The Beginning Part 1

Years earlier, Captain Randor defends the Council of Elders in the Hall of Wisdom against the warlord Keldor, who is driven off with his face ruined, and the Elders vanish after naming Randor king. In the present, on Prince Adam's sixteenth birthday, a skull-faced villain in Snake Mountain uses a quake device powered by the Coridite Crystal, along with Evil-Lyn's magic, to breach the Mystic Wall. The Sorceress summons Man-At-Arms, who takes Adam to Castle Grayskull, where she tells him he is destined to become He-Man. Adam dismisses it as a birthday prank and leaves, only to find the palace under attack.

Keldor: "It would appear so. But appearances can be deceiving!"

The Sorceress: "A hero shall emerge to protect Eternia."

Skeletor: "So many years, so many failures. But at last, I have the key to success."

Prince Adam: "So this is Castle Grayskull? Could use a coat of paint."

Prince Adam: "Look, I'm no great warrior. I'm just a kid."

Prince Adam: "Talking falcon telling me some crazy story!"

Every origin story has to decide how long to keep its hero waiting, and Dean Stefan's opener makes a bold call: the boy who will become He-Man spends his first episode turning the job down.

It begins years earlier, in the Hall of Wisdom, where Captain Randor warns a council of meditating elders that Keldor's army is moving on the capital. The elders already know. They tell the soldier he will be king, the wall behind them blows in, and the fight that follows ends with Keldor screaming about his face while his warriors retreat. The Sorceress, still only a voice, promises peace "but only for a time" and a hero when the time runs out. The cold open is dense and confident, and it hands us the stakes before the title character has said a word inside the story.

Then the clock jumps forward to Adam's birthday, and the real subject comes into focus: the people who matter in this episode know the danger is real except the boy it is about. The friends around him tell him to work on his fundamentals, and Adam answers that his father and the Defenders drove the forces of evil away years ago, so "They're history." We have just watched that history, scar and all, which gives the line a dramatic irony the script plainly enjoys.

The writing builds the rest of the half hour on that gap. While Adam and Teela trade jousting tricks and jabs, a skull-faced figure in Snake Mountain unveils a quake machine that only lacks a Coridite Crystal from the deepest reaches of the Sea of Rakash. The cutting between the two worlds keeps sharpening the contrast. The palace party belongs to Orko's out-of-tune trumpet and a pudding spell gone wrong; the mountain belongs to a war council. When the device cracks the Mystic Wall, the tremor reaches the banquet and the guests are told it is nothing to worry about. Nobody in Snake Mountain says the villain's name aloud, either, so the viewer is left to connect the skull on the throne with the man who lost his face in the prologue.

The animation saves its sense of scale for the castle. A drawbridge stretches out over a misty jungle, the skull gate opens its jaw, and inside the Sorceress waits on a throne framed by enormous golden wings. After the cramped red tunnels of Snake Mountain, that vast, quiet chamber feels ancient.

Cam Clarke's Adam carries the comedy, and the standout scene is his audience with the Sorceress. Nicole Oliver delivers the history of the wall and the orb with full solemnity, and Adam keeps answering like a teenager being shown a timeshare: "Uh-huh. Okay, thanks. That's great." When she tells him he is the hero, he assumes it is a birthday prank and thanks her for the magic show. A boy dragged away from his own sixteenth birthday party would say much the same, and Clarke makes the reluctance likeable instead of bratty.

The weakness is the exposition. Much of the Sorceress's speech retells the war the prologue has already shown us, before it reaches the Elders and the orb, and the episode's best scene has to pause while she gets through it. The likely reason is practical: a three-part opener has a world to set up for viewers who skipped the first five minutes, and a toy line's worth of characters to walk past the camera. Beast Man and Evil-Lyn get names, but most of their colleagues get a pose and a growl.

It ends on refusal, not transformation, with Adam storming out of the castle muttering about a talking falcon and a shout of "No!" as smoke trails over the palace. Making Adam wait for his transformation was the right call! The Beginning Part 1 is a prologue that knows it is one, and by the end the boy who thought evil was history is the last person on Eternia to find out it was not.

1. Homage: The name Keldor comes from the Mattel minicomic The Search for Keldor, one of the last made for the original toy line, which hinted at a link between Keldor and Skeletor. The He-Man wiki notes this series never ties Keldor to Randor on screen, though a biography on the DVD release made them half-brothers.
2. Continuity: Nobody says the name Skeletor aloud in this episode; the subtitles only tag his lines. The first time it is spoken is his own announcement, "And the name is Skeletor," in The Beginning Part 2.
3. Continuity: The scene in which Keldor actually becomes Skeletor is held back until the second-season episode The Price of Deceit, where the dying Keldor begs Hordak to save him.
4. Continuity: The Coridite Crystal from the Sea of Rakash returns in The Deep End, where Skeletor wants back the crystal that was strong enough to topple the Mystic Wall. (Pick one spelling for both pages.), where Skeletor wants back the crystal that was strong enough to topple the Mystic Wall.
5. Homage: In the Filmation series Coridite was the mineral He-Man's harness was forged from, and the Sea of Rakash had already appeared in the Ladybird books and Star Comics, according to the He-Man wiki.
6. Homage: The Filmation series made the falcon Zoar an alternate form of the Sorceress, the He-Man wiki notes, and this version keeps the bird in the picture: Adam storms out of Grayskull complaining about a "Talking falcon telling me some crazy story!"
7. Fan observation: The stone marker beyond Grayskull's drawbridge turns up at least eight times in the series. Story editor Ian Richter once joked it was the grave of Loo-Kee, but background painter Bill Perkins later said the markers were only meant to warn travellers away, and the 2008 Classics toy line turned the design into He-Ro's gravestone.
8. Voice cast: Nicole Oliver voices both Queen Marlena and the Sorceress, and Garry Chalk doubles Man-At-Arms with Whiplash and the frightened merchant Skeletor interrogates at the site of the Hall of Wisdom.
9. Broadcast: The three parts of The Beginning premiered together as a single feature-length block on Cartoon Network's Toonami, and Wikipedia's episode list still carries them as one entry.