Coslough Johnson

Lou Kachivas

Negator wants Man-at-Arms's latest invention - and Negator won't never take no for an answer - never! Instead, he'll force our heroes to play his "real-life" video game. And Negator never fails to not lose!

Prince Adam (He-Man), Cringer (Battle Cat), Teela, Orko, Man-at-Arms, Ram Man

Negator

fish monster, nerbs, tentacled monsters

sky sleds, Wind Raider

Prince Adam has wandered off to a remote quarry to be by himself and sculpt rocks with a hammer and chisel. He has just brought a napping Cringer with him. Well, and Teela, who butts in to ask what he's doing. Oh - and Orko, who comments that magic is far easier and preferable to sculpting, then flubs a magic trick and ends up with a giant, hideous fish monster in his lap. And oh, right, Duncan is there too! In fact, he just happens to have a new invention, a "beam ray," which can make Adam's sculpting much easier. Handing the boxy device, which has a long thin control wand and a satellite dish business end, over to Adam, Duncan explains its use and the prince instantly carves his rock into a large, somewhat crude facsimile of Orko, which completely terrifies its exemplar.

Man-at-Arms's friends realize that the beam ray has some pretty impressive military potential, and Duncan admits that this is, indeed, the case, and the reason why he is quietly testing it in this remote location. In the wrong hands, it could be very dangerous! Well it just so happens that also at this lonely, remote location where no one ever goes are the representatives of some very wrong hands. A spying pair of hooded figures are hidden up in the hills nearby. They speak to each other in an indecipherable gibberish, then send a message back to their boss, seated in a video game dungeon in some distant location. We know that he has built a game and is just waiting for some victims - er, players - to insert into it. He knows what his buddies, the nerbs, are saying, and commands them to transport him over to the site so he can check out the beam ray in person.

The villain shoots a ray of energy out of his hand and at Duncan's device, which Teela is in the process of testing. This greatly ups its destructive power, causing its beam to plow a tunnel straight through a mountain. While Adam and Cringer wander off to check out the tunnel, the villain approaches the others and introduces himself as Negator, demanding the device from Man-at-Arms. When Duncan refuses (cleverly deducing that the stranger is evil), Negator decides to show off his powers. First he causes a cave-in that blocks off the tunnel. Then he breaks open a dam, causing a flood to head towards Duncan and his daughter. Fortunately, when Adam got trapped in the tunnel he decided it was He-Man time, so when he emerges from the other end and scopes the flooding, he starts right in on a rescue which involves tossing a giant piece of rock. He-Man's rock is too large and impressive for Negator to zap away, so he decides to head for home. Once He-Man has ensured the safety of his friends, they all head back to the palace, Duncan filling in He-Man on this new, deep-voiced, very negative gentleman.

Later, a helmeted guard with some very suspicious eyebrows and a deep, evil-sounding voice knocks on Teela's door and tells her that Prince Adam wants to meet her in the Valley of the Desert (psst - guess what? The guard is actually Negator!). Confused but gullible, Teela heads out alone on her sky sled and gets captured by Negator. The villain then informs Duncan by tele-beam that he has the man-at-arms's daughter prisoner, and demands the inventor come and provide weapons in return for the girl's freedom. With no choice but to obey, Duncan heads off. When Adam can't find Teela, Orko mentions the phony message about the meeting at the desert, and they both notice that Duncan is missing. Time for a second He-Man transformation!

He-Man and Battle Cat grab their most reliable, intelligent sidekick, Ram Man, and take a Wind Raider ride out to the Valley of the Desert, where the trio immediately locate Duncan's ditched sky sled. They are then menaced by a creepy cloud with tentacles, and He-Man decides that the smartest thing to do will be to let the thing swallow him. Since he's He-Man, he turns out to be right: the creature pukes him out in Teela's cell, deep in Negator's game dungeon. Man-at-Arms, Teela tells him, is being forced to work in Negator's lab. Meanwhile, on the surface of the desert, Ram Man and Battle Cat find a more reasonable entrance into the lair, via a ventilation duct. Battle Cat scares off the nerb guards and opens the prison, releasing Teela and He-Man. The heroes then find Man-at-Arms - but Teela and Battle Cat get caught in the same paralyzing energy field that is holding Duncan! Therefore, it's He-Man and Ram Man who are beamed up by Negator and thrown into his maze game. A giant projection of the gloating head of Negator tells them that to win the game, all they must do is find the exit of the maze: something which no one else has ever managed to do!

Ram Man and He-Man brave the maze's obstacles, which consist of giant bouncing balls, mashing doorways, another tentacled beast, a glowing arrow, and some periodic taunts from their gamesmaster. Eventually they come to the center of the maze, where all the obstacles charge them at once. He-Man gets the idea to hop onto the glowing arrow, which he and Ram Man ride out of the maze and into Negator's headquarters, for a final hand-to-hand battle. Negator demands for the fifth or sixth time that his nerb minions "power me!" and they do so to the fullest extent, draining the remainder of their beings into him. His full-charge hand zap is all for naught, or less than naught, however, because He-Man deflects it into Negator's cool video screen. The entire gaming room gets wrecked, freeing the frozen prisoners, and Negator beams himself into his projection equipment, seemingly never to return. The happy heroes, some tired and others hungry, decide it's high time they returned home.

End with a Joke: "Lucky Adam," Teela remarks; "while we were going through all this he was probably at home, playing one of his games." He-Man demurs: "I don't think he likes games as much as he used to." When Teela asks why he would say such a thing, He-Man responds, "Just a hunch."

• Negator: Man-at-Arms, you're amazing. What a waste, using your genius only to do good! ... Nerbs, power me!
• Negator: I am Negator, future master of all Eternia.
• Negator: No one says no to Negator; never!
• He-Man: This is Man-at-Arms's sky sled, all right; but I don't see Man-at-Arms. / Ram Man: That's because he's not here.
• Battle Cat (ruminating on Ram Man's antics): Effective - but dumb.
• Negator (responding to some gibberish from his nerbs): Of course I've let them escape. It's all part of my game plan.
• He-Man (to Ram Man, as they race through the game): Let's hope that's the last problem we'll have. / Negator (watching remotely): No - this will be your last problem.
• Ram Man: Would it do any good if I hollered "help"?

• He-Man jumps on the back of Battle Cat: Just after transforming
• He-Man in battle stance on Battle Cat: After landing from a leap onto a plateau
• He-Man runs away from the viewer: Inside Negator's energy prison; also includes a subsequent runs at the viewer, bug-height
• He-Man spins Ram Man in a circle: To extract Ram Man from a giant ball he rammed himself into

Two full
Variation - In the first transformation, right after He-Man says "I have the power!" Cringer butts in to say, "And I have a headache!"

Brought to you by He-Man
The obvious lesson of this episode (you might think) would be "don't be a sore loser." He-Man takes a slightly different tack, advising his viewers not to get so wrapped up in trying to win a game that they play "too rough" and hurt themselves or others. Easy to say when you're a young white male in the 80s who wins at the end of every episode. (For the sore loser lesson, visit the PSA for MU061's "Pawns of the Game Master.")

Negator episodes: There will be another!
Games and gladiators: One of several entries for this category, in which He-Man and/or his buddies are forced by a villain to play a game or fight in a gladiator-style arena.
Skeletor-less episodes in Season 1

• This looks to be the only episode of the series written by Coslough Johnson. He unites He-Man with another fabulous craze of the 80s: arcade games!
• Adam likes to sculpt! Who knew? In MU062 we'll see Adam trying his hand at painting as well.
• Orko becomes so frightened on beholding the sculpture of himself that the "O" temporarily pops off of his cloak!
• A broken dam is a very common catastrophe in He-Man. There have been several, but this one is most reminiscent of the one the imp Lokus caused in MU024's "Wizard of Stone Mountain." I believe the animation used of the floodwaters is exactly the same.
• The heroes are clearly meeting Negator for the first time (unlike other villains, like Darkdream or Aremesh, who are already very familiar to the other characters when the audience first see them); but Negator can already identify Man-at-Arms, Teela, and Adam by sight.
• Teela is worried about Adam! "Don't worry," says He-Man, "he got out the other end of the tunnel." "That's a relief!" says Teela, completely satisfied and with no desire to follow up on the whereabouts of the royal prince. Ahh; secret identity safe again... At the end of the episode, He-Man risks his identity again by saying knowing things about Prince Adam's personal tastes.
• Negator sends Teela to the "Valley of the Desert," a location we haven't been to before. It looks a lot like every desert in Eternia: once you've seen one...
• For the first time ever, Teela is driving a sky sled that almost runs out of power. Unfortunately, we don't get to learn what is generating that power; Teela just says that the "power source" is getting low.
• Negator is not the first person to realize that Man-at-Arms, with his weapon-building skills, makes a valuable hostage. Trap Jaw realized this just recently, in MU052.
• This is the second He-Man episode in a row (see MU053) to feature two full transformation sequences, usually a rare occurrence.
• Oddly enough, though it seems like it would have been more expedient to use the same one everywhere, there are actually two amorphous, tentacled cloud beasts in this episode. The one in Negator's game has green tentacles and a round mouth ringed with teeth. The one that grabs He-Man and deposits him in the energy prison is a darker gray, with pinkish tentacles, yellow eyes, and fewer fangs.
• Unlike your typical house cat, Battle Cat demonstrates that he has some very precise control over his tail by using it to push the button that shuts off the bars of the prison. We will see something very similar happen again in Snake Mountain, in MU066.
• He-Man makes use of his powerful breath, which I'm not sure we've seen him use since all the way back in MU010, to blow away the "bag of wind" tentacled monster in Negator's game.
• He-Man also makes very good use of his deflection skills, bouncing Negator's full-powered ray off of the power sword and straight into the villain's giant-screen monitor.

• Man-at-Arms was clearly creatively tapped-out when he came up with the name for his latest invention, the "beam ray." Those two words are just synonyms, guy.
• I love the way Negator's little hooded minions, the nerbs, communicate by staring at each other and creating an electric beam between their eyes, which can also be used to "power me!" as Negator says, and teleport him to their location. The nerbs are very Jawa-like.
• This episode brings us one of my all-time-favorite lines of dialogue in the history of He-Man: "No one says no to Negator; never!" It's like a quadruple-negative! ...Yes, it's the simple things in life that bring me pleasure...
• I love how, even though it's incredibly obvious that the guard who speaks to Teela is actually Negator in disguise, he stops in the hallway to remove his helmet and grin wickedly at the camera, just to make absolutely sure we know it's him.
• When Negator dials Duncan up on the tele-beam and shows the man-at-arms that he has Teela imprisoned, we see Teela restrained at her wrists by manacles and chains. However, when the heroes actually find her in Negator's hideout, she is in an energy prison. Did he just think the chains would look more dramatic for the video call? Artsier?
• Part of the price for Negator's hostage was that Duncan bring the beam ray, and after he heads for the desert it's clearly no longer in the desk of his workshop, as Adam notices. But Negator never seems to receive the beam ray: we never see it again, and he never tries to use it.
• Even though Ram Man doesn't appear until pretty late in the episode, I get the feeling that Coslough Johnson really enjoyed writing him. There are several funny, Yogi Berra-ish lines from the hard-headed hero.
• "I have a hunch this will take me to Teela and Man-at-Arms," says He-Man, just before allowing himself to be swallowed by a gigantic tentacled cloud beast. That's some hunch! Boy, would his face have been red if he just ended up getting digested instead. Later, He-Man draws another dubious conclusion based on just as little evidence, when he finds that Man-at-Arms, Teela, and Battle Cat have all been immobilized by some kind of stasis field within Negator's base. "I'm afraid the only way we'll free them is by getting Negator," he states - not even bothering to try his favorite Plan A: smashing the problem.
• For my money, Negator keeps his prisoners far too well informed. When He-Man arrives and questions her, Teela knows not only where Man-at-Arms is being kept, but which button will open their cell!
• When He-Man tries to get a running start to escape from the prison, the animators reuse the stock clip of a character running away from the viewer. But it is in the wrong perspective for the background, making it appear as though He-Man is shrinking as he runs back.
• I think Negator is a fantastic villain. His name sounds like a mix between the Transformers' Megatron and our main villain, Skeletor, but he's not derivative of either. Most actual action figure Evil Warriors in the Mattel line had at least one unusual physical feature to set off their mostly humanoid form - Skeletor's skull face, Mer-Man's fishiness, Trap Jaw's jaw and arm - you get the picture. All Negator has to offer on his person is a weird haircut (his widow's peak goes all the way down to the top of his nose). But he nevertheless has a very distinctive style, a wonderfully deep villain voice, and a lot of really great accessories: his nerbs, his maze lair with all of its obstacles and critters, his energizing ways, his really sweet gaming chair. I can see why they never produced a figure of him but it's a shame! (All this having been said, it should be noted that the look of Negator was likely not entirely original; see the end of the commentary.)
• When Negator forces the heroes into his game, he claims that no one has ever succeeded in winning it; but his data appears to be skewed, because at the beginning of the episode it sounds as if he has just put together the pieces of his game for the first time. Naturally no one has ever won if no one ever played before!
• Negator's game reminded me very strongly of an episode of the fantastic Batman: The Animated Series. The one I'm thinking of is Riddler's origin episode, "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?" In it, irked software designer Edward Nygma eventually traps Batman and Robin in a real-life version of his video game, "Riddle of the Minotaur," which features a maze much like Negator's and a "Hand of Fate": an electric flying hand which Batman reprograms and rides, much like He-Man rides the flying glowing arrow in Negator's game. So who wrote this suspiciously corresponding Batman story? No, it wasn't Coslough Johnson; but it was David Wise, writer of nine episodes of the Filmation He-Man series. Hmmmmmmm.... (imagine me waggling my eyebrows very suggestively)
• We denizens of the future, with access to the internet, know that Negator will return; but the children viewing this episode on its first airing had no idea. So it's surprising that his defeat appears to be very...permanent at the end of this story. First, the nerbs completely expend themselves into nothing, giving all the energy in their bodies to fully power their master and leaving only empty cloaks behind. This without even a preceding proviso that they are "non-living things - like robots!" or something like that. Then Negator zaps himself into his machine, which is completely destroyed, and He-Man says with finality that "you won't have to worry about Negator anymore." Did you... grease him, He-Man?
• There's an amazing theory about the inspiration for Negator's character design, and once you hear it you'll find it hard to deny. I really wish I'd thought of it, but I got this thanks to a member of the MOTU community on Facebook (thank you Chris Mardon!). Here it is: the look of Negator and his nerbs was almost certainly inspired by the Tall Man and hooded dwarves from the low-budget horror classic Phantasm (1979). If you've seen the movie or Google up some shots from it, you'll definitely know what I mean. The Tall Man's swept-back gray hair and wicked eyebrows are almost identical to Negator's, and both villains had little hooded helpers. Such a weird connection - I can only assume one of the animators was a fan!