Lee Robert

Bill Reed

Our heroes go digging around in an ancient city and wake up some very touchy robot guardians. Just when our friends seem to have convinced the robots of good intentions, Trap Jaw wades in to ruin the ruins!

Man-at-Arms, Teela, Cringer (Battle Cat), Orko, Prince Adam (He-Man), Sorceress (by psychic vision only)

Trap Jaw

Professor Smallen, Zaktons (including Kappa), Eternian guards, great bird

Wind Raiders

In an unnamed, ruined city in the Sands of Time, Man-at-Arms and a Professor Smallen are busy looking for buried treasures. Well, the professor is; Duncan is busy testing his Converter, which produces from sand and chemical ingredients a very unpleasant-looking pile of brown stuff which he claims tastes wonderful. Smallen calls Duncan's attention to a box he's found, which when opened reveals an ancient book in the old Eternian language. The professor radios up Captain Teela so he can read it out to her and get it translated by their "lango-computer;" but before he can begin, an army of robots emerges from hidden doors placed all around the room! The robots are clearly in a tizzy over what they perceive as a pair of looters messing with their stuff. They zap the radio, cutting off communication with the palace.

Back in the radio room in Eternos, Teela is worried. She rushes off to go help her father, too occupied to explain her departure to a passing Prince Adam, who has to get the news from one of the guards manning the radio. The guard points out a storm they're tracking which is approaching the ruins, so Adam decides to run and assist Teela in navigating (it so happens that the captain has been giving him lessons in handling just this eventuality). Even though Cringer claims he's feeling queasy from an Orko-conjured green apple he recently ate, he is forced to join the insistent prince and Teela in the Wind Raider, and they head off into the storm.

It's a rough one! Even with Adam assisting, Teela can't hold the Raider on course, and the vehicle crashes in a cave. Cringer rouses the prince, who finds himself pinched into his seat and his female companion unconscious. To extract himself and aid Teela, he transforms into He-Man, changing his cat while he's at it. He-Man is big on muscle but not on medicine, so he transmits a telepathic SOS to the Sorceress, who sends him a giant bird. The bird, apparently, is going to heal Teela through an all-natural regimen of staring and flapping. He-Man and Battle Cat leave the bird to its task, and try to find Duncan and the professor.

Unfortunately, the storm is still raging outside, and our heroes get caught up in it. The wind forces them to cling to columns amid the ruined city. He-Man realizes that the presence of ruins implies hollow ground underneath (for some reason), so he marks out a big circle in the sand with his sword, tips up the ground, and shoves the storm clouds inside, neatly re-sealing the opening afterwards. Let the NOAA take note!

All this time, Duncan and the professor have been trying to convince the ancient robots, called Zaktons, that they mean no harm and are just there to catalogue the relics. The suspicious Zaktons time-freeze the professor (he ends up looking like a Scooby-Doo character who's been covered in flour) and attempt to do the same to Man-at-Arms; but he cleverly fools them by ducking, and in the ensuing melee two of the robots crash into one another. Duncan hops up to assist the damaged Zakton. He is temporarily zapped and frozen for his troubles, but this is just so that the robots can get his tool kit. When He-Man arrives, he finds Duncan crouched over the damaged robot, whose name is Kappa (the ancient Eternians, in an incredible coincidence, having also developed the Greek alphabet). Our man-at-arms assures the big lug that the robots will only attack if they feel threatened. Their memory banks tell them He-Man is a good guy, so he's safe.

Bring on the threat! You see, back when the Wind Raider crashed, a nosy Trap Jaw was watching on his radar screen, and decided to go "pick up the pieces." Locating the cave, he patiently waited for Teela's healer bird to finish up and flap away, and then showed up to disarm Teela and tie her up. He arrives in the ruins with his hostage and fires at He-Man and the Zaktons, demanding He-Man and the others as a "present for Skeletor." Rather than negotiate for the release of his hostage, Trap Jaw just ends up getting into a fight, and Battle Cat frees Teela by nibbling her bonds. Duncan convinces the Zaktons to time-freeze the villain, and He-Man totes him off to the prison mines (time-freezing also makes the victims float horizontally, for easy transport). The professor is, conversely, time-thawed.

Teela and Duncan finish repairing Kappa and fully win the trust of their new robot friends. The Zaktons even conduct a tour and try to give away one of their treasures as a gift to Professor Smallen, who instead insists that all the artifacts stay in place, but go on display for the people of Eternia to come visit and enjoy. Promising to return to make this dream a reality (and hopefully provide some company for the very lonely antique robots), the professor flies off with Man-at-Arms, and Teela returns to the cave to find Adam and Cringer - who seem to have missed all the excitement - just finishing repairs of the crashed Wind Raider.

End with a Joke: As the heroes fly home, Teela begins telling the events of the episode in a fragmentary fashion, as Cringer and Adam exclaim in amazement at each new disclosure. "Trap Jaw!? Robots?!" Dig that dramatic irony, baby.

• Professor Smallen (of Teela): Oh, smart girl, that one. / Man-at-Arms: Of course; she takes after me.
• He-Man (sorrowfully): Teela, if only my powers could make you well and strong again.
• Zakton: You are our enemy; why would you want to help an old robot? / Man-at-Arms: I'm not an enemy. I'm a man of... of science!
• Zakton 1: All who came before you came to rob and plunder. / Zakton 2: We must protect the treasures.
• Adam (sarcastically, though it's hard to tell, to Cringer): Thanks for all your help. / Cringer: I'm very good at supervising. / Adam (more obviously sarcastic): So I've noticed.

• He-Man jumps on the back of Battle Cat: To start heading to the ancient ruins; later, used in reverse to show him getting off Battle Cat
• He-Man juggles his sword: The beginning of the animation, pre-juggling, is used to show He-Man preparing to defend himself
• He-Man from above, runs to mid-screen and pauses, battle-ready: Confronting Trap Jaw

One full
Variation - In an interesting variation, Adam performs his transformation with his lower body trapped in the front seat of the Wind Raider. The animators felt they couldn't show the part of the clip that has Adam standing with his whole body visible, so instead they point the camera at Cringer and we infer the transformation. He-Man is also shown only briefly, without the normal energy glow surrounding him and clearly still stuck in the Wind Raider, just so we can see him turn the power sword at Cringer.

Brought to you by He-Man
He-Man urges us to turn off the dang TV and go to a museum, because they are storehouses for knowledge. Knowledge (he claims) is more valuable than money and can also bring you "the power," a concept with which he's very familiar.

Historians, archaeologists, and digging up old cities: Another one for this category; one I'm glad I came up with, as it's seeing a lot of use!
Skeletor-less episodes in Season 1

• This is the only He-Man episode written by Lee Robert. I don't know exactly what that signifies, except that it's rather unusual: most writers we've encountered so far have at least a couple of episodes to their credit.
• Professor Smallen finds The Book of Ancient Eternia, which is written in "the ancient language." Possibly he means the ancient Eternian language that Orko had to magically translate in MU008's "The Time Corridor."
• Teela is back at the palace manning a "lango-computer," presumably capable of translating other languages that are spoken aloud. Noyce.
• We're introduced to a new room in the palace, where Teela has been communicating with Professor Smallen and her father. Orko calls it the "radio room," and it's being manned by Eternian guards. The weird thing about it: the room is lined with large windows which appear to face out onto solid rock. Nice... view? Also, when Adam asks where Teela is, Orko says, "She went up to the radio room," which should mean it's in a tower somewhere, and not underground. Hmmm. (We'll see the radio room again in MU049, and its backgrounds will be used often, eventually being subsumed under the vaguer and larger auspices of Man-at-Arms's laboratory/workshop.)
• This episode again takes place in the very popular Sands of Time, also the site of MU040-MU042. We'll visit here again in MU050!
• We see definite evidence, merely suggested in previous episodes, that the palace has a fleet of multiple Wind Raiders.
• Teela has taught Prince Adam to "plot coordinates without sightings," which turns out to be very useful in this story. Lucky!
• In an unusual use of his powers, He-Man psychically asks the Sorceress for wisdom matching his strength, so he can heal Teela. Instead, he gets a big bird, which stares intensely at Teela until she feels better.
• When He-Man leads a time-frozen Trap Jaw away, he again makes reference to the "prison mines," which is where Trap Jaw was headed after he was caught last time, in MU042. Clearly they're revolving door prison mines...
• Teela is shown again to also be proficient at repairing technology, something she was particularly good at in MU013's "Like Father, Like Daughter."
• Guess what? We're not done with Professor Smallen! The character will reappear in MU072's "The Great Books Mystery." As for the Zaktons, we'll see their design used again at the end of MU052, and Duncan will make a passing reference to them in MU113.

• "Looks terrible, but it tastes good!" says Duncan of his food, generated from a mixture of sand and chemicals, and which looks exactly like poop. It's a little hard to understand why Duncan's Converter appears in this episode; usually gadgets like this have some obvious use later in the plot, but aside from producing some momentary curiosity in the robots, this one doesn't do much.
• The Zakton robots remind me of the much larger "Mega-Maid" from the movie Spaceballs (1987). Or how about this: they also are reminiscent of an even more contemporaneous toy line, Ideal's 1984 Robo Force figures. Robo Force, I find, while not as profitable as the He-Man property, has proven itself almost as persistent. It has been sold to a couple of different companies over the years but rebooted toys were still being sold as of 2021. (Oddly, the Ideal toy company has come up before in this database; see my discussion of rubbery spider toys in MU035.)
• Some of the Zakton voice work makes them sound like Kermit the Frog pretending to be a computer.
• Professor Smallen looks like Albert Einstein. Not sure if this is intentional or not.
• This episode touches on an area which seems to have become more sensitive in today's society: namely the appropriation of other cultures's relics by Western powers and museums. The Zaktons are understandably upset that the treasures they've been guarding for a thousand years are getting rifled through by these Eternian intruders. Smallen claims they are merely "cataloging," but one has to wonder if he'd really have stuck to just that, if a bunch of aggressive robots hadn't just popped out of the closets. Ironically, by the end it seems our heroes have completely converted the Zaktons on this score, and are planning to display all the treasures for everyone to see - though it seems this proposed exhibition will be happening on-site (the middle of the desert seems like an inefficient place for a museum, to say the least) rather than in some more populated Eternian venue. The Eternians will prove much more tone deaf to these cultural considerations in later archaeological episodes, notably when He-Man goes rifling through ancient temples in MU066.
• Adam and Teela manage to crash the Wind Raider, facing out, several yards into a very narrow little cave. I'd like to have seen how they managed that!
• "These are ruins," says He-Man; "there must be caves underneath." Ummm... why?
• He-Man has done plenty of, let us say, unlikely things. One might argue we'd reached the pinnacle of idiocy in last episode's exploding of the moon (MU046); or perhaps you might prefer to rank his reversal of a shrinking royal palace in MU010 higher on the scale. For me, the top so far just might be his shoving of an entire storm into a hole in the ground, which we watch He-Man do in this episode. However, for perhaps his most insanely overpowered feat, see MU091.
• The Zaktons have a real Keystone Kops moment when they are going after Duncan with their time-freezing rays. It's very obvious that Duncan has just ducked down behind the only visible hunk of rubble; however, the robots are completely flummoxed by his evasion (perhaps all that time in closets has taken away their sense of object permanence), and blunder about in search of him until two of them manage to collide head-on.
• I was amused by Teela's awkward interaction with the great bird, once she's been healed. "You can... you can leave now, if you want," she stammers. The big bird, who has no dialogue, slowly nods.
• We get a really interesting moment when Duncan tells the robots that the big hunky stranger who just showed up is He-Man. "He-Man," remarks a Zakton, "friend to all. It is so recorded in my memory, old as it is." Just think about the implications here! These robots have been around for a thousand years; they are "antiques," as Smallen noted earlier. Unless their memory has been updated very recently with current events on Eternia, or they woke up to destroy some plunderer in the past few years who happened to tell them about He-Man (both of which scenarios seem highly unlikely), their information on He-Man is incredibly old. And unless Queen Marlena stopped aging when she landed on Eternia and just hung around for a few centuries, and/or Eternian princes age much slower than human ones (again unlikely, especially based on the approximate age of childhood playmate Teela as implied in MU006), that means He-Man has existed in some form before Prince Adam has. I think we can deduce from this little nugget of information that He-Man as an entity is like a title or inheritance that gets passed on from person to person over the centuries. This is the first time this idea has been suggested in the show. It alone would make this episode worthy of the "dealing with Adam's secret" category, if it weren't for the fact that I suspect the implications of the Zakton's comment were entirely unintentional on the part of the writer. For further ruminations from me on this subject, see MU073 commentary.
• In the scene where Duncan is repairing the busted Zakton, he abruptly stands up and we discover that the scale of the characters is completely wrong. In earlier scenes, the robots were about Duncan's height, if not taller; in this shot, he appears to tower several feet over their heads.
• Just to compound the scale bloopers, when Trap Jaw appears just after the error with Duncan's height, the villain's multi-purpose arm is drawn far too long, with a pole extending out his laser gun. If anything, Trap Jaw's metallic arm usually appears stubby, even stubbier than the one his action figure had.
• Trap Jaw has a defenseless hostage in the form of Captain Teela, but he does nothing to capitalize on it. When he arrives with his captive and finds the other heroes, he simply opens fire, making no attempt to negotiate a deal in exchange for releasing the girl. This very same failure to be sufficiently evil happened in MU015's "A Beastly Sideshow," where Skeletor seemingly forgets that he has Teela as a bargaining chip to influence He-Man. (See next episode, MU048, too!)
• For robots, the Zaktons seem a surprisingly emotional bunch. They appear downright angry that people keep robbing their stuff, they are sensitive about their age, concerned for each other's well-being, and at the end of the episode one even sheds a real tear! "We want you to return," declares the weepy robot. Clearly these guys are lonely; so why do none of the Eternians invite them back to the palace? The Zaktons have learned to be less anxious about guarding their possessions, so surely a small party could bring themselves to go visiting and maybe make some new friends. It's possible that for some reason the Zaktons are tied to their city and cannot leave, though this is never stated explicitly. That, or Duncan just doesn't want a gang of trigger-happy robots hanging out in his workshop. Orko is bad enough! (Ironically enough, we WILL see Zaktons in the palace, during the PSA of MU052 - but I don't think we are intended to remember them as Zaktons. They are just used as some machinery for Man-at-Arms to be tinkering with before he imparts the lesson. Duncan doesn't just forget about the Zaktons, however, since as noted previously, they are still on his mind in MU113.)