Adam tells Man-At-Arms the story of how Man-E-Faces went from being a villain who terrorized innocent people, to a noble hero and actor of the Royal Court. Beast Man shows he can control Man-E-Faces' monster persona. Man-E-Faces and Orko tell viewers repetition and rehearsal are key to remembering things like lines.
Orko: "Man-E, could you help me with a problem?" Man-E-Faces: "Sure, Orko." Orko: "I can never remember anything. How do actors learn their speeches?" Man-E-Faces: "By rehearsing. We practice saying them again and again. Well, that's what you have to do. If you're trying to remember something from school, say it to yourself over and over again. Rehearse it in your mind just like an actor." Orko: "Say goodbye... Say goodbye... Say goodbye..." Man-E-Faces: "What are you doing?" Orko: "Oh, I'm trying to remember to say goodbye. Bye! It worked!"
John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam, Beast Man and Squinch
Alan Oppenheimer as Skeletor, Man-At-Arms and Battle Cat/Cringer
Linda Gary as Teela, the Sorceress and Lara
Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, Man-E-Faces, Kando and unidentified Widgets
"Who are you?" "No one ever asked me that before."
Man-E-Faces, asked by He-Man after the Sorceress breaks Beast Man's spell over him.
The episode plays its origin story backwards. It opens with Man-E-Faces already settled into the cast, cracking jokes at Orko's party and trading pleasantries with Man-At-Arms, before anyone explains why a man who can swap between a human face, a mechanical face and a monster's face is standing in the Eternos ballroom at all. The flashback that follows spends most of its twenty-two minutes answering a question nobody in the room asks out loud until the very end. Who is he? Adam and Teela already know. We have to earn the answer the way Man-E-Faces himself did.
Paul Dini's script gets more mileage out of that structure than the premise strictly needs. The Widgets' monster-in-the-walls scare and Skeletor's recruitment pitch play as stock Filmation business at first, but the show keeps undercutting them. The stranger terrorizing Widget Woods turns out to be alone and frightened rather than evil, and once Skeletor hands him to Beast Man, the villainy on screen belongs entirely to the mind control, not to the man wearing it. "I have to do as Beast Man commands," he says mid-fight, and the line does real work, because it tells us, as plainly as a Saturday morning cartoon can, that a monster acting monstrously is not the same thing as a monster being evil.
The Sorceress gets the episode's clearest statement of its own theme, and the script is smart enough to let a side character say it rather than have He-Man announce it himself: "Sometimes the ones who seem the worst are the ones who need our help the most." That is a generous reading of a character who spent the cold open smashing down the Widgets' door, but the episode earns it. He-Man breaks the spell with an appeal rather than a punch, then sits the stranger down and asks him a question that has apparently never once come up in his life. "Who are you?" "No one ever asked me that before." That exchange is the episode's real climax, not the fight before it. It is also where the character gets his name, built out of the very trait that used to terrify people: his many faces.
Where the episode runs thinner is in everyone standing around that moment. Teela gets a line or two of recognition and no real stake in the stranger's fate beyond being present for it. Duncan narrates the flashback to Adam without much reason to be the one telling it rather than the Sorceress, who already knows the stranger is not evil before anyone else does. Skeletor, too, hands off the episode's villainy early, content to let Beast Man do the actual bullying once the Collector lands. That keeps him safe for next week but leaves him a bystander in his own scheme. The Widgets, led by the excitable Squinch, supply comedy more than stakes, and the show never decides whether they are meant to be sympathetic or simply loud.
But the episode does the one thing that matters here, something rarer on this show than a premiere stuffed with five villains or a parade of gimmick weapons. It sits with one character's loneliness long enough to let the redemption mean something, and it rewards him with a stage, an audience and a name of his own. Man-E-Faces earns his spot on the Heroic Warriors' roster. The show finally bothered to ask why a man with three faces needed to hide behind any of them.
- Behind the scenes: Script was approved April 27, 1983 and final script revision took place April 29, 1983.
- Continuity: The animated sequence of Beast Man throwing a grappling iron at the jaw bridge of Castle Grayskull is reused from Diamond Ray of Disappearance. The animated sequence of He-Man's deflection of a blast and Skeletor's ducking it is also reused from Diamond Ray of Disappearance. Lady Edwina from Creatures from the Tar Swamp can be spotted in the audience at Man-E-Faces performance in the final scene. Man-E-Faces does not appear again for 37 episodes.
- Animation errors and goofs: Each time Teela and Orko are seen in flying the Wind Raider, neither of them is holding the control stick, which is clearly visible. He-Man throws Man-E-Faces over his shoulder twice, and both times his scabbard is missing from his back. When Squinch points and exclaims "Why, he's gone", one of the Widgets behind him is standing in mid-air. The Sorceress appears outside of the Widget's Fortress and is part of the audience when Man-E-Faces performs at the Royal Palace near the end, even though she is not supposed to be able to leave Castle Grayskull in her human form. After Beast Man is thrown to the ground, Man-E-Faces is standing in the background with his arms at his side. Each time Beast Man moves his mouth, the sky visible between Man-E's arms changes color.
- Man-E-Faces, the multi-faced actor cursed with three forms, joins the Heroic Warriors. This is his Filmation (1983) origin story: the script treats a man with three faces and no name with more sympathy than the toy gimmick alone would suggest.
DISCUSSION
Join the conversation.
Comments below are mirrored on the heman.org forum. Sign in once, post anywhere.