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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome into the Ringerverse. This is, of course, the Ringer's Nexus podcast feed for all things fandom. We are Steve, the architect, the builder, the tinker of things. Rabble-rousing Rob Mahoney. That's his Midnight Boyz name. Rabble-rousing Rob Mahoney. Joni is in Sweden. Yes, he is. Jomie's in Sweden. Sweden is the land of milk.
Chapter 2: What spoilers should listeners be aware of before diving into the movie?
So Jomie's in heaven.
Chapter 3: What are the initial reactions to 'Masters of the Universe'?
Jomie's in heaven right now. I thought it was the land of, like, herring. I know, but it's a lot of white people out there.
Sure.
And so then, like, oh, herring and milk. That's disgusting. So Jomie's there right now. We can only hope that Jomie comes back to us without adding to our biracial scourge that's been taking over television and film. Can we? It's not a scourge. I'm going to go. Old man, man, he of the receiving resurgent hairline, coat baby Chuck, the 24-karat closer. Together we are known as the Midnight Boys.
I love you! All right, we'll be right back after this. Follow us on socials. So Jomie's gone. At the Midnight Boys pod on Insta and TikTok. At Ringerverse on Insta, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. I've been monitoring the socials. And I have to say, they're going well. You think so? I think Jomie's got something going. Why don't you ever tell him this to his face? I do. I feel like you don't.
We've been having problems with Jomie. He's been feeling himself a little bit. He got the new apartment. He got milk in and out.
See, it's tough, Rob, because like... What you want to do is you want to make sure that you continuously pour into Jomie. While also pushing him down. No, but also pulling him back. You want to pour into him, but you want to pull it back. Jomie got on here one day and Jomie went, yo, man, he had the glasses on the whole night.
He was like, we're going to cover Invincible if we get to 15K on the Instagram. And we never talked about that. I was like, yeah, yeah, cool. And then I was like, wait a minute, man. When did that get brought up? You know what I mean? So you have to make sure. He's a young whippersnapper. Do you have whippersnappers in your life? He's not a young whippersnapper. Jomie's like 30.
He's an adult man. You be treating him like the Black Tom Holland.
tom holland's 29 and by the way his entire fucking career is whippersnapper he's played whippersnapper and everything and he's actually playing whippersnapper in odyssey and we have to see how his whippersnappering kind of works in that movie a lot of people were i did hear joe me say if he's still doing the midnight boys at 37 he's gonna have to reconsider his whole life a la tom holland so take that for what it's worth i'll tell you what though he got lucky for him if we would still be doing the midnight boys that's a wrong thing to fucking say
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Chapter 4: What themes of masculinity are explored through the character of Adam?
Why it's coming on after He-Man, I'm not sure. It should be coming on before. I'm not sure. But why it came on after in Baton Rouge, I'm not sure about it. But when I got home and I would get there and I would sit down and I would watch He-Man, He-Man wasn't just like an afternoon cartoon for me. Right?
Right.
It was something other than the Batman, Superman type of stuff that I was getting in the comic book shops and stuff like that. This was different. You go buy toys. The toys were active. You didn't just watch He-Man. You played He-Man. You'd set battles up. You would go get Ram Man. You would go get these people. You'd get Castle Grayskull. You'd get Snake Mountain.
In order to get into the entire thing, you had to live it. You had to be a part of it because there wasn't much story. Okay? There wasn't much to it.
It's the inverse of Star Wars where Star Wars comes out and then the toys explode. He-Man, they made the toys and the TV show is to sell them.
So what I'm saying is as much as I have, I'm saying this inartfully, as much as I have watched He-Man, I've also been He-Man, and that's different. I've been He-Man. I've played my own adventures. I've staged sieges on Grayskull. We've lost some, right? But then we've also sneak attacked Snake Mountain, and we've won some. We've taken Evelyn hostage. We shouldn't have done that, okay?
It was the 80s. Skeletor has had to come get it back. We've done surprises. I've done so much. But I never really got a chance to be in the world, besides the Dolph Lundgren masterpiece, in a way that I felt like saw me and rewarded me for all the time I put in. This was dwarf fan fiction. This was my fan fiction.
This was somebody actually taking all of the battles that I have played and making them come to life on the screen. It was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. It was actually maybe, in some places, incredibly messy, but I had a fucking shit ton of fun in Masters of the Universe, man. And it wasn't lame. My biggest...
fear for the movie is that the movie would be fucking lame y'all don't know what it's like i'm sure you guys do because you guys the anime shit and all that shit to wait 30 fucking years for something to be presented to you and not to have it be bad bad is acceptable but to have it be lame is just a kick in your nuts and i didn't feel like the movie was lame at all i had a lot of fun i liked it robert
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Chapter 5: What insights do the hosts provide about the future of superhero movies?
Like, it's bookended by, like, different types of Thor movies. In the middle, it tries to be Barbie. Yes. With that amount of sentiment. And, like, it's... We have Ken, clearly, with He-Man, who Adam himself is, like, kind of being played as this kind of, like...
It's supposed to be a bit of a dullard character, but also he's very socially repressed and doesn't really know how to operate in the world because he only has matured nothing past 10 years old. And it made me a little sad, but also there's this way of combating toxic masculinity and identifying what strength can look like in many different ways. And as muddied as it can be...
Getting to the end of all of that, I kind of wish that it did a little bit more to land those sentimental parts. But again, it still came across the finish line. It is kind of trading one for the other. And I think, Charles, you're absolutely right. It is what holds the movie back and also the reason it works.
It's like in those moments, when it is swinging for sentiment, I think it's pretty sentimental. And when it's swinging for comedy, it is a volume game. But it can be pretty funny. And when you step back after all of it, it's like, okay, I don't know how I feel about the... whole item of this, of what this movie is presenting. But in the moment, I just had a great time.
Right. Every time it feels like it's getting a little bit too much into itself to where it's going to lose you, something genuinely funny happens. Or something genuinely cool happens.
Like when Battle Cat comes at the end of the movie, I was just like, oh, wait, where was Battle Cat? And then I was like, oh, shit, he's back. He's back with the homies.
It's genuinely cool. And then they called him a fucking pussy. Yeah. Yeah. And the movie did do that a couple of times where it's like, you feel like the movie commits to early on. That's where you could tell there was a rewrite in there. The movie early on is like, this is a kid. This movie is going to be a movie that like is for more for kids or whatever like that.
It's going to be a softer touch. And then they put some jokes in there. You're like, oh shit. Like there's a joke about fisting. It was way too many. It was funny the first two times. Yeah, the jokes. They're trying to, like, the guys who fucking watch this, they're almost fucking 50 years old. Like, man, we got to give them something that they can laugh at.
There was an interesting scene that I wanted to bring up to you guys where I feel like this is pretty indicative of what the movie was trying to do. So Adam is on a date.
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Chapter 6: How does the film's portrayal of He-Man differ from previous adaptations?
highest favorability rating, you know? No. And there are all kinds of things about Jared Leto that have been alleged, talked about, doubled down on, and it's been for a while now. Now, I will say that unlike some of his contemporaries of the last 15 years, he has largely been able to avoid any... Responsibility whatsoever. Yeah, and any direct tainting.
Like, you think of Franco, you have an automatic response. You think of, like, Louis C.K., you have an automatic response. You think of some of these... Jared Leto... he's still been able to do like Morbius and like have fun with the Morbius stuff. He's still been able to do the Tron movie and kind of be around. It hasn't, he was in the Blade Runner. 2049. 2049.
I also, to be fair, I think a lot of these movies that he chose were in gestation for a long time. Right. And we are kind of getting, at least his vehicles, like 2049. A lot of these are like, we signed Jared Leto back before 2049. all the really abhorrent shit or around. And now we're like, because Masters of the Universe, they've been trying to make this movie for a while.
Same thing with the Tron sequel. I do think, though, that if this movie had come out or was scheduled for release some years earlier, that they move away from him. Right, or recast him. Or recast him. I mean, he wasn't heavily involved in the promotion of it still, not from what I saw.
But I do feel like if this movie were dropping in, I don't know, 22 or 23, where we're a little bit closer to people still acting like they had a moral center, that maybe they move away from him or they recast him.
But I mean, he was heavily in the promo for Tron, a Disney movie that was putting him front and center of everything in that. And even with his extracurriculars aside, he was kind of labeled box office poison by most of the things that he was in for many of these years. Those movies just weren't working. Yeah, because they weren't good.
Yeah, there's this larger conversation about predatory behavior and all that, and then there's just like, in most things, he's bad. Jared Leto was not good. Distractingly, annoyingly bad in the vast majority of his work. He has some high points of his career, and this is one of them, I think. In terms of the actual performance, it is quite good.
Yeah, because we do not have to see him, and I don't even think he was... I might be wrong. I don't think he was physically the character. I do think a lot of this is not just Jared Leto's voice acting. Whoever was on screen moving as Skeletor did a fucking phenomenal job.
They did a great job. Right. So the challenge with the character of Skeletor is, like we said before, Skeletor is both the comic relief of this, but also the sinister center evil of the entire story. That is very hard to do. It's very hard to do to make a compelling, comedic character that is also just the worst motherfucker in the whole fucking universe. Is he that bad? In actuality, yeah.
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Chapter 7: What are the comparisons made between this movie and other superhero films?
We are six months from you like living in a shed, newspapers over the windows, like scrawling the number 23 on the walls.
Like, I'm worried. I told you guys I was right. Okay. So, you know what? I'll tell you something. You truly are a midnight boy. You completely participated in a tangent that doesn't have very much to do with this movie.
I try.
And you did your thing. All right. Now, we've talked about it. We've gotten into the film. We've discussed it. I loved the movie. Last thing I'll say about the film.
Okay.
Number one, there are things, I have to tell you, things that I think they could have done better. Number one, they could have committed to a better tone. They could have actually committed to the story of Adam, which they kind of do, but they do in this film let the hijinks sometimes overrun the movie and not actually serve the movie. Hijinks in the movie are supposed to serve the movie.
There are also a couple of, I think, action set pieces in this that are supposed to be important that are just completely flat. One of them, I think Beastman attacking them in New York or Oklahoma City.
That was nothing.
That's terrible. That part almost actually lost me. In that part, there's actually an Amazon commercial in the middle of it. Amazon, do yourself a favor. We know that you're producing movies. Do not fucking do that again. An Amazon truck saves Adam. An Amazon truck saves Adam. I'm telling you guys, just listen to me. I'm not trying to be holier than thou with the whole thing.
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