Dree Elle's Return

On Trolla, word reaches Dree Elle and her little brother Yukkers that Trap Jaw and Clawful have stolen the Horn of Evil. Dree Elle sets off through her Magic Pyramid to warn Orko, with Yukkers talking his way into coming along. Meanwhile on Eternia, Adam, Cringer, and Man-At-Arms are busy fending off a meteor shower over the City of Colmay, with He-Man catching a toppling tower before it can fall.

Orko is delighted to be reunited with his old friend, less so when Yukkers introduces himself with a joy-buzzer handshake, but the reunion turns serious once Dree Elle explains what's missing. The two villains have already reached Castle Grayskull and forced the horn's dark power loose there, weakening the Sorceress, by the time Orko and the Trollans arrive to snatch it back. A chase into the Evergreen Forest follows, where one of Yukkers' pranks backfires badly enough to get Orko captured by Clawful.

Teela and the newly transformed He-Man and Battle Cat join the fight in the forest, where Orko's trick of shrinking the horn into his hat, Dree Elle's quick work with an improvised lasso, and a few of Yukkers' own gags turn the tide against Trap Jaw and Clawful. But the danger isn't over: Yukkers' sneeze sets the horn off again, and its mist conjures a handful of monsters out of the forest itself. Following the Sorceress's telepathic guidance, the heroes find a song hidden inside the horn and, with He-Man blowing the mist back out in reverse, use it to undo the damage and restore the forest to normal.

Back at the palace, Orko gets the last laugh on his young friend, giving Yukkers a hat rigged to soak him the moment he puts it on. Yukkers takes the joke in stride and shakes Orko's hand without his buzzer for the first time, before he and Dree Elle head home to Trolla with the recovered horn.

Orko: "In today's story you saw what happened when Yukkers sneezed and accidentally blew into the Horn of Evil. He was just playing around and didn't mean to do anything wrong, but the results were just as bad. Of course, there aren't any Horns of Evil in your house. But there are many things that can be just as dangerous. Many people have been hurt because they were careless and played with things like knives and matches and glasses and tools. So as He-Man always tells me, 'Playing is fine, but play it safe'".

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam

Alan Oppenheimer as Man-At-Arms, Battle Cat/Cringer and Yukkers

Linda Gary as Teela, Dree Elle and the Sorceress

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, King Randor, Trap Jaw, Clawful, Attak Trak, Trollan and peasant

Erika Scheimer (uncredited) as Dree Elle's singing voice

"That's the old Trollan hat switch, one of my specialties, heh!"

― Orko

Dree Elle warns Orko about her little brother early on, before anything has gone wrong: Yukkers thinks his jokes are funny, she says, and he doesn't see that they hurt people, and someday one of them is going to cause real trouble. It's a throwaway line of dialogue in a story that otherwise looks like a standard two-villain chase, but it's also the episode's whole argument, and we don't see it pay off until the very end. By the climax, it has. Yukkers' prank on Orko, a disguise and a handful of sneezing powder, is what makes him sneeze into the Horn of Evil at the worst possible moment, and the forest fills with monsters because a joke went one step further than the joke-teller meant it to.

That's a sturdier spine than "Dree Elle's Return" usually gets credit for, because the episode spends its first half looking like two stories stapled together. The cold open, Adam and Cringer saving the City of Colmay from a meteor shower, has nothing to do with the horn plot that follows, and it plays exactly like what it is: a few minutes of stock-footage-adjacent spectacle to get He-Man on screen before the actual story starts. Once Dree Elle's pyramid lands in Orko's room, though, Robby London's script tightens up considerably, and the meteor detour starts to look less like padding and more like a deliberate contrast. Colmay is a disaster nobody caused, solved by brute strength. The Horn of Evil is a disaster somebody did cause, and it isn't solved until somebody learns something.

Orko carries more of the episode than the format usually allows him. He grabs the stolen horn back from Trap Jaw and Clawful in Grayskull's shadow, shrinks it down, and hides it in his hat well enough to send the Evil Warriors home with sneezing powder and a bear trap instead, and for a few minutes the show lets him be competent rather than merely decorative. The character design even marks the difference: Orko and Yukkers wear near-identical red robes and masks, down to the same silhouette, with a stray "O" or "Y" stitched onto the hood whenever the show needs the audience to tell them apart at a glance. Two Trollans in motion are hard to read, and Filmation solves it with a letter instead of a redesign. It's a small, practical fix for a real problem, and it works.

The episode's best scene belongs to Trap Jaw, not either hero. Clawful forces the horn on him twice, once at Grayskull and once in the forest, and both times Lou Kachivas' direction holds on his reluctance a beat longer than it needs to, a villain who understands exactly what the horn will do and does it anyway because the bigger villain told him to. When Yukkers later gives him an electric handshake with the buzzer that's been Trolla's running gag all episode, Trap Jaw's shock is the show's one real moment of comeuppance, landing on someone who's earned it twice over.

Where the episode runs thinner is the monster rush itself, the Horn of Evil's mist conjuring a living tree, a stone giant, and a feline beast that exist for exactly one fight scene each before He-Man and company blow the horn in reverse and turn them back into harmless creatures. None of them get a name, a motive, or a second appearance, and the "sing the song written on the parchment" resolution arrives with barely a setup, the Sorceress supplying the fix by telepathy rather than the heroes earning it. It's the kind of ending this show reaches for when the clock is almost out, competent rather than clever.

What the episode gets right, though, is that it doesn't save its own moral for Orko's closing-narration speech about knives and matches. Back at the palace, Orko gives Yukkers a hat that's rigged to dump water on him the moment he puts it on, not out of cruelty but to let the joke land on the joke-teller for once. Yukkers gets it immediately, shakes Orko's hand without the buzzer, and the episode ends on the exact image Dree Elle predicted at the start, a joke that finally taught somebody something instead of just causing trouble.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved May 24, 1983. Final script revision was done June 1, 1983. The character models were finalized on July 25, 1983. In the first draft of this story, the Horn of Evil was called the Horn of Horror and Beast Man was featured instead of Trap Jaw.
2. Animation errors and goofs: Each time the exterior of Castle Grayskull is shown, the drawbridge is open when it should clearly be shut. At one point, Clawful even orders Trap Jaw to use the Horn of Evil to open the drawbridge. In the final scene in the throne room, Man-At-Arms can be heard laughing even though he was not present.
3. Orko and Yukkers wear nearly identical red Trollan robes and face coverings, and the animators mark a stray "O" or "Y" onto the hood whenever a shot needs the audience to tell the two of them apart at a glance.
4. Dree Elle warns Orko early on that Yukkers' pranks will eventually "cause real trouble." The buzzer-handshake gag he plays on nearly every character he meets, Teela included, pays that warning off directly when his sneeze over the Horn of Evil sets the episode's monster attack in motion.
5. Dree Elle, Orko's old friend from Trolla, returns to Eternia with her little brother Yukkers in tow, right behind the Horn of Evil that Trap Jaw and Clawful have just stolen from her home world.