Phyllis & Robert White

Lou Zukor

He-Man rescues a boy in the Vine Jungle who he realizes is Adam and Teela's childhood friend - David, the rightful Duke of Abra! David has been returned to boyhood and had his memory taken away by his evil uncle, Count Marzo. Our heroes will have to hunt down the inherited Ring of Remembrance and defeat Marzo to restore David to his life and title - let's hope they don't forget anything along the way!

Prince Adam (He-Man), Cringer (Battle Cat), King Randor, Queen Marlena, Teela, Sorceress, Man-at-Arms, Orko

N/A

David of Abra, hunger lily, Count Marzo, Chimera, gargoyle ("fuzzhead," as Orko calls it)

Wind Raider (mentioned only, but clearly used), Marzomobile (unnamed, but what else would you call it?)

Adam and Cringer are hanging out fishing in the Vine Jungle - a great place to meet an episode plot! (Though Cringer dislikes the "creepy crawly things," like moths, which populate the jungle.) Sure enough, they overhear a boy being menaced by a giant hunger lily, so He-Man and Battle Cat rush to the rescue. After violently ejecting the boy from the flower's clutches and tying it up, He-Man gets a closer look at his rescuee and recognizes him as a childhood playfriend of Prince Adam: David of Abra. The boy has mysteriously failed to age since then, and also has no memory of who he is. As Prince Adam, our hero takes this boy wonder to the throne room to show off to Teela and the royal couple, who all confirm his identity but are just as confused as to his lack of maturity and knowledge. Adam makes a lame excuse to the assembled company and has a telepathic chat in a side room with the Sorceress, who gives him the skinny: David should be Duke of Abra, but his evil uncle Count Marzo put some mojo on the kid and took away his ducal signet, the Ring of Remembrance. To fix David, they will need to track down the ring.

Given this information, Man-at-Arms is able to use his wacky Eterno-Scope to track down the location of the ring: the Lake of the Lost. Due to local magnetic conditions, the approach to the lake will have to be taken on foot: a journey which is undertaken by the boy's childhood friends, Teela and Adam (with Cringer along for some helpful complaining). Marzo, who is just as good at spying on Heroic Warriors as other Eternian villains, sees them coming and sends his imposing lackey, Chimera, as an obstacle. Adam claims he will "find a way around" the creature and runs off with Cringer, to be replaced seconds later by He-Man and Battle Cat (pure coincidence, I'm sure!). Fortunately, He-Man knows the one thing that will stop the Chimera using his main talent of teleportation, and that's to imprison him within the very crystal rocks that dot the area they are currently walking through. Convenient!

Meanwhile, our clever Count is covering all his bases, because he's gone to the palace to capture his nephew. He brings along a gun filled with the amnesiac vapors from his "Well of Forgetfulness," and uses it on poor Man-at-Arms. David is in the process of playing hide and seek with Orko, and has helpfully placed himself in a portable pot, so that Marzo can just put on the lid and tote him out of the palace. Orko witnesses all this happening (finding that Man-at-Arms's amnesia is not cured by a failed disappearing act from the court magician) and decides to hop in the Marzomobile so he can ride with the villain back to his fortress. At the castle, having released the boy from the pot, the Trollan sees the Count head off again to the Lake of the Lost, accompanied by a raincloud which will impregnate the lake with the forgetful waters from the well. Promising David that he will bring help (we assume - otherwise he'd just be ditching the kid!), Orko runs off to warn our heroes, with the escort help of a gargoyle-type monster that he charms into being his (temporary) friend.

Orko arrives at the lake just as the forgetful rain falls into it and Teela and He-Man pull up on Battle Cat. The Trollan is about to shout a warning when his friendly spell wears off and the gargoyle dumps him into the lake, giving him amnesia. Teela and He-Man, hearing their friend continuously ask who everyone is and what his own name might be, put two and two together and decide not to go have a swim. Instead, He-Man drains the entire lake by removing the one rock which was holding it in place. They find the entire exposed lakebed is dotted with rings (that Count Marzo is a clever dog!). Luckily, our hero's power sword is magnetized to the memorio metal that makes up the true Ring of Remembrance, and pulling out the weapon causes the ring to be drawn right over. He-Man then handily whips the lake back into place and uses the ring to restore Orko's memories, and the heroes head to the Count's castle to rescue David.

At the castle, the Count continues to prove himself a formidable enemy by throwing various obstacles in front of our heroes. A freezing fog separates Teela and Orko from He-Man and Battle Cat, and completely encases the blonde barbarian and his feline in a block of ice. Teela and Orko make it to David but are trapped in a magical prison by Marzo, requiring a self-defrosted He-Man to rescue them. He-Man uses his old deflection trick on Marzo's magical attack, which dissolves the prison, and a freed Teela trips Marzo with her bolas, causing him to tumble into his own well. Having forgotten that he is evil, Marzo is no longer a threat, and the heroes are free to return to the palace. Teela restores her father's memory, and Prince Adam, having reappeared without any explanation, puts the ring back on David's finger, causing the boy to be restored to maturity and his memories. He gratefully thanks his rescuers.

End with a Joke: Orko is glad that everyone has their memory back, but there's one thing he'd prefer Duncan still forget: his failure to make himself disappear earlier. The Trollan is sure he has the trick figured out now, and casts the spell again. This time it puts a grid of lines all over the magician's body. "Oh well," says an abashed Orko, "does anybody want to play checkers?" And they all laughed...

• Sorceress (to Adam, setting up the entire plot of the episode): The boy is David of Abra, whom you played with as a child. His people were keepers of the Ring of Remembrance... but just as he reached the age when he would become Duke of Abra, his evil uncle, Count Marzo, cast a spell that reverted him to childhood, with no memory of who he really is... The spell cannot be removed until the ring is recovered.
• Adam (to Teela): You really didn't need to come along. / Teela: David was my friend, too. / Cringer: I never even knew him. How come I've gotta come along?
• Man-at-Arms (not particularly angry, just sounding tired and defeated, when a shower of Orko's playing cards fall on him): Why me? Why is it always me?
• Orko: You can't hide from me! The Great Orko sees all, knows all.
• Man-at-Arms (rather dazed since he's just been zapped with an amnesia gun and been forced to watch Orko mess up a magic trick): That's very interesting. But silly.
• Marzo (sounding surprisingly indecisive and equivocal about his trio of prisoners, Orko, Teela, and David): I think I will keep you three in there, possibly forever.
• Teela (in a strong case for nurture over nature, observing an amnesiac Marzo's behavior): He's forgotten to be evil.

• He-Man from above, runs to mid-screen and pauses, battle-ready: To save a boy from a hunger lily
• He-Man punches the viewer: Somewhat ill-advisedly punching the lily
• He-Man picks up and throws a rock: To drain a lake
• He-Man in battle stance on Battle Cat: After blowing away some fog
• He-Man juggles his sword: About to face Marzo

One full, one partial
Variation - in one of his shortest transformations, Adam lifts his sword and says the first line of his magic words, we see the energy begin to surround him, then: cut!

Brought to you by He-Man
Taking a bit of a leap from the circumstances of today's story, which vaguely had to do with water and bodies of water but had nothing to do with swimming, He-Man instructs us on swimming safety. There's no danger of losing your memory when you take a dip on Earth - but you could drown!

Count Marzo episodes: Surprising as it may be, given his condition by the end of this episode, the Count will return! Because this episode is about people getting amnesia, I'd like to put it in the "amnesiac He-Man" category shared by MU019 and MU031; but since He-Man remains unaffected by memory loss in this episode, I guess we have to leave it out. This is, however, a...
Skeletor-less episodes in Season 1

• This is not the first time we've seen or heard about the prince fishing. In MU006 Duncan's memory projector reveals that Adam has wasted his morning fishing, and in the much more recent MU056 he intends to use the iron vine that he finds in the forest for fishing. Given Cringer's established obsession with fish, it makes sense!
• Queen Marlena states that Teela and Adam played together with David when they were all eight years old - establishing that Teela and Adam are the same age. This turns out to be a rather important little factoid in determining Prince Adam's current age. We learned in MU006 that Teela was a newborn the last time Bakkull was summoned, which was exactly twenty years ago. This means both Teela - and Adam - are about twenty years of age in MU006. If we assume that every subsequent episode of the series occurs at some point after that story, well, they are only getting older! (It's possible that Adam's birthday is a few months after Teela's, which could mean that on the episode that features his birthday, MU072, he is turning 20. But he can't be any younger than that, if we're to take these other facts into account.)
• The story that Teela tries to tell to the child David about the ball going through a palace window is very much like the setup for MU037's "It's Not My Fault," but in reverse: in David's story, he nobly owns up to hitting the ball so that Duncan's wrath won't fall on Teela, while in MU037 Podi runs away to avoid getting in trouble for the same thing.
• Interesting that Adam just walks into the next room to psychically contact the Sorceress about the problem of David. The more usual practice in a story would be for him to ride all the way off to Castle Grayskull to talk to her in person. Now that's starting to seem like a waste of time!
• In the realm of doing a poor job covering your secret identity: in order to have that chat with the Sorceress, Adam just awkwardly says: "Um... if you'll excuse me," and walks out of the throne room. Real smooth, Prince. Later, when he and Teela are confronted by Chimera during their journey, Adam simply says "I'll find a way around" and walks off, to be replaced seconds later by his alter ego. Despite having had no idea where he was for all the intervening time, nor having evinced any curiosity about his disappearance, Teela is totally unsurprised to find Adam safe and sound in the palace at the end of the episode.
• Duncan reveals to his amazed audience that Eternia has an orbiting imaging satellite, dubbed the "Eterno-Scope." (This almost sounds as if he has pre-invented the Sky Spy we'll hear about in the Christmas Special.) It allows him to detect the previously unheard-of element "memorio," of which this episode's MacGuffin, the Ring of Remembrance, is made. Niiiice. You can always trust MOTU to use the most obvious names possible.
• When Duncan is locating the ring on his scope, we get a view of the planet from space, looking surprisingly different from how it is usually painted in opening or closing establishing shots. The background-painting Eternia appears to consist of one vast supercontinent surrounded by one giant ocean. In the Eterno-Scope, we see three separate chunks of land, two of which are large continents, one a small island. I'm willing to admit that planets have more than one side, and it's possible the Eterno-Scope is (for the first time) showing us the far side of Eternia.
• Just like Skeletor and other He-Man villains before him, Marzo spies on the heroes by magical means. His visions appear to spawn within a sort of spiral ball.
• The Well of Forgetfulness has the power to summon... a forgetfulness gun?! Okay...
• Orko tries to make himself vanish, which he believes will somehow jog Duncan's memory of him, and only succeeds in vanishing the lower half of his robe. At the end of the episode, when he tries again, he instead makes gridlines appear on himself. His most amusing failed magic trick is when he tries to open David's prison door and instead fastens an extra lock on it.
• Teela mentions that "Crystal Mountain" lies along the path to the Lake of the Lost. This makes us wonder whether she, Adam, and Cringer are travelling through the Crystal Sea of MU006 (which, might I remind you, is Mer-Man Country, and should also be crawling with shadow beasts). The terrain is rather similar.
• Marzo has an impressively large henchman who it is eventually revealed (in the typical fashion suggesting that we knew his name all along) is "the Chimera." He is a tall, grayish, humanoid critter who wears a roomy loincloth and appears to be sporting a close-cropped afro - interesting look. He shows the ability to easily teleport, until He-Man traps him. Chimera will appear in the other Marzo episodes as well, though he will inexplicably look very different - see MU112 and MU122.
• He-Man's ridiculous power display for this episode: he runs around the rim of the transplanted Lake of the Lost until it whirls up into a sort of water spout, which he then runs on over to the lake's original location. This power is similar to his whirlwind-making and -reversing skills, seen in MU030 and MU050, among others.
• Teela makes use of her wrist weapon, which is usually a freeze ray (see MU001, MU013, or MU034) but in this episode is used to knock down a prison door.
• He-Man breaks his sword out of the ice block he's trapped in so that he can use it to channel "the power of the sun." He also uses the power sword as a magnet, showing that it has more uses than a Swiss army knife.
• He-Man uses his super breath, last seen in MU054, to blow away Marzo's freezing fog.
• He-Man's good old sword deflection skills are in helpful evidence as well in this episode, as he ricochets a single bolt of Marzo's magic back into a magic prison, freeing the other heroes.

• It's great that He-Man came to save the boy being menaced by the hunger lily, but couldn't he have found a way to release him that didn't involve flinging him through the air? Not to be picky, but child endangerment is not cool, He-Man.
• It's He-Man who rescues and meets David, but Prince Adam who brings the boy to the throne room. So... how did he make the switch without revealing his secret identity to David? Did He-Man duck into the bushes to take a whiz?
• It's cool that Adam is able to get all the necessary information on David's back story from the Sorceress; but how does he convey that information to Teela and her father without giving away his mystical connection to the keeper of Grayskull? Hmmm.
• Confusingly, when the Eterno-Scope zooms in on what Adam calls "the Lake of the Lost," it closes in on what appears to be the middle of an ocean - weird place to put a lake!
• One has to wonder whether it was Orko or David who determined that the Trollan would count to 10,000 for their game of hide and seek. Or maybe it was Duncan - to ensure he had more time to himself!
• It's another case of Eternian home invasion! This time the culprit is Marzo, easily infiltrating the interior of the royal palace in the form of a glowing ball to mess with his woebegone nephew.
• I love how we subtly see how much of an egomaniac Marzo is through his penchant for monogramming everything: his summoning gong, his Marzomobile - even a door handle seen near the end of the episode is marked with a huge, fancy "M." It's too bad that the count's sweet ride, the Marzomobile, won't show up in his other MOTU appearances, where he makes use of stranger looking vehicles, when he uses them at all.
• Orko was literally in Marzo's prison with the kidnapped David, and he literally escaped. Why oh why did he not take the kid with him? It would have removed the whole need for everyone returning to the castle at the end of the episode!
• "That crystal is the only thing that stops the Chimera," He-Man claims, after having quickly boxed in the lackey with a series of perfectly-cut rectangular prisms of crystal. Does he have a Pokedex hidden in that chest harness somewhere?
• He-Man can't go into the lake to get the ring, or he'll get amnesia. A student of Occam's razor, he chooses the simplest and most obvious solution: drain the entire lake! Much easier than asking Orko, who already has amnesia, to pop into the water and fish it out. True, it turns out that Marzo has seeded the lake with hundreds of phony rings - but He-Man's solution for that reveals that he didn't even have to go into the lake in the first place, since his power sword magnetically attracts the right one without him having to step into the lakebed at all! If he'd just pulled out his sword to begin with, he wouldn't have had to pull his absurd "vacuum" trick to put the lake back.
• "We shouldn't disturb them anymore than necessary," says He-Man of the fish from the displaced Lake of the Lost - then he very likely kills them all by lifting the entire lake and all of its fish into a giant tornado-shaped funnel.
• It's very convenient that David's clothes grow with him when he returns to full size at the end of the episode; but it would have been less unsettling if they hadn't remained quite so... form-fitting. Put those pecs away, man!
• "The ring," says grown-up David, "it will restore my people." It will do what, now? Are his people trapped somewhere, and/or also suffering from mass amnesia? I don't remember the Sorceress saying anything about that...it does make a kind of sense, though, since otherwise they would have raised a bit of a fuss over their rightful duke having gone missing.