He-Man’s Original Cartoon Had A Bizarre (But Strangely Logical) Approach To Violence

If you grew up in the ’80s, the odds are good you watched at least one episode of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” considered one of the best animated shows of all time. You saw He-Man battle Skeletor, you saw Cringer become Battle Cat, but what you did not see was violence, and that was thanks to the very specific rules animators had to follow.

In the ’80s, parent groups raised concerns about violence in children’s programming. Erika Scheimer, a voice actress on the show whose father, Lou Scheimer, helped create “He-Man,” said those groups noticed “He-Man” immediately. “Even before the show hit the air, the interest groups heard the title and started complaining about the violence in the show without ever seeing a single thing,” Erika Scheimer told Syfy Wire. “And I mean, come on, the show had action, but there was no hardcore violence.”

Those complaints meant producers needed to guarantee nothing on the show could be considered violent content. Lou Scheimer had great success with bringing on a children’s programming expert to act as a consultant for his show “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.” Erika Scheimer followed his lead for “He-Man” and reached out to her professor. “When people came around and claimed that “He-Man” was no good and didn’t follow any values, we could point to the fact that we had an educational consultant from Stanford who reviewed the scripts,” she told Syfy Wire.

While having a consultant on board looked good, producers for “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” knew they needed specific rules about what the characters could and couldn’t do in the episodes themselves. Other series later released for young audiences, like the spin-off series “She-Ra: Princess of Power” and the popular fantasy cartoon from the ’80s, “Thundarr the Barbarian,” created their own guidelines to avoid censorship.

In a 1985 interview with the New York Times, producer Lou Scheimer said one of those rules involved limitations on the heroes. “‘We try not to have He-Man hurt any living creature and the good guys always win,” said Scheimer. ”He-Man is heroic but not omnipotent.” And when he says “living creature” he means any living creature.

“Sometimes [producer] Arthur [Nadel] would balk at the weirdest things when it came to action,” said writer J. Michael Straczynski in the interview with Syfy Wire. “On one occasion, he balked at having He-Man hit someone with a tree because it would kill the tree, so the tree had to be clearly and visually dead to begin with.”

Producers came up with several inventive ways around large action scenes without showing any violence. For instance, He-Man carried a sword but mostly used it to deflect projectiles. He fought bad guys but could only punch non-living enemies like robots. When it came to fighting living creatures, Straczynski said Nadel had a solution for that too. “His big thing was to throw the bad guy out of frame,” he told Syfy Wire. “Because once they were out of frame apparently, we never had to worry about them again.”