Larry DiTillio

Lou Zukor

Adam and Teela volunteer to help the fairy folk (AKA Sylani) when they hear the noble Baron Grod the huntsman is looking to bag Eternia's last unicorn. But Grod is too determined to take the magical creature as a trophy to be dissuaded by a raging Captain of the Guard or a peremptory royal whelp. Why, he might even stoop to colluding with ogres to have his way... Better call He-Man - and hope some ironic table-turning will change the huntsman's outlook on life!

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

N/A

Sylani, castle guards, Baron Grod, target assistant, Growler, the Baron's trophies (various wildlife), Gamrack the ogre, other ogres, unicorn

Wind Raider, ogre flying pods, Grod's flying ship

Prince Adam and Captain Teela, along with a typically unenthused Cringer, are gratefully returning a little box to the Sorceress, which she had loaned the king for some mysterious purpose. Before we get to find out what's in the box, the Sorceress is contacted by the Sylani, some tiny fairy folk who inform her that a huntsman is planning to infiltrate their Whispering Valley in search of the last living Eternian unicorn. (The Sylani's job is to protect said unicorn, but apparently they need the Sorceress's help to do their job.) The huntsman in question is Baron Grod, who immediately gets Teela's goat, just by existing. Adam and the Sorceress council the captain to hold her tongue and be diplomatic when she and the prince (and Cringer) go to try to reason with the nobleman, who lives at the edge of the Mystic Mountains.

At the baron's castle, Adam and Teela ask around and find Grod busy shooting at targets, his trusty robotic hound Growler at his side. The baron seems polite enough and invites them back to his main hall, where the heroes see the many animals he's vanquished over the years. The creatures are not stuffed, and they're not even dead: Grod explains that he paralyzes them, to keep them looking life-like and give them a sort of immortality. Teela is disgusted, and even Adam's more measured attempts to convince the huntsman to give up his quest for the unicorn fall on deaf ears. With an angry and very mature promise that he is going to go tell his dad, Adam leaves. A desperate Grod sneaks off to a video screen, where he calls up his buddy Gamrack, chieftain of the ogres of the Mystic Mountains, promising him double the usual pay if the chieftain will take care of the important visitors before they manage to get back to the palace.

Let no one say Gamrack is not an ogre of his word: in the following scene, he promptly shoots down Adam's Wind Raider and takes the trio of dazed survivors captive. Before they can be sent to the ogres's mines for a long and full life of slavery, a quick-thinking Teela topples over a flaming brazier, making a fiery distraction, and Cringer pitches in with a rare courageously helpful move, snatching Adam's power sword before the trio escape into the ogres's underground tunnels. In the commotion, Adam manages to lead his cat away from the Eternian captain long enough to discreetly transform into his hunkier form. He and Battle Cat then trap their pursuers and make a lucky catch of Teela, who was taking a risky walk across a thin log bridge above them. He-Man assures Teela that the prince is perfectly safe... somwhere... and the trio evade the ogres and head back to Grod, sensing that the Baron was responsible for their troubles and sure he is already after that unicorn.

Which of course he is. The Sylani try some prankish tricks to slow the huntsman down, but Grod stuns them and stuffs them in a bag. By the time He-Man and friends arrive and let the fairies free, it's too late: Grod has made his conquest, hobbled the unicorn, and flown the beast home to freeze it for posterity.

The heroes head back to the Baron's castle, accompanied by the Sylani, where a firefight breaks out against Grod's soldiery. Teela single-handedly holds off the few guards while He-Man barges inside. An alerted Grod shows up for the final battle, his dog at his heels. Battle Cat smashes Growler to bits with one blow. Grod tries slowing down the heroes by unfreezing some of his trophy critters, but one of his shots goes wild thanks to some Sylani magic, freeing a nasty horned cat posed right next to him. The huntsman is cornered by his own prey! Teela steps in to save the Baron with her freeze ray, amazing him with her compassion. He is further astounded when He-Man and Teela point out that he has just gotten a taste of what it's like to be hunted. A chastened Grod realizes that the achievements he's spent his life working for are all garbage, and decides to let all of his animals go - even the incredibly rare unicorn he was paralyzing in his basement.

Back at the palace, Adam and Teela relate their adventure to King Randor, who is moved to make a decree outlawing all sport hunting on Eternia. Adam turns to Teela: "Looks like we've done it, Teela."

End with a Joke: "Don't forget about He-Man," says Teela. A wry Prince Adam assures her that He-Man is "one fella I never forget."

• Adam: Cringer, that's very rude. You apologize right now. / Cringer: I'm sorry you live in such a creepy place, Sorceress.
• Cringer: Suppose this Baron decides to hunt me? I'd look terrible hanging on a wall. / Adam: We'd never let anyone hang you on a wall - would we, Teela? / Teela: Oh, of course not. Besides, you'd look better as a rug.
• Sorceress: Reason is always better than anger.
• Grod: As much as I respect the royal family, you have no right to meddle in my affairs. / Adam: And you have no right to hunt down the last unicorn for your own selfish pleasure! As I'm sure my father will agree. Goodbye, Baron.
• He-Man (to Grod): It's not much fun being chased and trapped, is it? / Teela: Now maybe you know how animals feel when you hunt them. / Grod (awestruck with the revelation): I never realized. I've been a fool!

• Adam from above, runs to mid-screen and pauses, battle-ready: About to transform into He-Man in the ogre tunnels
• He-Man picks up and throws a rock: To stop the pursuing ogres
• He-Man jumps on the back of Battle Cat: Just after stopping those ogres

One full
Variation - He-Man has to send the zappy power of Grayskull around a corner to hit a hiding Cringer and transform him. Something very similar happened in MU034, a DiTillio classic.

Brought to you by Teela
The Captain of the Guard reminds us how miffed Grod made her. Despite her own obvious inability to control her temper, she has the temerity to suggest that we control ours. I mean - can you BELIEVE the hypocrisy? It's just outrageous.

Everybody deserves a second chance: Even though his turnaround is ridiculous and contrived, since Baron Grod does change his ways I suppose we have to tag it this way.
Skeletor-less episodes in Season 1
Haven't had enough of jerky hunters?

• It's pretty unusual for Teela and Adam to be at Grayskull, as they are at the beginning of this episode - particularly Teela.
• The Sorceress communicates with the Sylani by means of her all-purpose screen, which in this episode appears to the left of her throne. It's at about the same spot where her identically shaped time window has been in other episodes, and where a convenient map of Eternia happened to be hanging in MU055.
• Not surprisingly, given the similarity of their characters, Baron Grod uses almost the same design as the power-hungry hunter Danavas from MU038's "Valley of Power." One marked difference is that Grod doesn't have the weird black eyeballs that Danavas did. He looks a lot like Kris Kristofferson, around the time the actor starred in A Star Is Born (1976).
• Among the many creatures Grod has frozen in his main hall as trophies is a sort of mountain lion with a single horn on the top of its head. It's the same one that tries to attack Grod at the end of the episode. This creature design was seen before, in MU032's "Search for the VHO," as one of the dangerous critters attacking Eternia's historian family on Selkie Island (though in that episode it also sported a series of spines running along its back). We'll see the creature design doing duty again, as "furlons," in the late episode MU129.
• Baron Grod's lovely, classically shaped castle is identical to the fortress that Skeletor had the primitive Ape Clan of Ancient Eternia building in MU008's "The Time Corridor." And it will appear again in MU122's "Search for a Son."
• Grod tells Gamrack that the Wind Raider that just left his castle is "headed south," which is actually geographically accurate based on the maps of Eternia we've seen (notably in DiTillio's MU034). We know that Grod lives "at the edge of the Mystic Mountains" and according to the maps, the palace lies in a vast fertile plain south of there. Ah, sweet internal consistency!
• Grod promises Gamrack that he will pay him well, "as I always do." Okay, Baron: what the heck are you up to? How many Wind Raiders have you hired shot down? Perhaps the baron also plays the most dangerous game, and has some human prey paralyzed in his sub-basement...
• Adam's decision to try to use full power to break the Wind Raider loose from the ogres's tractor beam has to remind more people than just me of the scene in Star Wars where Han tries full power on the Millenium Falcon to break loose of the Death Star's tractor beam. Right? Right? Neither attempt is successful.
• Teela is mystified when He-Man suddenly appears to save her from a deadly fall in the caves of the ogres. She asks what he's doing there and where Adam is. He-Man uses the typical excuse "Adam's all right" and forestalls other questions by the lucky accident that they are being shot at. But he almost slips up when he reveals his unlikely knowledge of Baron Grod, and is forced to stumble through a very unconvincing explanation. Secret identity safe again!
• The ship in which Grod transports the captured unicorn is, rather unimaginatively, identical to Skeletor's Basher.
• In the ending firefight, Teela makes use of her wrist freeze ray, last seen being used for much more explosive purposes in MU058.
• Another DiTillio script which blatantly omits everyone's favorite royal magician, Orko. Say it ain't so, Larry! This is also the third consecutive episode missing Man-at-Arms. He must be cooking up something extra special in his lab...

• Having gotten almost halfway through the process of writing the content for this database, relying almost entirely on the DVD captions for my name spellings, I'm alarmed at my decision not to follow the captions for this episode. According to the DVD, the title character's name is "Graud" and the fairy folk are called "Salani." Neither of these spellings seem to make sense, and the latter makes the fairies sound like a lunch meat; other sources spell them the way I've chosen to spell them here. It may be that I will have to look around and see whether the original scripts are available for the Filmation series, as that seems the best bet for getting official and accurate character and place names.
• Baron Grod is no relation to DC Comics's character, Gorilla Grodd. You can tell because the Baron is a humanoid and Gorilla Grodd is, well, a gorilla. But it's funny that the purple-clad assistant firing off Grod's targets and running his "paralyzation" process looks a lot like the classic DC Super Friends version of Lex Luthor. Coincidence? I think not!
• Adam is surprisingly rough on Cringer in this episode. He chastises the tiger for being rude to the Sorceress, then yells at his pet again when Cringer leaps on him in fright in front of Grod's robot dog. It's pretty rare to see the prince coming down hard on anybody! (Incidentally, the multiple fun Cringer scenes in this episode perform the important function of padding out the runtime on this fairly simple story.)
• Cringer redeems all the cowardly behavior he's exhibited in the first half of the episode by fetching Adam's power sword from a small cache of what is apparently ogre booty. The other two objects lying near the sword are a rotor that looks like the outboard motor from a powerboat, and a sort of axe-gun which we saw Duncan trying out on Phantos at the beginning of MU005.
• I'd been thinking that these ogre guys were a different bunch than the orcs we've seen in other episodes (notably MU022, MU042, and MU059), but the army of ogres that chase Adam and Cringer through the caves are geared up with suspiciously orc-like armor and helmets.
• I thought one of the things animators did when they designed characters was decide their relative scale to other characters. However, the ogres in this episode seem to vary in height from scene to scene. In the throne room scene, the ogre with the spiky helmet appears to be about the same size as the one with the skull hat. In a later chase scene, Spiky is roughly half the size of Skull. To be fair, there seem to be multiple instances of both Spiky and Skull running around the tunnels, so I guess we can say that throne room Spiky was a different ogre than tunnel chase Spiky.
• Growler's nose extends out from his snout on a thin metal rod, which thrusts in and out. Ewwww.
• Battle Cat's single strike takedown of Growler is totally bad-ass. Way to go, cat!
• Only a children's show could orchestrate such a sudden, complete, and utterly absurd change of heart as Baron Grod's in the ending minutes of this episode. And then there's King Randor's blanket decree, outlawing all sport hunting on the entire planet of Eternia. Well I guess it's nice when your ruling position isn't an elected one, and you don't have to worry about the sportsmen's vote.
• Seriously, though. MOTU stories tend to take very safe, even-handed approaches to topics, but they come down hard against hunting in this one. I can't say that I've ever taken down a buck or run with a pack of hounds, and I question the morality of killing creatures for sport; but I'm surprised that they would take such a solid stance against something that is not universally considered to be wrong. Certainly Grod's method of eternal paralysis leaves quite a bit to be desired. But what about thinning out herds of invasive species? Taking out dangerous, feral predators? And what if Beast Man wants to tear out the throats of a few deers for kicks? Think about poor Beast Man.