ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)
By:
August 13, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite sympathetic villains. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.
SKELETOR
The central confusion and the source of the animosity between He-Man and Skeletor that drives all of the action in the 1980s show He-Man and the Masters of the Universe is that Castle Grayskull is clearly meant to be Skeletor’s. Any five-year-old watching the show in 1983 could tell you that — I mean it’s a creepy stone castle on a blasted heath hanging over a fiery abyss, it’s pretty obvious who is supposed to live there. Is it the blond muscly guy with the page-cut or the fellow with a skeleton face? So this clear injustice looms over the entire series. But it’s an injustice committed against a cackling maniac with a skull-head, so it’s fraught.
In the opening sequence, Prince Adam (aka “He-Man”), half human, half Eternian hero with a magic sword and a battle cat, states that his job is “Defender of the Secrets of Castle Grayskull.” Not “Protector of the People of Eternia”; “Champion of the Downtrodden”; or “Wise and Kind Princeling Learning the Business of Benign Despotism,” but “Defender of the Secrets of Castle Grayskull.” That’s the gig. Not even defender of Grayskull, see, but its secrets. They give the game away in the opening credits. If Skeletor had gotten the magical transforming sword that turns Prince Adam into He-Man “by the power of Grayskull,” who would he turn into?
Watching the show as a middle-schooler (using my younger siblings as cover) I didn’t quite get that this was a full-blown conspiracy, but it did seem pervasively weird, like they were constantly dodging some etiological question. But that’s not why I would have said that I was rooting for Skeletor. I liked him for the same reason every other kid did — why we all secretly rooted for him — he had all the coolest gadgets, henchmen, and insults… and He-Man was a drip.
Beast-Man. Triclops. Evil-Lyn. Klawful. Spikor. Trapjaw. And He-Man’s over there trotting out Dollar Store Gurney Halleck? Come on. I did like the battering-ram dude — my little brother had the figure and you could push his head down so it would depress and then spring forward and whack things, but that was about it. It was like Paradise Lost, but upside-down – or maybe sideways. Skeletor might not have all the good lines like Satan — it was, admittedly, a lot of cackling — but he’s got all the best minions, and Skeletor got to brutally insult them constantly. “You’re a wimp scientist and you could be a wimp villain!”; “Metal-munching moron”; “Pathetic pair of pitiful pinheads.”
In Season One there was a time-travel episode where a desperate Skeletor tries to set everything right by preventing Grayskull from ever being built, but he’s thwarted by He-Man. This is Skeletor’s “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” moment. He is willing to forgo his home, bend magic and science, just to prevent this broken timeline from happening. Hero stuff.
ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Heather Quinlan | Kathy Biehl on DR. FRANK-N-FURTER | Catherine Christman on ALEXIS CARRINGTON | Crockett Doob on M3GAN | Nick Rumaczyk on AURIC GOLDFINGER | Mariane Cara on MIRANDA PRIESTLY | Trav SD on PROFESSOR HINKLE | Alex Brook Lynn on TOM POWERS | Lynn Peril on ENDORA | Adam McGovern on EDDIE HASKELL | Mimi Lipson on SUE ANN NIVENS | Heather Quinlan on HAROLD SHAND | Tom Nealon on SKELETOR | Matthew Hodge on BARRY LYNDON | Josh Glenn on JOEL CAIRO | Dan Reines on WALTER PECK | Mark Kingwell on HARRY LIME | James Scott Maloy on CLARENCE BODDICKER | Nikhil Singh on LOCUTUS | Carolyn Campbell on CARSON DYLE | Tony Pacitti on DENNIS NEDRY | Gordon Dahlquist on WALKER | Colin Campbell on RUTH LYTTON | Marc Weidenbaum on THE XENOMORPHS | Susannah Breslin on ANTON CHIGURH | Micah Nathan on PATRICK BATEMAN.
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