We got to experience that on set, with real set-worn costumes that were functional, had pockets and pouches galore, and in the case of some very famous characters were also a lot less furry…
“We went through lots of iterations [for Adam]. Is he wearing trousers? Is he wearing armor on top? We did tease Nick at one point, saying that he was going to be wearing the really tight furry pants.”
It’s not just the heroes that they knew they had to get right though, as one of things that made the famously toy-selling kids show so popular was its roster of hilarious, campy, and often super weird villains—all of whom are brought to life in shockingly accurate and practical fashion.
“It all goes down to the critical story that we’re trying to tell and then how you tell it, and it is a balance of those things,” Knight shares. “It’s cheekiness, it’s a reference, it’s fun, it’s playful. That, to me, is part of the DNA of Masters of the Universe. It was always that. It was never super serious, and yet we take it very seriously, we do love these characters, we want to have fun with it, but we are telling an emotional story that does have stakes. So it’s trying to find a way to balance those things.”
“These characters are very over the top; they look ridiculous; they do ridiculous things; they have ridiculous names. So a lot of it was trying to find reasons for those things, which you’ll see when you watch the movie,” Knight explains.
“[We’re just] trying to honor those characters in a way that felt like the Masters of the Universe that we loved as kids, but that also made sense in this world, so we made adjustments along the way. Still, Triclops feels like Triclops,Trap Jaw feels like Trap Jaw, Skeletor feels like Skeletor. It’s our own version of it within this kind of modernized cinematic take on the material.”
