The Dragon's Gift

Skeletor disguises himself as Ambassador Therin of Eastfen and visits the Royal Palace bearing a jade bust as a gift for King Randor. Man-At-Arms recognizes a sword hidden in Skeletor's disguise and grabs the bust before Randor can touch it, but it shatters in his hands, and the curse hidden inside, the Weird of Crystal, turns Man-At-Arms into a crystal statue. Teela fights off the unmasked Skeletor, who flees once He-Man and Battle Cat arrive, and He-Man and Teela rush to Castle Grayskull to ask the Sorceress for a cure.

The Sorceress tells them the Weird of Crystal predates Grayskull itself and is beyond even her power to undo, but she points them toward Granamyr, the mightiest of all dragons, who might know how to break it. Bound by an old pact with the Dragons of Darksmoke, she cannot simply tell them where he lives, so she sends He-Man and Teela to the royal library instead. There He-Man works out, from an account of the friendship between Ice Trolls and dragons, that Darksmoke must lie somewhere in the Ice Mountains, and the pair set out to find Granamyr and plead for Man-At-Arms's life before the statue crumbles for good.

Teela: "Today He-Man had to decide whether or not to chop down a tree. Now, the trees around you probably don't speak the way Skytree did. Or if they do, we haven't learned to hear them yet. But trees are living things. And when you respect a tree, you show that you care about all life. Life is a wonderful, precious gift. Learn to enjoy and respect it and you'll be a happier, better person for it. Bye for now."

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

Alan Oppenheimer as Skeletor/"Ambassador Therin", Man-At-Arms and Battle Cat/Cringer

Linda Gary as Teela, the Sorceress and Queen Marlena

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as King Randor, Skytree, Royal Announcer and unnamed Ice Trolls

"Granamyr does not fight humans, Granamyr wins."

― Granamyr

Granamyr spends most of "The Dragon's Gift" refusing to be impressed. He-Man and Teela cross the Ice Mountains, fight through a pair of trolls, and announce themselves at the mouth of his lair. His first response is boredom. He has heard He-Man's name on the wind and does not think much of it. That stance, not the Weird of Crystal or the trip north, is what this episode is actually about. Larry DiTillio, in his first sold script for the show, is less interested in whether Man-At-Arms gets turned back from crystal than in what it costs a dragon who has given up on humanity to trust two of them again.

The setup borrows its mechanics from a dozen other episodes: Skeletor in disguise, a cursed gift, a race to Castle Grayskull for an answer the Sorceress cannot give. But DiTillio uses the familiar shape to get somewhere specific. Granamyr tells He-Man why he has stopped helping people, and the reason is small and ugly: a thousand years of humans who "barged into my home," begged, and never once said thank you. It sounds like something a person would say about a neighbor, not a line written for a children's cartoon dragon, and it reframes the rest of the episode as a test. Are He-Man and Teela any different from that thousand years of ingrates?

Granamyr sets the test badly on purpose. He does not ask for gratitude. He asks for Skytree, the oldest living thing on Eternia, cut down and burned in his fire pit out of spite for a tree he resents for being older than him. It is a cruel, almost childish demand, and the episode trusts the audience to see through it before He-Man does. The strongest material in the back half belongs to Skytree itself, animated as a slow, patient face in a canopy of impossible roots. Skytree turns out to have its own history with the Man-At-Arms line, and it offers itself up anyway, unafraid of He-Man's sword, convinced the debt is worth paying. Tullamore the Treeprechaun, introduced as comic relief with a pack of wolves at his back, gets to be the one character in the forest who actually weeps when Skytree accepts its own death, and the beat lands harder than it has any right to in a show this brisk.

He-Man and Teela's refusal to go through with the bargain is the obvious choice for a 1983 Saturday morning show, and the episode knows it. What it earns is the scene after. Granamyr does not relent because he is moved by a speech; he relents because two humans walked back into his lair empty-handed, by the letter of their bargain owing him their souls to the Realm of Demons, and told him the truth instead of making something up. The dragon's actual gift is not Skytree. It is the fact that someone finally kept a promise with him even when breaking it would have cost nothing visible. John Erwin's reading of Granamyr sells the turn, dropping from theatrical menace into something quieter, almost embarrassed by how much the gesture means to him.

The episode's weakest stretch is the detour that gets everyone there. The Ice Mountains sequence, with its field-downed Wind Raider, an Ice Hacker, and a pair of trolls who exist mainly to be iced over and left behind, runs long for what it contributes. It burns screen time before the real conversation starts, and a tighter script could have cut the detour by half without losing anything. Once Granamyr is on screen, though, the writing does not waste a line. Even the closing palace scene, usually the most disposable minute of any Filmation episode, pays off the running gag of Cringer's cowardice by having him decline, with real feeling, an invitation to meet the dragon himself.

"The Dragon's Gift" is not the flashiest entry in the run, but it is one of the more thoughtful ones. Its arc belongs to a character who never crosses paths with Skeletor at all, and the show is better for trusting a dragon's bad mood to carry the whole episode.

1. Behind the scenes: Elements from this story were adapted into a mini-comic titled Dragon's Gift, written by Michael Halperin and illustrated by Alfredo Alcala, that came with several Masters of the Universe action figures. In the comic version, Granamyr was colored green instead of the red version seen in the Filmation cartoon. When Mattycollector announced a toy version in 2012, fans were able to vote which color the dragon would be released in. The red version was chosen, but a green version was also eventually released as a 2016 Power-Con exclusive figure. Writer Larry DiTillio originally created Granamyr and the Ice Trolls for a 'Tunnels & Trolls' role playing game module for Flying Buffalo Inc. called 'The Isle of Darksmoke'. Script was approved on March 22, 1983 and final script revision was finished on July 13, 1983.
2. "The Dragon's Gift" was the first script Lawrence G. DiTillio sold to Filmation, which led to him being appointed staff writer on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Tullamore the Treeprechaun is named after Tullamore Dew, an Irish whiskey.
3. Continuity: Skeletor is disguised as Ambassador Therin from Eastfen. The kingdom of Eastfen will be mentioned again by Man-At-Arms in Bargain with Evil. Elements from the Rotoscoped sword fight were used again for a sparring session between Prince Adam and Man-At-Arms in The Return of Granamyr, a fight between Teela and a Space Pirate in One for All, a sparring session between Teela and Man-At-Arms in Teela's Triumph and a sparring session between Teela and Adam in The Games. The animation of Skeletor falling down was used again in Return of Evil. The comical sequence in which Cringer tries to hide around a corner during the transformation sequence was reused by writer Larry DiTillio in The Huntsman.
4. More continuity: The Royal Library used here by Teela and He-Man was again seen in House of Shokoti Part 1. The character model for the Ice Hacker w reused as the giant Snow Beast in'He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special. When Granamyr first appears, he was scripted to say 'Who dares call my name'. Although the line was deleted, the great dragon can still be seen mouthing the words. Tullamore's character model was reused as the Elf Lord in Fisto's Forest. A background plate featuring Skytree and his surrounding forest is briefly visible in The Games. The character model of the Ice Hacker can be seen as part of the Keeper's menagerie in The Heart of a Giant.
5. Animation errors and goofs: When Man-At-Arms discovers Ambassador Therin's true identity, the shot of the King and Queen's thrones is flipped, making each appear to sit at the opposite side to where they are normally seated. During the sword fight between Skeletor and Teela, the cross-boned hilt on Skeletor's sword disappears between the wide-shot and the two-shot. Several people enter the throne room through the same entrance. When Battle Cat jumps in carrying He-Man on his back, they are smaller in size compared with the others that came in earlier. At Castle Grayskull, when The Sorceress says "Teela, I will guard your father", it switches from a wide shot of The Sorceress and the crystal Man-At-Arms in the background to a close-up of Man-At-Arms. However, the stalagmite in the background remains the same size (the same background is used in both shots). When the Sorceress spreads her wings to send He-Man and Teela away, part of the feathers on her right side are missing. However, they are all there in the next shot. In the Royal library, He-Man reaches for a book with a green cover, but pulls down a red covered one. While flying in the Wind Raider, Teela is too large in proportion to He-Man. When He-Man is fighting the Ice Hacker, his sword is missing from his scabbard. This is because the animation was duplicated from a fight between He-Man and a giant version of Skeletor from The Dragon Invasion, in which He-Man had lost his sword. As Granamyr bends down to face He-Man and Teela, his jaw disappears into the pit he's sitting on for a moment, then pops back in front of the pit. Near the end, Teela is sitting on a table in the gardens of Eternos with Adam on a bench beside her. When the angle changes, Adam is sitting on the ground and Teela appears to be towering over him. Then it returns to the first set-up again.
6. The second Granamyr-spotlight episode and one of the most widely praised entries of the Filmation run. Larry DiTillio's script, his first sold to the show, gives the dragon a substantive moral arc as a misanthropic but ultimately principled figure who agrees to help on his own terms. Granamyr would return three more times across the series; this episode established the template.