The Shaping Staff

Prince Adam is late to dinner again, and Orko's jester routine falls flat, when an enchantress named Magestra arrives unannounced and offers to entertain the royal family with a mysterious Cabinet of Wonders. King Randor steps inside out of curiosity and briefly vanishes before Magestra brings him back, charming the king into inviting her to stay at the castle.

Magestra and the restored "Randor" are not what they appear. In the dungeon, the real King Randor is being held prisoner by Evil-Lyn and Beast Man in disguise, with Evil-Lyn wielding a newly discovered artifact called the Shaping Staff, capable of transforming anyone it strikes. She turns Randor into a goat and, catching Orko spying on them, changes him into a cricket, all while plotting with Skeletor to march the Royal Guard on Castle Grayskull under the impostor king's orders.

Orko escapes to warn Prince Adam, who transforms into He-Man and confronts the disguised villains with Battle Cat at his side. Evil-Lyn strikes again, turning Teela into a frog and freezing He-Man into a golden statue before hauling them both off to Grayskull, where Skeletor has unveiled a duplicate of He-Man called Faker to finish the attack. When the Sorceress grows suspicious of Faker and steps outside, Evil-Lyn partially transforms her into a tree, but the telepathic bond between the Sorceress and He-Man lets him break free of his own enchantment. He-Man defeats Faker in a duel that ends with the double falling into the abyss below the castle.

As the Royal Guard arrives and Skeletor strikes down Man-At-Arms, the Sorceress intervenes to soften his fall. He-Man finally breaks the Shaping Staff itself, instantly restoring Randor, Teela, and Orko to normal. Evil-Lyn tries to use what remains of the staff against the heroes, but it backfires, turning her into a snakelike creature that slithers off after the fleeing Skeletor.

Orko: "In today's story, you saw what happened when a stranger came to the palace. She turned out to be evil and dangerous. Of course, turning people into animals is only make-believe, but there is nothing make-believe about how dangerous some strangers can be in real life. Never accept any food or toys or money from a stranger. Don't even talk to them. And no matter what a stranger may say, never go away with them. Terrible things have happened to some kids who did. The smart thing is to just walk away, or in my case just float away."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam, Beast Man and Faker

Alan Oppenheimer as Skeletor, Man-At-Arms and Cringer

Linda Gary as Teela, Evil-Lyn, the Sorceress and Magestra

Erik Gunden as Orko and King Randor

Jay Scheimer as Queen Marlena

"In this dim light, she'll think you're He-Man. Call her, Faker." -- Skeletor, sending his double after the Sorceress

We watch an enchantress named Magestra walk into the royal dining hall offering parlor tricks. She is really Evil-Lyn in a wig. We watch a king send the Royal Guard marching on Castle Grayskull. He is really Beast Man wearing a crown. We watch a warrior meet He-Man outside the castle gate, sword drawn, armor gleaming. He is Faker, a copy built to pass for the original in bad light! Even the Shaping Staff itself works this way on a smaller scale: it doesn't destroy anyone, it just remakes them into something else, a goat, a frog, a cricket, a tree. Bob Forward's script keeps asking whether the face in front of you is the one that belongs there, and by the time He-Man is fighting his own double on a Grayskull ledge, a dinner-party illusion has become the episode's entire shape.

The best stretch of the episode is the dungeon reveal, and it works by doing almost nothing. Magestra and the false king walk the real King Randor's cell, and the animation lets both masks drop in the same shot rather than cutting away for a reaction. Evil-Lyn's voice sharpens the instant the disguise is gone, and Beast Man stops holding himself like royalty and starts slouching like a brute again. It's a small piece of craft, and it trusts us to read a change in posture as the real twist, no exposition required.

The Sorceress gets the episode's most striking visual beat. Evil-Lyn's staff catches her outside the castle walls. Rather than knocking her down, the animators let her transform in stages: wings stiffening into bare branches, feathers going the color of old bark, her voice dropping out mid-sentence. It's unsettling in a way the show rarely bothers with, and it pays off the telepathic link between the Sorceress and He-Man that the episode set up only a scene earlier, when his eyes go distant and unfocused as her voice reaches him from across the battlefield. The staff only ever takes something away. The telepathic bond is the one piece of magic in the episode that gives something back.

Where the episode runs into trouble is the climax, which tries to resolve four separate threats in under two minutes. Skeletor hypnotizes He-Man. Faker squares off against him. The Royal Guard descends on Sky Sleds, Beast Man still guards a caged goat, and Evil-Lyn holds half a magic staff, all more or less at once. The fight with Faker gets lost in the shuffle worst of all. Two nearly identical figures trade blows against a purple sky, and with no clean way to tell them apart, the tension drains out of every punch. It ends when one of the two falls off a ledge. It's the one place where the episode's whole theme, mistaken identity rendered literal, works against the storytelling instead of for it.

Still, "The Shaping Staff" earns its spot as the show's second outing by committing fully to an idea and following it everywhere the format will let it go, from a magician's trick at the dinner table to a doppelganger duel at the castle gate. It's rougher than the series would get once it settled into its rhythms, and the ending can't quite juggle everything it's carrying, but the dungeon reveal and the Sorceress's transformation are both better than the episode around them has any right to produce this early. For a story literally about things not being what they seem, that's a fitting kind of unevenness.

cereal:geek's commentary on The Shaping Staff, with behind-the-scenes detail on how the episode was made.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved March 18, 1983 and final script revision took place July 19, 1983. This story was loosely based on a Filmation script premise also titled 'The Shaping Staff' in which Skeletor, disguised as a magician, making King Randor disappear. The character model for Magestra was designed by Gerald Forton.
2. According to the script, Faker was planned to have the same blue and orange color scheme as his toy version instead of having the same colors as He-Man. This is why Skeletor says "In this dim light she'll think you're He-Man".
3. Continuity: The downward looking shot of the abyss surrounding Castle Grayskull is actually the background of Snake Mountain's Blood Falls minus the waterfall. It will be used as intended in The Dragon Invasion. The sequence of Adam preparing to transform into He-Man featuring a cross fade was used again in The Littlest Giant.
4. Animation errors and goofs: During the opening sequence, when He-Man is fighting a Hover-Robot and a giant squid, his sword is visible hanging on his back. But when Man-At-Arms drives up in the Attak Trak, He-Man's sword is missing. On the map of Castle Grayskull that 'King Randor' and 'Magestra' are looking at, Grayskull is incorrectly spelled 'Greyskull'. Orko is changed into a cricket by the Shaping Staff, but manages to travel from the palace dungeons to Prince Adam's bedroom to warn him. However, when Evil-Lyn confronts He-Man outside Adam's bedroom immediately thereafter, she conjures up an image of Orko the cricket back in the dungeon with King Randor the goat. During the fight between He-Man and Faker, in most scenes Faker does not have a scabbard or a sword on his back and He-Man does, but sometimes it's the other way around. When He-Man is hanging off the ledge, he is wearing the scabbard but it is empty. Then Faker charges at He-Man wearing the scabbard on his back, but it is gone in the next shot as Faker falls into the abyss. When we first see the battalion of Royal Guards flying overhead on Sky Sleds, their legs are bare. In the next shot they are wearing their familiar green leggings.
5. The second episode of the Filmation series. Bob Forward's script introduces the recurring premise that Skeletor will frequently use intermediary villains (here, Majestra) rather than direct frontal assault on the royal family. The transformation gag (royal family turned into animals) is one of the earliest examples of the show's willingness to lean into fairy-tale logic.
6. The episode is also notable for an early Faker appearance, predating his more famous later turns.