Disappearing Dragons

At the Royal Palace, Orko and Prince Adam are playing a game when Zoar's arrival signals an urgent message from the Sorceress: Granamyr needs He-Man's help. Adam heads for Dragon Mountain at once, bringing Orko along for his first visit to Granamyr's realm of Darksmoke. The dragon lord explains that dragons have been vanishing from the mountain and his own magic can't explain why, so he asks He-Man to investigate, promising to help if summoned by name.

Searching the territory, Mekaneck and Buzz-Off catch Kobra Khan and Webstor using a transporter ray to capture a dragon, but are overpowered before He-Man and Orko arrive. When Orko tries to disable the ray, it malfunctions and teleports everyone except Orko to the alien world of Mero, where Kobra Khan and Webstor flee to the city of the Darmi. Following them, He-Man and his allies find the missing dragons held prisoner and are captured themselves when they refuse to let the games continue.

The three remaining Darmi, the last survivors of a world devastated by war, reveal that Kobra Khan offered them Eternia's dragons for gladiatorial sport in exchange for help conquering Eternia. Disgusted, He-Man agrees to fight their champion, a massive robot called Bellatron, for the dragons' freedom. Back at Dragon Mountain, Orko repairs the transporter ray with Granamyr's help once the dragon lord is summoned.

He-Man's fight with Bellatron goes badly until Granamyr and Orko arrive to intervene, giving He-Man the chance to recover and finish the robot off. When the Darmi try to go back on their word, Granamyr turns them to stone for their role in the dragon theft, while He-Man tracks down and captures the fleeing Kobra Khan and Webstor. Granamyr wants to force the restored Darmi to fight for the dragons' amusement in turn, but He-Man talks him out of it, arguing it would make him no better than they were, and the dragon lord instead spares them and sends his dragons to tear down their arena. Back in Darksmoke, Granamyr thanks He-Man, and rewards an expectant Orko with another run-in with the monster in the bottle.

He-Man: "In today's story we met some people who had a strange idea of fun. To amuse themselves, the Darmi wanted to make the dragons fight each other. Fortunately they didn't succeed. There are no dragons in your world, but there are animals. And hurting or teasing an animal is no way to have fun. Treat your animals with kindness. You'll find that's a lot more fun for you and for the animal. Until later."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam, Granamyr and Webstor

Alan Oppenheimer as Cringer, Buzz-Off and Verdor

Linda Gary as the Sorceress and Kara

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, Mekaneck, Kobra Khan and Bylon

"You take care of Webstor, I've got a little trick up my neck for snake-face."

― Mekaneck

A game opens "Disappearing Dragons," and a game closes it, and Larry DiTillio's script wants the gap between them to do the work. Orko loses to Prince Adam at a table covered in toy dragons and toy soldiers, sulking over a board where nothing real is at stake. Forty minutes later He-Man is standing in an arena on a dying world, fighting for the lives of actual dragons while three immortal rulers bet on the outcome the way children bet marbles. The episode never states the comparison out loud, but it does not need to. It built the comparison into the first scene on purpose.

The Darmi are the better part of this idea. Verdor, Kara and Bylon are not conquerors or monsters in the usual Eternian sense; they are the last three people left on a world that burned itself out in a war the script barely bothers to specify, and gladiatorial gambling is what they have instead of a civilization. "The only pleasure left to us is betting on the games, as our ancestors once did," Verdor tells He-Man, and it plays less like a villain's boast than an old man's confession. Kobra Khan's arrival with a fresh supply of captive dragons is less a scheme than an opportunistic sale, the Mero equivalent of smuggling contraband into a town that has run out of everything else to want. DiTillio does not ask the audience to sympathize with people who cage animals for sport, and the episode is right not to. But it does let Verdor's court feel like the last room of a house nobody bothered to clean up after the fire. That beats a flat evil-overlord routine.

Where the episode runs out of ideas is the middle act, where Mekaneck and Buzz-Off spend a long stretch trading blows with Kobra Khan and Webstor over a transporter ray that exists purely to get the cast from Eternia to Mero. It is competent, well-staged action with none of the thematic interest the opening and closing promise, and the Bellatron fight that follows repeats the same problem in a different arena: a tall white robot swings its fists, He-Man absorbs an energy-draining ray he shrugs off a scene later, and the fight resolves on a single punch that the script has not earned so much as scheduled. Season 2 leaned on gladiator-robot climaxes often enough that we can call this one the formula rather than a surprise. It is the episode's weakest stretch.

Granamyr is what rescues the back half. He spends the cold open being pestered by Orko and a bottled monster gag that exists purely to burn ninety seconds, and it would be easy to write him off as a plot device with a voice. Then the Darmi are caught, and Granamyr's first instinct is to turn all three to stone, and the episode lets He-Man talk him out of it on the simplest possible grounds: punishing cruelty with cruelty does not make you anything but cruel. It is a small moment, delivered without fanfare. It is also the only place the episode's two games actually meet. Granamyr wanted to force the Darmi into the arena they built for his dragons. He-Man talks him into tearing the arena down instead, and the episode's whole argument gets stated once, cleanly, by the characters rather than the narration.

"Disappearing Dragons" never fully decides whether it is a story about a toy-store war game growing up into something with real stakes, or a standard rescue plot padded out with two fight scenes it did not need. The episode works best when it remembers the former and drags when it settles for the latter. Granamyr and the Darmi carry it through the second half regardless, and Mekaneck's one good line to Webstor, "I've got a little trick up my neck for snake-face," is proof the writers' room still had its sense of humor even when the plot was running on autopilot.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved April 6, 1984 and final script revision took place April 18, 1984. At the very start, two Royal Palace Guards are visible in the distance who's armor is based on that of Zodac the cosmic enforcer rather than than the standard Eternian guards. In the script, when Mekaneck spins Kobra Khan around, only his neck was supposed to spin, not his entire body.
2. Kobra Khan's animation model, based on the toy prototype from Mattel, was designed by Marcus Nickerson. Mekaneck does not appear again for another 37 episodes. The Sting Lance weapon used by Buzz-Off was released as a toy in 2018 as part of Super7's line of action figures. It was included with several others that came with a Filmation style action figure of Man-E-Faces. A smaller sized version was released with a Buzz-Off action figure in 2019 that was in the same scale as the original toy-line from the 1980s.[[1]](#cite_note-1) There is no transformation sequence in this episode. Prince Adam becomes He-Man during the first scene intermission.
3. Continuity: Prince Adam's startled reaction was previously seen in Golden Disks of Knowledge and will be seen again in Teela's Triumph. The location of Dragon Mountain was previously referred to as as Dragonmount in The Dragon Invasion. The battle-wagon used by Kobra Khan and Webstor was first seen being used by Skeletor in Teela's Trial. Kara's facial design are reused from Lady Edwina from the episode Creatures from the Tar Swamp.
4. More continuity: The sky backgrounds, as well as some of the physical backgrounds on the planet Mero, are reused from the episode Quest for He-Man.