She-Ra and the Princesses of Power S1-S5

After seeing my neighbor's daughters actively try and change to a different cartoon and then ask her parents to change it after 15 minutes of watching it, the show clearly doesn't seem to be for young girls. I watched She-Ra after watching the old 2000's reboot of He-Man and decided to give the old series a look. So I understand the original show but I don't hold significant nostalgia for it. But this... this isn't She-Ra It feels like a shoe horned in fan fiction that they chouldn't sell to Dreamworks on its own, and instead when given the She-Ra license they just changed a few names and submitted that as the script. It's a vapid and shallow fan fiction that tries to emulate other shows that are popular now, but fails. There are even parts where the main characters, when encountering a bad guy... just scream at them... like... as if they were some wild animal that would just scamper off. The character designs are plastic and cookie cutter. Like they took templates and just used the scaling tool to smoosh and stretch it out in different proportions. This is especially obvious for the character Spinnerella, who's 'chunky' physique was clearly too hard to design as the only fat part is her torso and thick legs, which immediately sprout a thin neck and Barbie Doll like thin face. This show is clearly a cash grab for a very different audience. Despite the name, with such a drastic change of character, and practically little to no resemblance to their original designs, and a butchered story, its clear that they didn't make this for the majority female She-Ra fans (and they seem to actively attack them). And yet, it's not for children as I've clearly hear a couple of young (6-8) girls say that the show was 'for babies'. Not to mention how the show doesn't respect the intelligence of the audience, and putting in messages as subtly as the "This is your brain on drugs" PSA. Which makes me wonder who the audience of this show actually is.

I'm a fan of the old She-Ra cartoons, but I use them to help me fall asleep since they're so one-dimensional. This reboot, on the other hand, is fantastic. I just started watching on a whim, and couldn't stop-just like what happened with "Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia". I like how the characters have varying body shapes and sizes, and the friendship between Adora, Glimmer and Bow. It's very empowering and modern, which is what we need She-Ra to be in this day and age.

Holy cow, this show is delightful! It's like "Sailor Moon" and "Steven Universe" had a baby, and then the baby was raised by "Voltron: Legendary Defender" and "She-Ra: Princess of Power." It feels much more story and character driven and much less 'toy sales' driven. The voice acting is perfect, the animation is fun, the facial expressions make me giggly, and the music is pretty suitable. That first time she says "For the honor of Grayskull" gave me actual goosebumps.

As its own thing, this new show is a mediocre Steven Universe knockoff; as a reboot of She-Ra, it's godawful. Now, before anyone uses the oh-so-convenient deflection of me being a sexist/homophobic pig, let me preface my review by saying I'm a progressive 27-year-old gay dude who watched the original She-Ra on VHS in the nineties. *ART: Simplistic and unappealing, with changing proportions and heights from scene to scene. Although I found Hordak's and Shadow Weaver's new looks pretty cool, the rest of the cast is just ugly (moon boots, really?). Derpy animation that constantly makes characters look deformed is the icing on this bland cake. Now, the original show was full of reused sequences and stiff animation, but it worked on a shoestring budget in a time where everything had to be hand-animated, yet it still managed to have some beautiful art. There's no excuse for the new show to look like a cheap webtoon. The backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous, though, so I guess that's where the money went. *WRITING: Despite the creators stressing how much deeper this show would be, a very important part of Adora's backstory is cut out and replaced with her randomly stumbling upon a magic sword. The tone is all over the place, nothing makes sense (Partying? Princess prom? What kind of juvenile fanfiction is this?), and all jokes rely on the "LOL, how random!" type of humor or outright slapstick, which makes almost every character look like a bumbling idiot. Funnily enough, I caught myself rooting for the bad guys because the princesses and their crew were so irritating. *VOICEWORK: When it's not being chock-full of the "OMG! This is, like, sooo cool" millennial speak, the "acting" ranges from annoying whining to screeching and/or yelling. *MUSIC: The new soundtrack is very dull and unmemorable. No trace of the iconic transformation theme - instead, it's replaced with a generic score that could serve as intro music to a game show. The original had some fantastic synth- and guitar-driven tracks, yet for some reason She-Reboot's staff didn't seize the opportunity to modernize and include those. *CHANGES/DIVERSITY: Due to budget constraints, the majority of the original characters had to have a similar body type, so it makes sense for the reboot to diversify its cast, HOWEVER, the creators tried to score some woke points by blatantly pandering to minorities & the SJW crowd and then using it as a shield from criticism, which comes off disgustingly calculated. Some changes, like adding lesbian undertones to Adora/Catra's relationship or giving Spinnerella a fat body with a slim neck/face, were just unnecessary and, once again, seem like a desperate attempt to appear inclusive. The problem is that the show has almost a checkist-like approach to its characters, and stereotyping is not the kind of representation I want. It's disingenuous, not to mention insulting. *OVERALL: Princesses of Power could've been a wonderful reimagining of the eighties classic, but it fell victim to its creators' narcissism, oversimplified art, unnecessary redesigns and changes, dumb humor, lack of respect & care for the source material, and shoehorned politics. On top of that, instead of listening to upset fans or trying to involve the people who worked on the original show, the studio decided to demonize all critics and trash talk the very thing it was rebooting. Disappointment doesn't even begin to cover how I feel about the end result.

I LOVED SheRa as a kid. I had her sword, her tiara, and a stuffed unicorn. She was my hero (until I found xena). This is a great re-imagining of She-Ra and I don't see it as taking the place of the original. Its funny, well animated, and the voice acting is great. I also cried the first couple of episodes...cuz feelings.