When the intergalactic slaver Jawbreaker captures Orko for the Slavemaster's mines, Orko's visiting friend Squonge races to the palace for help, but Teela, He-Man and Man-At-Arms hesitate to believe him because of his habit of exaggerating and inventing stories. They investigate anyway, find real evidence that the Slavemaster's ship was in the forest, and Man-At-Arms has He-Man deliberately get captured so he can be delivered straight to wherever Orko is being held. Once inside the mine, He-Man frees Orko and the other captives, and Squonge is left to reckon with how his constant exaggerating nearly cost him the one time people needed to trust him.
In our story today, Squonge learned a valuable lesson. Squonge exaggerated and made up stories, which caused people a lot of trouble. And later, when he needed people to believe him, they didn't. You know, Squonge made up stories to make people think that he was important. And what he learned was, we're all important! Every one of us. Goodbye for now.
John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and Jawbreaker
Alan Oppenheimer as Man-At-Arms and Slavemaster
Linda Gary as Teela and the Sorceress
Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko
Erika Scheimer as Squonge
Slavemaster: "Well, Jawbreaker, I trust that you've brought me a slave superior to that last wretched specimen."
Squonge arrives announcing a crisis, and nobody believes him. That disbelief drives "Orko's New Friend" from its first scene, not a complication bolted onto it after the fact. Shelley Karol and Warren Greenwood's script spends its first act establishing why Teela and He-Man hesitate: Squonge is introduced, via Orko's own fond warning, as a fellow graduate of the Trollan Academy of Magic who has never met a story he couldn't improve. By the time he is hopping across the palace terrace insisting the Slavemaster has taken his best friend, the audience already knows what Teela and He-Man are weighing, and the episode trusts us to weigh it with them rather than announcing the moral up front.
That is the real subject here, a third of the way through once Man-At-Arms has pulled Jawbreaker's file off the palace computer: a true emergency arriving in the mouth of someone with no credibility left to spend. Squonge is not lying about Orko. He is just the boy who has cried wolf so often that his one real alarm sounds like the rest of his stories, and the heroes' caution, reasonable on its own terms, nearly costs Orko his freedom. Few Filmation plots let the heroes be right to doubt someone and wrong about the stakes at the same time, but this one does, and it gives Linda Gary and John Erwin something sharper than generic suspicion to play as Teela and He-Man.
Where the episode spends its animation budget is the mine, and the reused creature designs do real work there rather than padding a scene out. Gleedil and a Lizard Man, both recycled from "Quest for He-Man," turn up as fellow slaves under Jawbreaker's watch, and their presence quietly tells you the Slavemaster's operation is not new, that Orko and the eventual He-Man have simply walked into a system that was already running before they arrived. Jawbreaker himself, goggled and grinning under his bandana, gets the episode's best scene when He-Man deliberately lets himself be captured and delivered as stock: "Well, Jawbreaker, I trust that you've brought me a slave superior to that last wretched specimen," the hooded Slavemaster says, sizing up the hero like cargo, and He-Man's muttered "you don't know the half of it" is the kind of joke this show rarely allows itself, a hero amused by his own disguise rather than grim about it.
The mining robots that chase this plan through its back half are competent, not inspired, action filler, a towering blue-grey design that mostly exists to give He-Man something to punch while the plot catches up to him. The episode is also oddly incurious about its own villain: Slavemaster gets a title, a voice actor shared with Man-At-Arms's Alan Oppenheimer, and almost no characterization beyond running a mine full of slaves, which leaves Jawbreaker, despite being the subordinate, as the more memorable of the two.
What holds "Orko's New Friend" together is that it never lets Squonge off easy, and never punishes him for the right reason either. The closing message, delivered as Orko looks straight at the camera, does not scold Squonge for lying about something small. It scolds him for making himself feel important through stories he did not need, when the people around him would have valued him without any of it. Squonge is going to be fine. Nobody drags him for the mistake; they just make sure he understands why it mattered.
- Continuity: Among the Slavemaster's slaves are the reused character models of Gleedil from Quest for He-Man and a member of the same Lizard Man species. The animation of He-Man's punch, spinning crescent kick and throw tactic was first seen in Quest for He-Man. The kick is also seen on its own in Attack from Below. The briefly seen village and its inhabitants have a much larger role in Monster on the Mountain.
- Voice cast: Jawbreaker, the Slavemaster's enforcer, is voiced by John Erwin, who also voices He-Man and Prince Adam. The Slavemaster is voiced by Alan Oppenheimer, who also voices Man-At-Arms.
- A Shelley Karol and Warren Greenwood script that turns Orko's own habit of trusting a chronic exaggerator into the thing that nearly gets him lost in the Slavemaster's mines for good.
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