About

Masters of the Universe: Revelations is the Netflix adaptation and soft-reboot of the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe TV series that debuted in July 2021. While not a complete reboot, Revelations ignores some previous canon to go back to the original storyline and continue that path. Leading up to the premiere, there was a lot of controversy about the show and its supposed content, as well as some controversy in the way lead creator Kevin Smith was interacting with fans online.

History

Netflix announced the show on December 18th, 2019, saying that the series would be primarily focused on adult viewers and feature a darker story beat. Despite being announced back in 2019, the trailer for the series wasn't shown until June 10th, 2021, when the Netflix official YouTube^[1] account released it online, gaining 7.5 million views in two months (shown below).

While main characters He-Man, Skeletor and Teela had their voice actors known since February 14th, 2020, the other accompanying cast wasn't revealed until July 2nd, 2021, 20 days before the release of the first half of the series. The series released the first five episodes on July 23rd, 2021, with the back half of the storyline being planned to release later in 2022.

Online Presence

Before the release of the trailer, there were already controversial aspects noticed by YouTubers and fans of the series. Notably, the YouTube^[2] channel ClownfishTV found a leaked merchandising picture that showed potential spoilers for the show. Using those merchandising photos, combined with different tweets and jabs from Kevin Smith to fans on Twitter, a video was made that explained what the plot of the first five episodes would look like. This video, posted to their YouTube on May 13th, 2021, gained 185,000 views in two months (shown below).

Upon the show's release, people were quick to watch and see if all the leaks and theories were right and Kevin Smith's reassuring words on Twitter were wrong. As expected, the attempt to subvert expectations made the show's twists obvious to those that were following along with the drama online. While the plot details were shocking to many fans of the original He-Man shows and continuity, it was pointed out by Twitter^[3] user @EightBitArt that this is actually not too uncommon in most other series from around that timeframe, earning 350 likes on his tweet posted on July 28th, 2021 in less than 24 hours (shown below).

(⚠️SPOILERS FOR Masters of the Universe: Revelation⚠️) ..Mad He-Man "fans": "How could they kill off He-Man? He's the main character of the whole series! What franchise could do something like that?" Transformers fans, used to seeing Prime die for like the 20th time: pic.twitter.com/cIaaCZcPCJ

— Emmanuel Esparza 💀 (@EightBitArt) July 28, 2021

With fans feeling taken aback by the show's content, the audience scores on the review site Rotten Tomatoes started to plummet. While taking scores from review sites is typically not seen as something too legitimate, it is often seen as the best way for some consumers to have their voices be heard. In this case, the score differential between the critics and audience is a 70 percent difference, as shown in the tweet by Twitter^[4] user @mjannertwins, which gained 1,200 likes in six days (shown below).

Guarantee this wouldn't have happened if they had been upfront about what masters of the universe revelation was from the beginning. They can't just promise He-man and not deliver. pic.twitter.com/GXV86eVjNT

— M.J. Tanner (@mjtannertwins) July 23, 2021

Various Meme Examples

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External References