The Sleepers Awaken

While leading Prince Adam on what she calls a wild horse roundup, Teela brings him to an ancient, overgrown castle and tells him the legend behind it: centuries ago its rulers, Lord Tyrin and Lady Valtira, drained the surrounding forest of its energy and fell into an enchanted sleep, one said to end right around now. Adam laughs off the idea that the story could be literally true, and moments later the two of them spot exactly what they came for, a pair of winged horses grazing nearby.

Unknown to them, Lord Tyrin has already woken and recognizes the horses as ones his wife always loved; he hopes their calls will finally stir Valtira from her own long sleep. Sure enough, both Valtira and her long-petrified pet Sago wake at the sound, setting the castle's two slumbering rulers back on a collision course with Adam, Teela, and the rest of Eternia.

Orko: "Hi, today we met some people who had slept for over two hundred years. Well, we don't need that much sleep, but it is important to get enough sleep. So here's some things to remember: don't eat a lot before going to bed. A glass of milk or a piece of fruit makes a good bedtime snack. Try to go to bed at the same time every night and avoid any exercise or excitement before going to bed. Well, good night... Oh, good night Cringer." (Cringer is snoring)

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam

Linda Gary as Teela and Lady Valtira

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko (moral only)

George DiCenzo (uncredited) as Lord Tyrin

"Sago trusts you, and so do I. And I'm starting to learn I'd rather have friends than slaves."

- Lady Valtira

"The Sleepers Awaken" spends its first act on the kind of gothic setup Filmation rarely allows itself, a castle with two coffins and a legend Teela only half believes. Douglas Booth's script refuses to rush it, letting Adam and Teela stumble into Lord Tyrin and Lady Valtira's story before either rises from centuries of sleep, and that patience pays off once the pair wake up wanting their old kingdom back exactly as they left it, slaves included.

What the episode is actually about declares itself once Valtira starts draining trees for her youth and beauty: power here is explicitly a resource, taken from something else and spent on yourself, and the people around Tyrin and Valtira are just another resource to spend. Adam becomes her first conscript inside a few minutes of screen time, and it barely registers to her as wrong, because conscription is how she has always kept a kingdom. The episode never needs to state that outright. It shows Tyrin ordering his spider around with the same flat entitlement Valtira shows toward Adam, two people who have forgotten there is any other way to want something.

He-Man's answer to that isn't force. It's the smarter choice Booth makes here. When He-Man asks Valtira directly why she never tried to enslave him the way she enslaved Adam, her answer is the line the whole episode has been building toward: "Sago trusts you, and so do I. And I'm starting to learn I'd rather have friends than slaves." It's a strange thing for a villain to be allowed to say out loud and mean, and the show lets her mean it, a stronger move than giving He-Man a speech to deliver at her instead. The character does her own turning.

Sago does real work here too, more than a pet usually gets in this show. He's the one fixed point Valtira and Tyrin both reach for when the plot needs a gesture. Tyrin sics his spider on Sago out of jealousy rather than strategy, and Tyrin going back for him under the collapsing castle, after everything else that's happened, is the clearest evidence the episode gives that his and Valtira's affection for each other was never entirely buried under the amulets.

The giant snake sequence in the throne room is the episode's best piece of pure action. The animation gives the snake real scale against the hall, and He-Man tying it into a curtain rather than simply beating it down is the kind of specific, improvised solution this show does well when it bothers to. It's also, not coincidentally, the one fight scene that has nothing to do with the episode's actual conflict. That conflict is a domestic one, a husband and wife who have drifted into being tyrants, and no sword settles it. That mismatch is the episode's one real soft spot: once Tyrin and Valtira are reunited, the castle's collapse and the amulet-smashing resolution arrive fast, with the genuine reconciliation between them compressed into a scene or two after twenty minutes spent on misunderstanding.

Still, the ending earns its warmth. Tyrin and Valtira tear off the amulets themselves, restored to youth by the choice rather than by magic doing it to them, and Teela closes the episode promising to make a hero out of Adam "someday," a line that plays as a joke only because we already know the punchline. "The Sleepers Awaken" isn't trying to be one of the show's bigger adventures, but it is one of the more thoughtful ones about what power is actually for. Getting that right is harder for a Saturday morning cartoon than staging a sword fight.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved March 25, 1983 and final script revision took place May 5, 1983. In the script, Lord Tyrin had more interactions with the large spider that does his bidding, treating it like an oafish sidekick. Originally, after He-Man ties the giant snake up in a tapestry, Sago was scripted to approach the sack and poke it.
2. Continuity: The facial features of Lady Valtira would be used as the character model for the 'Gorgeous Woman' in The Return of Granamyr. The character design for Sago was reused as Batty in One for All. If one goes through the sequence in which He-Man picks Lady Valtira up from the ground frame by frame, He-Man appears to cup one of her breasts for a single frame. The animation of He-Man tying up the large snake in the tapestry would be reanimated in One for All to show He-Man fashioning a lasso from the Permavine.
3. More continuity: The shot of Teela holding He-Man's shoulder will be used again in The Problem with Power. A version in wich Teela is replaced by the Sorceress is seen in Origin of the Sorceress and yet another version in which Man-At-Arms takes the place of He-Man is seen in Orko's Return. The shot of He-Man picking up the Sword of Power would be used again, but with Adam replacing He-Man, in One for All.
4. Animation errors and goofs: When Valtira awakens from her 200 year sleep, her bare legs are colored red like her dress. Near the end, Lady Valtira is not wearing her amulet moments before she takes it off and destroys it.
5. Adam and Teela discover an ancient castle whose rulers, Lord Tyrin and Lady Valtira, wake from a two-hundred-year sleep determined to rule as they once did, through fear and the forest's stolen life force, until He-Man gives them something worth staying awake for.