Granamyr, the oldest and wisest of Eternia's dragons, calls on He-Man for a strange favor: his young protege Torm has fallen in love with a human woman named Lyra, but her father Brindle will only bless the marriage if a suitor passes a series of trials that no dragon can physically attempt. Since Torm cannot take the test himself, He-Man agrees to stand in as his champion, with Man-At-Arms coming along to thank Granamyr in person for an old debt.
A rival suitor, the wizard Zem, has no intention of losing Lyra to a dragon and works to sabotage the trial from the start, even shrinking himself down to ride along unnoticed and summoning a demon to attack Brindle's home overnight. He-Man pushes through a maze guarded by illusions, a deceitful hag, and a centaur who demands a show of strength, winning the final test with a tug of war rather than a sword fight, and keeping the prize, a Silver Apple, out of Zem's reach along the way.
With the trial won and the wedding underway, Zem makes one last desperate move, freeing the imprisoned evil dragon Shadow Wing to attack Darksmoke itself. Torm tries to defend his bride-to-be but is outmatched, and it falls to Granamyr to drive Shadow Wing off using his own magic. With the threat ended, Granamyr transforms Torm into a human and performs the wedding himself.
Looking back on the day, He-Man reflects that proving his courage never required him to fight at all, having won his hardest test by refusing to draw a blade rather than by swinging one.
King Randor: "Helping his dragon friends sure kept He-Man busy today. And Brindle's tests were pretty tough. In one of those tests to prove his courage, he was challenged to a fight. But He-Man wouldn't fight. He-Man: "The fact is, fighting never proves anything. Trying to find a peaceful way to settle a problem is usually the best way. And if someone calls you a coward or a chicken, don't let it worry you. It often takes more courage not to fight. Until later, bye now."
John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam and Granamyr
Alan Oppenheimer as Man-At-Arms, Torm and Brindle
Linda Gary as the Sorceress, Lyra and Gorgeous woman
Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Zem, Braylok, Herald, Centaur, Shadow Wing and King Randor
"The fact is, fighting never proves anything."
He-Man
He-Man spends most of "The Return of Granamyr" standing in for someone else. Larry DiTillio, back for a direct sequel to his own "The Dragon's Gift," builds the whole plot on a legal technicality. Torm has fallen for a human woman, her father Brindle will only accept a husband who passes his trials, and a dragon cannot physically take a human's test. So Granamyr asks for a champion, and He-Man spends the rest of the episode being brave on somebody else's behalf, in somebody else's shoes, for somebody else's wedding. We rarely get He-Man in a story this explicitly not about him.
That secondhand quality shapes everything. The maze test could have been generic obstacle-course filler, but DiTillio keeps attaching it to Zem, the rival suitor who turns himself into an insect to sabotage the trial from inside He-Man's own sleeve. Zem is a small, mean character, the kind of villain the show seldom bothers writing: not a conqueror, just a man who has decided a dragon's happiness is less real than his own entitlement. "Lyra should be my bride, not the wife of a monster," he tells Brindle, and Brindle's daughter answers him flatly: "Torm is no monster. He's a gentle spirit, and I love him." It is a plainer rebuttal than this show usually bothers writing. The episode's two antagonists, Zem and the dragon Shadow Wing he later frees from imprisonment, both exist to punish Torm for the same thing, wanting something outside his own kind.
The production leans on a returning cast instead of building one from scratch. It is where the episode shows its age. Brindle's household, the maze's hag and centaur, Braylok the night demon: nearly every design here is a repaint. Zem and Brindle are reused character models from "A Friend in Need," the hag's face is Lady Valtira's from "The Sleepers Awaken," and Braylok's whole look comes off Aroo in "Masks of Power." None of it reads as laziness on screen, mostly because the episode never lingers on any one borrowed face long enough to invite the comparison. But it does mean the episode spends its visual imagination almost entirely on Granamyr's own chamber and the dragons themselves, who get distinct silhouettes: Granamyr's heavier red frame, Torm's smaller build, Shadow Wing's cold blue-grey. The fight between Granamyr and Shadow Wing near the end is the one real set piece, and it earns the screen time the maze spends getting there.
The tug of war is the best scene, and not because it is thrilling. A centaur demands proof of He-Man's strength and assumes that means a sword fight; He-Man offers a tug of war instead. It plays as a throwaway gag, but it is also the episode rehearsing its own closing argument before King Randor says it out loud: that passing a test of courage does not require drawing a blade. He-Man wins the apple by refusing the fight he was handed, the same move he makes again when a bully calls him a coward and he simply does not take the bait. "The fact is, fighting never proves anything," he tells us at the end, and for once the moral is not a stretch from what came before it. It is the same decision the episode already showed him making twice.
The weak spot is Torm himself, who disappears for long stretches of his own love story. He gets a handful of lines early on and barely more once the wedding is underway; his courtship happens to him more than it is something he does. Granamyr fills the gap, gruff and plainly moved by a human who finally offers him something other than a request. That is the throughline from "The Dragon's Gift," paying off. This is a lighter episode than that one, content to let its villain be petty rather than dangerous, but it knows what it wants to be about, and we never once need He-Man to throw a punch to get there.
- Behind the scenes: Script was approved May 26, 1983.
- Continuity: The sword fight between Prince Adam and Man-At-Arms is based on a Rotoscoped sequence previously used in The Dragon's Gift in a fight between Teela and Skeletor. It was also used in a fight between Teela and a Space Pirate in One for All and a sparring session between Teela and Adam in The Games. The rainbow effect and backgrounds seen when characters travel between dimensions were seen earlier in Quest for He-Man and will be used again in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episodes Into the Dark Dimension and The Greatest Magic. The design of the monstrous Braylok is reused from that of Aroo from Masks of Power. The character models for Brindle and Zem are reused from two different characters, Zicran and Jarvan respectively, who first appeared in A Friend in Need. An altered version of Zem also appeared as the character Spyster in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode The Inspector.
- More continuity: The facial features of the 'Gorgeous Woman' were used earlier as those of Lady Valtira in The Sleepers Awaken. The character models used for Lyra and the human form of Torm are reused from Bran and Jaymar from The Curse of the Spellstone. Jaymar's model was also seen in The Starchild and Return of the Gryphon. Shadow Wing had turned Zem into a frog and then trapped Torm in stone and turned Brindle into crystal. Since with his defeat, Torm and Brindle returned to normal, it is possible that the same happened to Zem, although he was not seen again.
- Animation errors and goofs: Although Granamyr's model sheet explained how his wings grow in size prior to his flying, this detail never appears on screen, causing a continuity error as the great dragon's wings go from tiny at the beginning to large near the end.
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