The Return of Cartoon Morality

A promotional still from Netflix’s Masters of the Universe relaunch

Masters of the Universe wasn’t really my thing in the 1980’s. I watched it occasionally when it aired, but it mostly ran when my parents expected me to do homework, so I never followed story arcs (such as they existed in Reagan-era animation) or savvied the characters. So when Nexflix proudly announced their intent to resume the show where it ended, my first reaction was to shrug.

I realize I’m at the age when the popular culture of my childhood has become mythologized. I grew up watching the Eisenhower Era and its hangover treated as somehow sacred. Nick at Nite reran Mister Ed, The Donna Reed Show, and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In with reverence once designated for Bach chorales and High Church Mass. The Wonder Years was one of network TV’s biggest hits, and Classic Rock Radio first became a thing.

So maybe I should’ve been better prepared, thirty years later, when the mass media icons of my childhood became similarly fetishized. From Michael Bay’s Transformers movies to Masters of the Universe, I’ve watched the chintzy animation of my childhood, little better than commercials when they first aired, turn into half-serious mass-market art. The result has left me curious and dumbfounded.

He-Man and Optimus Prime began life, of course, as toys. With media largely deregulated during the Reagan Administration, the strict boundary between TV content creators and the advertisers who subsidized them melted away. The syndicated weekday cartoons, few of which lasted beyond a single season, mostly existed to sell toys. And I, desperate to fit in, purchased some of them, particularly Transformers.

Looking back, these shows’ storylines had messages I didn’t necessarily catch as a child. He-Man and Optimus Prime both had American accents, with greater or lesser degrees of slow Southern drawls; Prime practically sounded like a stand-up comedian doing a John Wayne impression. By contrast, Skeletor, Megatron, and Cobra Commander all had British RPs, offset by their raspy voices. Villains were easy to spot: they spoke like aristocracy with laryngitis.

The morality of these shows had the complexity of comic strips in Boy Scouts magazines. Heroes and villains were unambiguous, and heroism or villainy was simply the characters’ respective natures. Villains lived sumptuously, ate caviar, and shat upon their sidekicks, while heroes ate red meat, slept rough, and had tight friend networks. It’s tough to avoid correlating these stories’ simple morality with Late Cold War propaganda.

Michael Bay with Bumblebee, perennially the most popular Transformer

Therefore, though it’s tempting to treat recent reboots of She-Ra and Voltron as mere nostalgia, the moral complexity these characters introduced strikes me. The revamped Voltron Force’s attempts to maintain enthusiasm for their mission, faced against an empire driven by strange and often poorly defined motivations, seems intended more for adults than children. Are we as Americans, the story seemingly asks, the plucky adolescent heroes, or are we the empire?

I have avoided watching Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, not out of love for cinematic grandeur and distaste for Bay’s notoriously excessive spectacle, but because the Transformers represent a piece of my childhood I’m not proud of. I purchased Transformers toys, not because I wanted to participate in their story, but because I thought I might fit in with other boys. I thought I could purchase my way into normalcy, a late-capitalist attitude that’s hard to shake in adulthood.

Therefore, when I see these artifacts of my childhood revamped for adults, with the complex morality that grown-ups know and fear, I’m left puzzled. We adults know that reality doesn’t break down neatly into good and evil, that villainy is contextual rather than innate, and that carefully placed violence doesn’t really make social problems go away. Yet exactly that attitude is being marketed back to us.

Netflix’s decision, with their Masters of the Universe relaunch, to resume the existing story rather than reboot it as they did with She-Ra, makes me wonder who these products are for. Despite attempts to popularize binary morality with stunts like the War on Terror, we just don’t live in the Cold War anymore; pitting bare-chested American virility against the skeletal Red Menace surrogate makes little sense. Who asked for this?

Then I realize: maybe we did. As the oldest Millenials have already turned 40, and Generation X has rollover IRAs, maybe we wish we really had the moral clarity we imagined in childhood. In a world where our greatest enemy is a virus, and where our fellow citizens are the greatest threat to democracy, maybe we want a bad guy we can punch. Maybe we just miss morality.