a magical sword that he knew nothing about. See also MU062 and MU111.

• It's odd that Skeletor requires a robot bird to spy on Adam, Duncan, and Orko, when he seems to spy on them just fine without robots at other times. It's too bad that, if they were going to use a bird, they didn't take this opportunity to include Screeech - the evil bird toy seems to have already been released by this time, though it hasn't yet made an appearance on the show. (For that, see MU084.)
• Skeletor grumbles at the beginning of the episode that he can't ever find his evil warriors when he wants them, and has to settle for the untried Oona and Aran. This is a somewhat contrived explanation for why the more regular minions don't end up wearing the titular masks; but it's nice to see some characters develop over the course of the episode, and turn to good in the end, which obviously wouldn't have happened with, say, Beast Man.
• It's interesting that Oona and Aran say they have "learned much" from Skeletor's other evil warriors, especially considering that he doesn't recognize them. Does he have an evil training program? Are they evil interns? They seem much more talented, honestly, than Skeletor's usual cadre of bumblers, given that they have teleportation magic.
• Oona and Aran's costumes and skin tone give off a distinctly Ancient Mesoamerica vibe, probably to fit in with the general look of the City of the Ancients.
• Demos looks like a particularly sour Amish gentleman with a pepper pot on his head. Tyrella reminds me of the old illustrations of the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. They are formidable enemies and do some cool magic.
• The heroes need the Sorceress to tell them that Demos and Tyrella are looking for the Sword of the Ancients, but the pair mention it before the scene with the Sorceress; He-Man just doesn't seem to have been listening.
• Surely one of Orko's most prodigious acts of foolishness is his attempt to stop Demos and Tyrella by himself: "I'll get 'em He-Man; stop! I command you!"
• Aru is an absolutely awesome creature design, which I would put up there with some of the coolest monsters created for the show. Interesting to note that He-Man never actually manages to defeat Aru - the heroes just escape from the city and leave the critter behind, unharmed. (The design for Aru will be poached to give us the look for Braylok, demon of the night, in MU060.)
• It's charming that, it being obvious that Orko is not going to help in the final battle, He-Man asks the little Trollan to stay behind and "help defend Grayskull."
• It's always great to hear Alan Oppenheimer getting annoyed as Skeletor. He's at his amusing best when he has been imprisoned by Demos and Tyrella in a cage of stone spikes. Watching the evil pair depart by a secret way, he grumbles, "There was never a door there before - what's going on?!"
• Skeletor says to He-Man, "You'll never get through that wall, it's forty feet thick!" Clearly the poor guy has a very short memory: punching through rock is He-Man's specialty.
• Skeletor makes a portal to get down to where the Sword of the Ancients is. One wonders why he couldn't do that earlier to get out of his stone prison.
• When He-Man holds up the Sword of the Ancients he uses the identical pose from his transformation sequence.
• Why does the sword talk? Who knows. I suppose the power of speech helps it to explain what's going on in the scene where it chooses to merge with the power sword - which, by the way, once again recalls the bifurcated sword trick of the toy line (vaguely hinted at previously in MU007).
• As Aran and Oona return and decide they are done with evil, a strangely out-of-place touching piano melody tinkles along in the background.