By the power of Netflix, here's a first look at the new Masters Of The Universe

It was allll the way back in February of 2020 (pre-pandemic!) when we heard about the stellar cast that Netflix and Kevin Smith had put together for their reboot of Masters Of The Universe (a.k.a. the cartoon that He-Man was on), and now the streaming service has released some preview images that show Masters Of The Universe: Revelation in action—well, not “in action” because they’re still images, but you know what we mean. In the photos below, you can see Skeletor (Mark Hamill), Evil-Lyn (Lena Headey), Teela (Sara Michelle Gellar), Orko (Griffin Newman), Prince Adam (Chris Wood), and, of course, He-Man (also Chris Wood, not to spoil anyone’s secret identity). The rest of the cast includes Liam Cunningham, Stephen Root, Diedrich Bader, Henry Rollins, original Skeletor actor Alan Oppenheimer, Alicia Silverstone, Phil LaMarr, Tony Todd, Jason Mewes (how’d Kevin Smith land him?!), Justin Long, and Kevin Conroy (playing a Mer-Man instead of a Bat-Man).

In a press release that accompanied these photos, Smith (who is serving as showrunner and executive produced) explained that the series will be a “continuation” of the story from the original animated show in the ‘80s, saying, “we’re playing with the original mythology and characters” and “revisiting and digging deeper into some of the unresolved storylines.” He also notes that they wanted to “lean into” the aesthetics of the original Mattel toy line, since the company owns an “entire vast library” of artwork from the old show already anyway. This new one obviously looks significantly better than the old show, which really milked the fact that everybody looks kind of similar and it’s easy to reuse animation frames because of that, but it is nice to hear that they’re making an effort to maintain some aesthetic ties to the original. The new Masters Of The Universe premieres on Netflix on July 23.