The Heart of a Giant

Man-At-Arms sends Prince Adam and Orko into the Evergreen Forest to gather a rare plant, unaware that the pair are being quietly watched by a huge, hidden figure. When a storm rolls in and Orko is startled by the giant, he knocks himself out and wakes up being carried by a pair of enormous hands, with no idea what has become of him.

The giant turns out to mean no harm; he returns Orko, unharmed and with his gathered plants still in hand, then disappears without a word. Suspecting either a spy or someone in trouble, Adam and Cringer transform into He-Man and Battle Cat to track the stranger down, only to find that someone else is hunting him too: a showman known only as the Keeper, who wants the giant for his flying menagerie of captured creatures.

The Keeper gets to the giant first, and when He-Man tries to intervene, the Keeper captures Orko as well and tests his new captive's rescuer by releasing the monstrous Scorpio against him. Locked in a cage aboard the Keeper's airship, Orko finally learns the giant's story: his name is Cambro, a once-brilliant graduate of the Science Academy who fled human company after his great size made others afraid of him. Working together, Orko and Cambro rig an intercom into a radio and call for help, warning that the Keeper is headed for Avion next to capture its ruler, Stratos.

He-Man and Battle Cat race to intercept the airship, free Stratos, and fight their way aboard to tear open every cage in the Keeper's menagerie. With his prisoners free and surrounding him, the Keeper cowers, but it's Cambro who steps in to stop the other creatures from taking revenge. Man-At-Arms, moved by Cambro's story, offers him a place as his lab assistant, giving the gentle giant the first real welcome he's had in years.

"Today I learned something about judging other people by the way they look. Just because Cambro looked different, I was frightened of him, and I thought he was some kind of monster. But he turned out to be kind and gentle and smart. I hope you'll try to remember not to judge people by the way they look and not to make fun of them if they look different. People deserve to be judged on their words and especially on their actions. From now on, I'm gonna give them a chance. I hope you will too. Bye!"

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam, Cambro and Keeper

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

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko

Norm Prescott as Stratos

Cambro: "Because I was ridiculed for my great size, because I was hated for my fearsome appearance, because I was an outcast from the world of men, because people are cruel."

The Keeper: "So not only did that muscle-bound hero defeat Scorpio, he takes away my bird man. No matter. I'll catch so many of those bird-brains, not even he can save them all."

"The Heart of a Giant" spends its first act doing something the show rarely bothers with: it lets its monster be afraid first. Before Orko ever lays eyes on Cambro, the episode gives us hands parting the branches, a shape ducking behind a tree trunk, a huge figure who would rather hide than be seen. Robby London's story and David Wise's teleplay are in no hurry to resolve the mystery. Ernie Schmidt's direction backs that patience, keeping the giant in silhouette and partial shots for a full act. Most episodes show you the monster the moment it's convenient.

That patience pays off because the episode is not really about a monster at all. It's about who gets believed when they say they're not one. Cambro has spent years hiding in the Evergreen Forest because the one time he tried living among people, his size turned him into exactly the kind of thing Orko initially assumes he is, and the episode keeps circling back to that same mistake. Orko flees first and asks questions later. The Keeper, the episode's actual villain, never asks questions at all; he looks at Cambro and sees a prize for his flying menagerie, which makes him the one character in the episode who never updates his first impression. Cambro's size is incidental to both of them. What changes the outcome is that Orko, alone among everyone who meets the giant, is willing to be wrong about him.

The caged conversation between Orko and Cambro around the midpoint is the episode's best scene, and it's built almost entirely out of dialogue rather than spectacle. Cambro's account of himself, a prodigy who finished the Science Academy at sixteen and was feared out of civilization by twenty, is delivered without self-pity. The show lets the facts of his life make the case instead of leaning on a mournful score to do it. Erik Gunden's hesitant, apologetic line readings for Orko do real work here too, selling a character usually played for comic relief as someone capable of sitting still and listening.

The episode's back half trades that quiet for a fairly standard rescue plot, and it's the weaker half for it. Scorpio exists mostly to give He-Man something to punch while the plot sorts out Avion and Stratos. The detour to rescue Stratos is well-staged, the cable grab and the ride on his back both land, but it puts the episode's actual subject on pause for several minutes. The Keeper's menagerie payoff, a crowd of his former captives closing in on him while Cambro talks them down, is a satisfying image, but it arrives so late that the episode barely has time to sit with it before cutting to the Eternos coda.

Still, the ending earns itself. Man-At-Arms offering Cambro a job as his lab assistant is the one offer in the entire episode made to Cambro as a scientist, not as a specimen or a threat. Orko's closing message lands too, because it is built from what he actually says on screen rather than a generic lesson tacked on after the fact. "The Heart of a Giant" isn't among the show's tightest adventure plots, but its first half is as good a character episode as Filmation-era He-Man produced, and it knows exactly which character it's about.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved June 16, 1983 and final script revision took place June 22, 1983. Cambro's voice (performed by John Erwin) uses the same inflections as monster movies star Boris Karloff, albeit much deeper.
2. Continuity: Cambro's character model is reused as Tingler in Monster on the Mountain. The character model of The Keeper would be reused as Lord Todd (in disguise) in The Gamesman. A near identical version of The Keeper's ship appears in One for All. The Keeper's creatures are Bakkull and a Fish man from Teela's Quest; a Slotto from Evil-Lyn's Plot; a Cavern Monster from Reign of the Monster; Gark from Orko's Favorite Uncle; Gorgon from The Defection; an Ice Hacker from The Dragon's Gift and Tik Tok and Zalt from Orko's Missing Magic.
3. More continuity: The animated sequence of He-Man punching a hole in the hull of the ship was animated by Tom Sito and would be used again in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode She-Ra Makes a Promise, which he directed. The first half of the animated sequence that shows He-Man punching animated by Tom Sito will be used again in the episode The Time Wheel.
4. Dialogue note: the villain is never named on screen; "the Keeper" is the name used by fan reference guides, not a spoken credit.
5. Voice note: John Erwin, the regular voice of He-Man and Prince Adam, also voices both Cambro and the Keeper in this episode, giving the hero, the giant and the villain of the week the same actor under three different performances.