Douglas Booth

Lou Kachivas

The hero Fisto tells a story to a young boy he's rescued - a story about his own past, when he used to be downright evil! Listen in as we hear how Fisto learned the error of his ways and stopped messing around with evil spiders, kidnapping elf lords, and forcibly controlling forests.

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

Skeletor

Lad, grazzler, pink dinosaur creatures, female Eternian villager, Rayna, Yarrow (Rayna's father), Rayna's grandfather, Arachna, Elf Lord

Attak Trak

In a sunny part of Eternia (very likely the Evergreen Forest), a young boy climbs out on a tree branch to pluck a dangling fruit. But disaster strikes! The branch breaks, sending him violently to the ground. To make things worse, the injured boy is immediately menaced by a giant bear creature. Is it a grizzly? No! It's a "grazzler," as we learn from comments made by the boy's savior - who turns out to be Fisto. After Fisto has trapped the angry grazzler under a toppled tree (from which the more pacific among us will hope it can eventually escape), he carries the boy away and tends to the boy's injured leg. The boy - we'll call him Lad - is amazed to have been rescued by one of Eternia's greatest heroes, but a modest Fisto demurs, mentioning that in the past he was even what you might call "evil." He offers to tell the story of his change of heart to Lad, providing the setup for the rest of the episode's events.

We segue to a few years earlier, with a young girl named Rayna, who runs up to her family's house to tell her father that the nearby river has dried up. Her father Yarrow suspects the evil hand (get it?) of Fisto, and marches off to mete out justice. A concerned Rayna, who knows her father's limitations, decides that she should really bring this problem to someone better equipped to deal with it - the King and Queen. At the royal palace, Rayna explains that Skeletor has ensorcelled the local Elf Lord and appointed Fisto ruler of their forest (and presumably she also mentions the whole "we have no water now" issue). Randor considers the problem and passes the buck to his son, his son's cowardly tiger, and the only competent one in the room: Teela. Orko appears to inform the heroes that they don't stand a chance; but he nevertheless chooses to accompany them back to Rayna's neighborhood, where they park the Attak Trak to avoid running into any trees and approach on foot. The heroes spot Fisto and his spider sidekick, Arachna, running off with a webbed-up Yarrow, and split up to try to intercept him (with Adam and Cringer sneaking around behind). Fisto sees the heroes coming, however, and has Arachna leave a sticky web puddle to trap Teela and Rayna. Orko, the floating Trollan, is unaffected and runs off to warn Adam, who discreetly transforms himself into He-Man and Cringer into Battle Cat, then arrives just in time to keep Teela and Rayna from being smushed under a tree Fisto has punched over.

The unstuck heroes find their way into the darker, Fisto-controlled part of the forest, where we have seen that Rayna's father Yarrow is webbed to a cave wall, just next to where the Elf Lord lies trapped in a magic crystal ball. Instead of finding that cave, however, our heroes are forced into a tree hollow by some villainous tree roots, which grow to seal them in. Orko's attempts to magic away the roots backfire, with the tree growing even more because it obeys only Fisto. Battle Cat digs a way out of the problem, and the emerged heroes, having been mocked by a wily Fisto, decide to split up: everyone else will go after the villain, while He-Man ... does something else.

The "everyone else" portion of the group tracks Fisto to the relocated river, where he ambushes them. He directs the dammed water in a flood that pushes them into yet another cave, where a latticed door made of logs crashes down to seal them in. Fisto comes over to gloat and accidentally gets himself crushed under a log that he was trying to tie off. He only intended the floodwaters as a temporary tool to push the heroes into the cave; but without anyone to stop them, the waters will continue to rise and drown everyone!

Meanwhile, He-Man was swinging around the forest on what he thought was a vine, but turned out to be Arachna's webline. He engages in a brief tug-of-war with the spider, but then receives a telepathic SOS from Orko! Time to brush off the critter and run off to save his friends. Orko is unable to magic their prison door away because it's made of the trees from Fisto's forest; but the petite Rayna is able to squeeze out between the lattice. She pauses to do what's right and give Fisto the rope to free himself from the fallen log, then hurries off to fetch He-Man back to the watery prison. In the interim, Fisto has had a moral epiphany and decided he should be more like Rayna: helpful and considerate. He assits He-Man in freeing the trapped heroes and blocking up the floodwaters, then leads them towards the cave in the forest where the Elf Lord and Yarrow are imprisoned.

It won't be so easy, however, because Skeletor has been watching the goings-on by crystal ball. Seeing that Fisto has changed sides, old Bonehead calls Arachna over to the ball and gives it a size boost. In their return engagement, He-Man (who has been flung over most of the evil parts of the forest by means of a tree catapult) must battle a much larger spider - but this turns out to be an easy battle, with the muscular male wrapping the creature in its own webbing, then bypassing it entirely to leap into the cave. He cuts Yarrow loose and smashes the offending crystal ball. This frees the Elf Lord, who undoes all the bad things in the forest, and Arachna ceases to be a threat, having shrunk down to normal spider size.

Back in the present day, He-Man arrives to explain to Lad that Rayna's father forgave Fisto when he apologized nicely. The water was redirected, the King officially pardoned Fisto, and he has gone straight ever since.

End with a Joke: Lad thanks Fisto, who welcomes him to let the hero know whenever Fisto can lend "a hand." He-Man breaks in with the obvious punchline pointing out how very large Fisto's hand is.

• Lad: You're Fisto, aren't ya? / Fisto: Yep, that's me all right. / Lad: Wow! You're almost as great a hero as He-Man.
• Rayna: Oh, thank you, Your Majesty; with these mighty warriors to help, I'm sure that - / Orko (appearing out of nowhere to interrupt): Mighty warriors!? None of you stand a chance against a villain like Fisto! / Cringer: M-My-My thoughts exactly.
• Fisto: Only fools want happiness. I prefer power!
• He-Man: Wait a minute, this vine shouldn't be sticking to my hand. ... It's not a vine! It's one of the spider's weblines!
• Rayna (to Fisto): You're a person in trouble and I can help. That's what my father taught me. / Fisto: Why help me after what I've done? Is this a trick?
• Fisto: Free at last! / He-Man: But it's what you do with your freedom that counts. ... / Fisto: And I wanna help. That little girl could've left me trapped, but she treated me like, like a real person! Like, like a friend.
• Orko: Hey, don't forget us! / He-Man (laughing): How could anyone forget you, Orko?

• Fisto laughs, head back: At the "sticky welcome" he has prepared for our heroes; and again later, after agreeing with Rayna's comment about his control over the trees; and yet again at the end of the episode, enjoying He-Man's joke made at the expense of his own physical deformity
• A look through widespread legs: Fisto lands after swinging down to the ground on a vine
• He-Man from above, runs to mid-screen and pauses, battle-ready: When he encounters Rayna
• He-Man swings sword overhand: To destroy the magic sphere

One full
Variation - a very static shot of Cringer sitting politely in the forest is cut in before his transformation sequence

Brought to you by Teela
Teela goes over with us how Fisto started off evil but learned to be good by Rayna's example. It's the Golden Rule: "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." So he got schooled by a child. Heh.

Everybody deserves a second chance: Clearly our hero Fisto deserved a second chance, even though he stopped the village's water and took over a forest; and he gets one!

• The boy in the opening sequence is drawn, clothed, and colored identically to MU049's Thad, who was drawn the same as (though colored differently than) MU042's Chad. This boy is unnamed, but Fisto refers to him generically as "Lad" - which I have named him here, since it amusingly rhymes with the names of his other clones.
• In fact, every secondary (human) character design in this episode is recycled from an earlier character. Rayna, the girl in the flashback, is a double for MU037's Podi (though her clothes are colored differently). Rayna's father and grandfather are oft-seen designs for basic Eternian villagers, notably seen alongside the Creeping Horak in MU007's "Curse of the Spellstone." Even the Elf Lord is a repainted clone of MU034's Treeprechaun, Tullamore.
• The first appearance of Fisto, the hero with the embarrassing name! His toy was released in 1984, as the heroic counterpart to Jitsu, the large-handed villain who mysteriously appeared on the cartoon well ahead of his toy release (way back in MU009). For more Fisto content, see MU128, where through a scheduling SNAFU the hero temporarily subs in for He-Man as the greatest force for good on Eternia.
• In a rare delegating of responsibility onto his son, King Randor actually asks Prince Adam for his opinion when Rayna relates her problem to the royal couple. He even sends Adam out to solve the problem (albeit with the more dependable Captain Teela to back the prince up). We'll see something similar happen in the beginning of MU086's "A Trip to Morainia" and MU120's "Monster on the Mountain."
• This episode was written by Douglas Booth, who seems to have a limited range of themes that he explores repeatedly. He wrote a couple of pairs of episodes that are so similar that they almost seem like different drafts of the same story - one pair of which was alike enough to fall into its own connected category in this database (see MU011 and MU035, of the category "Evil power couple awakens;" or see MU027 and MU023, the confusingly ordered and very similar pair of episodes featuring Orko's favorite uncle, Montork). This episode shares some oddly specific similarities with MU035's "The Sleepers Awaken." Eerily like that story's Lord Tyrin, Fisto is initially a bad guy who eventually learns the evil of his ways, the evil of his ways involves controlling trees, and he has a spider sidekick that keeps webbing people up. In another odd echoing of circumstances, both of these episodes (MU035 and this one) feature He-Man catapulting himself through the air by using a bent tree.
• In the realm of keeping up with the old secret identity: this time He-Man doesn't have to do any work at all to assuage Teela's suspicions, as the captain of the guard happily deludes herself. After being rescued from a falling tree by He-Man, she blithely comments, "Well, it looks as if Adam and Cringer have gone onto the village," not even bothering to ask He-Man about their whereabouts.
• Orko shows some interesting magic abilities in this episode: first, after a good soaking, he is able to wring himself out. A few minutes later he demonstrates a never-before-seen ability to send a psychic message to He-Man, a la the Sorceress! In the end it doesn't seem to do him much good, since Rayna ends up being the one who really leads He-Man back to the heroes for the rescue - but very interesting nonetheless!
• As he has done in other episodes, notably MU013's "Like Father, Like Daughter," Skeletor is working-from-home in this episode, and only appears by a crystal ball video call to cast an engorgement spell on Arachna.
• Arachna's character design will appear again (and give me a lot of trouble attempting to identify it) as a giant spider in MU110 and a "Jawlik" in MU122.

• Like some other He-Man characters, Fisto's voice is given a consistent reverb effect, as though he swallowed a bullhorn. Not sure of the reason for this, except that it easily differentiates him from other characters who just might be voiced by the same actor.
• Rayna's father, Yarrow, is one of those characters who doesn't get named until far too late in the episode, making him mysteriously difficult to identify. According to Wiki Grayskull he was voiced by Erik Gunden (AKA Lou Scheimer), which I'm willing to believe but which is disappointing because Yarrow's voice work is absolutely terrible! Lou (who is the regular voice for Orko and many other secondary characters) usually does a better job. (Listen, for instance, to his emotionally stale and awkwardly pause-laden reading of the line, "Skeletor's spell may have imprisoned the Elf Lord and made you ruler of the forest, but some day we'll defeat you.") I suspect the character's lines may have been recorded by two different actors, as they seem to vary in accent and tone.
• Rayna has a very odd repeated habit - which makes no sense and is therefore hilarious - of holding her hands up, palms forward and fingers slightly curled, when she talks. It looks like the kind of pose a toddler adopts when they are pretending to be a monster (my son did this very thing when he was a toddler).
• The writer seems to have believed that Fisto's giant metal fist by itself was not impressive or threatening enough, as they gave him a spider sidekick that seems to deal out a lot more punishment than the fist, and a magic ball which surrounds the guy in fire and allows him to command trees. Fisto does get around to punching a few things (notably the tree which He-Man has to stop from crushing Teela and Rayna), but not nearly as much as you might think.
• For a short moment when Teela tugs Orko down the hole that Battle Cat digs, the force of her tug takes the Trollan down before his hat. If she had looked to the side before the hat landed back over his head and seen his face, well - I guess she would have had to marry him, or something! (See He-Man's pronouncement at the end of MU020.)
• Continuity error: Battle Cat has to dig the heroes a way out when they get caught in a sort of cave inside the hollow of a tree, which gets sealed off with roots. However when we see the heroes climbing out through the hole, the supposedly sealed-up exit is clearly uncovered again behind them.
• Fisto winds up needing to be saved because a log falls on him. A log from the forest. Over which he has control. In fact, Orko indirectly points out the nonsensical nature of this problem just a few seconds earlier, when he reminds us that his magic powers don't work on wood from Fisto's forest. But surely Fisto's powers should!