Fraidy Cat

At Snake Mountain, Skeletor sends Whiplash, Mer-Man, Clawful, and Kobra Khan to kidnap Queen Marlena and lure He-Man into a trap. While the court lunches in the banquet hall, Cringer falls asleep guarding Marlena's bedchamber and hides under her bed when Kobra Khan and Mer-Man ambush and abduct her, leaving a false trail for He-Man to follow through the Haunted Forest.

By the time Orko and Prince Adam wake to find both the queen and Cringer missing, Adam transforms into He-Man and heads out with Teela and Man-At-Arms on the wrong trail. Cringer, blaming himself for the kidnapping, uses his nose to realize his friends have gone the wrong way, and he and Orko set off into the Haunted Forest to find Marlena themselves. When Mer-Man collapses a footbridge behind the kidnappers, Cringer and Orko are swept over a waterfall and chased by sea creatures into a tunnel leading straight to Snake Mountain.

Terrified but determined, the pair find Marlena's cell and free her with Orko's magic. Insisting the queen be escorted home, Orko gives Cringer a charm he claims will make him as brave as He-Man, then leaves Cringer to help deal with Skeletor's bionic falcon Screeech while he gets Marlena to safety. Scaling Snake Mountain alone, Cringer's faith in the charm carries him past a threatening ghost and onto Screeech's back, where he disrupts an ambush meant for He-Man and sends the bird crashing just as He-Man and the others arrive to defeat the Evil Warriors.

Back at the palace, King Randor awards Cringer a medal for his bravery, but Cringer insists he couldn't have done it without the charm, until Orko reveals it was never magic at all. Realizing he faced everything on his own courage, Cringer is stunned for only a moment before a passing butterfly sends him right back to his old scaredy-cat self.

He-Man: "Courage and fear are two important instincts." Orko: "And we sould pay attention to both." He-Man: "Sometimes being afraid is just as important as being brave. Cringer: "I guess I was a double fraidy cat." He-Man: "How's that, Cringer? Cringer: "Because I was afraid of being afraid." Orko: "I see... well, how do you feel now?" Cringer: "Oh, much better. Now I'm just afraid of being brave..." He-Man: "Sometimes you just can't win. See you all next time!"

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and Whiplash

Alan Oppenheimer as Man-At-Arms, Cringer, Skeletor and Mer-Man

Linda Gary as Teela and Queen Marlena

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, King Randor, Kobra Khan, Clawful and the ghost

Cringer gets a whole episode to himself here, and the script does something the toy line never quite manages: it treats his fear as real rather than as the joke the name "Cringer" was built to deliver. Battle Cat is one half of He-Man's transformation pair, the muscle that shows up once the magic word is said, but Cringer is the half left standing around for the other twenty-one minutes, and "Fraidy Cat" is the episode that finally asks what that costs him.

The structure does the asking for it. He-Man and the search party spend the whole episode riding the wrong trail on the Dragon Walker. On paper that sounds like a wasted subplot, but it keeps clearing space for Cringer and Orko to be the ones who actually solve the kidnapping. Every scene cuts back to two characters we'd never bet on: a tiger who hides under the bed rather than fight, and a magician whose spells are as likely to set the tablecloth on fire as do what he intends. The episode bets that these two can carry a rescue, and the bet mostly pays off, because Phil Harnage's script builds its theme in the open rather than stating it: courage only means something once fear has been given room to be real first.

Cringer's best material is almost all physical. He flattens himself at the foot of Marlena's bed rather than defend her, and the storyboards don't flinch from how useless that looks in the moment; but the same instinct, scaled up later, is what lets him smell the Dragon Walker's trail has gone wrong when nobody else can. The show is explicit that his fear and his gift come from the same nose. Few of this show's non-human cast members get writing that clean. Orko, meanwhile, gets his own quieter version of the theme: the magic charm he gives Cringer for "bravery" turns out to have no power in it at all, and that reveal lands because Orko himself believes in it before he admits otherwise, so his lie to Cringer is really the same self-doubt dressed up as reassurance.

The standout scene is the bridge collapse in the Haunted Forest. The collapse itself is ordinary stock-footage Filmation peril, but the beat right after it is not: Orko goes over the falls after Cringer without hesitating, with no speech about duty or courage first. It's a sharper piece of characterization than anything said out loud in the throne room at the end.

The weakness is that He-Man's half of the episode barely exists as drama. The search party spends its screen time being wrong, and that part is deliberate. But the show gives Teela and Man-At-Arms nothing to do with that wrongness beyond standing near the Dragon Walker and looking puzzled. He-Man himself arrives at Snake Mountain, fights the Evil Warriors in the time-honored tunnel brawl, and contributes nothing to the actual rescue! The script seems to know it too; Cringer is still in the air wrestling Screeech when He-Man finally shows up. It's a fair trade for a Cringer spotlight, but it leaves the episode's action centerpiece feeling like a formality the show had to clear before it could get back to the theme.

The closing moral beats most of this show's tacked-on lessons, mostly because it arrives as a joke instead of a lecture: Cringer's closing line, "now I'm just afraid of being brave," undercuts the usual straight-faced sign-off and matches the episode's actual argument, that fear and courage are the same muscle used two different ways. "Fraidy Cat" won't make anyone's list of the show's biggest adventures, but as a character study of the creature who has to wait around for someone else's magic sword before he gets to be useful, it's one of the more thoughtful entries in the Filmation run.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved April 16, 1984 and final script revision took place June 18, 1984. Mer-Man's little lookalike allies were named 'Attack Fish' in the script. The original script featured a confrontation between Cringer, Orko and a Werebear in the Haunted forest. A model for the Werebear was designed but never used.
2. An extensive subplot from the script was removed in which Kobra Khan defies Skeletor for not receiving his reward and is thrown into the dungeons next to Queen Marlena. Later, he offers to show Marlena and Orko the way out of Snake Mountain if they release him.
3. Continuity: King Randor and Queen Marlena's bedroom looks different from it's previous appearance in Eternal Darkness. The animated sequence of Cringer's fur standing on end with fright was previously seen in The Curse of the Spellstone. The animation of Orko's shocked reaction was first seen in Teela's Quest and will be seen again in Just a Little Lie and Bargain with Evil. Background elements used for the collapsing bridge scene are reused during a similar scene in Not so Blind.
4. More continuity: The animated sequence of Whiplash striking out at He-Man was first seen in Trouble in Trolla.
5. A Cringer/Battle Cat spotlight. The script treats Cringer's fear seriously rather than as a comedy beat, asking what the cost is of being the more reluctant half of a transformation pair.