The Taking of Grayskull

Skeletor steals Castle Grayskull, with the Sorceress in it, and transports it to another dimension. Orko tells viewers to have three meals each day and to not overeat.

Orko: "Oh boy... this time I really overdid it! I ate so much I didn't have any room left in my stomach for dinner. In fact, It may be days before I'm hungry again! It really doesn't make sense to eat too many sweets in between meals. A litle snack is fine, but don't overdo it. Because if you do, you won't have room left for the three healthy meals which you should have every day. Don't get carried away with sweets. I wish I hadn't."

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam, Ram Man and Chef Alan

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

Linda Gary as Teela and the Sorceress

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko, King Randor and an unnamed Peasant

Orko: "You'd think someone would remember. But, no, everybody's busy. No time for old Orko."

Skeletor: "I may not have acquired the castle's secrets, but once the white hole is gone, you, the castle, and all your friends here will never be able to return to Eternia."

Orko spends the first four minutes of "The Taking of Grayskull" convinced that nobody on Eternia remembers his birthday. It is a small, ordinary hurt, played for laughs against a palace full of people who are obviously planning something. Then Skeletor steals an entire castle, with the Sorceress chained up inside it, and hides it behind a dimensional wall that nothing can cross. The episode never treats these two plots as separate shows. It keeps cutting back to Orko sulking through hallways while the real story, a kidnapping with planetary stakes, builds around him, and that gap between what Orko thinks is happening and what is actually happening is the episode's real joke.

Janis Diamond's script earns that structure by committing to the birthday bit rather than rushing past it. Chef Allen brushing Orko off, Teela calling the day "nothing special," King Randor fumbling his own cover story: none of it feels like padding once the cake shows up at minute two and we understand what Orko can't see. By the time Skeletor's whirlwind catches Man-At-Arms and Teela in the canyon, the show has already taught us to read a scene two ways at once, and it keeps asking that of the viewer for the rest of the runtime.

The white hole itself is where director Ed Friedman's episode earns its stripes. Rather than treat the pocket dimension as one more quarry set dressed in purple, the show lets its background artists loose: striped skies, floating orbs, a tunnel that seems to breathe. He-Man wrestles a serpent through a cave built from solid shadow. Teela loses her footing and falls into pure color. A half-glimpsed Sorceress watches from somewhere that isn't really a place. The episode spends real animation budget making the in-between feel like nowhere Eternia has ever sent its heroes. It is gaudy and a little incoherent by design, and it works because the show trusts that incoherence rather than narrating its way out of it.

Skeletor gets one of his better scripted moments here, too. Sitting the throne of Grayskull with the Sorceress chained beside him, he lays out the actual threat in plain terms: he doesn't need the castle's secrets, he just needs the white hole to close with everyone still inside it. It's a rare case of a Filmation villain's plan surviving contact with the question "but why would that work," and it gives He-Man's rescue something sharper to push against than the usual Havoc Staff standoff. The fight itself resolves cleverly, with He-Man bouncing two of Skeletor's own bolts off his sword and into the chains holding the Sorceress, which is the kind of detail that makes the climax feel earned rather than arrived at.

Where the episode runs thin is in the middle stretch of the dimension crossing, where Teela, Man-At-Arms and Orko mostly react to the scenery rather than do anything that couldn't have been cut to save two minutes. The episode has already shown it can make the birthday subplot carry real weight through absence; it doesn't manage the same trick with its supporting cast once they're past the whirlwind and into the white hole, where they become passengers in their own rescue mission.

Still, the episode knows how to land its ending! He-Man lassoes the castle whole and hauls it bodily back through a closing portal, and the show cuts straight from that huge image to Orko being handed a cake with his name iced across it. He eats far too much of it, which gets He-Man's closing message on moderation, but it also closes the loop the cold open set up: everyone had, in fact, remembered. "The Taking of Grayskull" is a bigger swing than most of the back half of the season, and mostly, it connects.

1. Continuity: The animated sequence of Prince Adam leaping into the bushes to become He-Man, with Cringer meekly following him, was first used in Diamond Ray of Disappearance. Teela's 'I'm falling!' line would be heard again in Into the Abyss. The dimension inside the white hole would be seen again in The Gamesman. This is the first of two times Skeletor is seen sitting on the throne of Castle Grayskull. The second time would be in Teela's Triumph.
2. More continuity: The animated sequence of Teela falling over will be used again in The Gambler. The animation of He-Man lifting Grayskull would be re-purposed to be used again in Return of the Gryphon; Quest for the Sword; The Gambler and a reanimated version was seen in Fisto's Forest. The animated sequence of He-Man creating a whirlwind with his sword was first seen in Evilseed and would be seen again in Temple of the Sun. Skeletor leaves his Havoc Staff behind when he escapes on a War-Sled. He has been shown in the past to retrieve objects by magic, but this is not shown in this case.
3. Animation errors and goofs: When He-Man and Battle Cat first arrive at Basilia, Battle Cat appears to be walking on air. As Ram Man rams a rolling boulder with his head he moves out of frame in one shot and into frame in the next, but the same background plate is used in both shots. After second boulder is seen rolling down a gullet, Ram Man gives He-Man a warning. But the empty gullet is visible behind He-Man and the boulder is now rolling at him from a different direction. During the fight inside Castle Grayskull, Skeletor runs past Teela and Battle Cat. Teela turns her head to the other side as if to follow his movement, but does so before he crosses her path. He-Man deflects two bolts from Skeletor's Havoc Staff and aims that at the two chains that are holding the Sorceress' arms. But he did not make any movements during this action to justify the bolts hitting two different targets. When He-Man pulls Teela up from the ledge, the sheath on his back changes color for an instant.