She-Ra and He-Man had a major impact on animation during their TV runs. All images © 1983/1984 Entertainment Rights plc; Characters © 1983/1984 Mattel Inc.; All rights reserved.

In recognition of the release of the original She-Ra and He-Man series on DVD, I met up with Lou Scheimer [whose Filmation Studios produced the series] at his home in Woodland Hills, California, to talk with him about the shows. I had worked on the He-Man and She-Ra shows as a character designer at Filmation all through the ‘80s. It was a major part of my early professional life and had a major impact on the animation industry in general. We went up to Lou’s home office with a spectacular view of the valley and surrounding area as our backdrop and began to talk about those He-Man days.

Dale Hendrickson: Well, Lou, as you look back on those shows, what stands out the most for you?

Lou Scheimer: Happy times. I mean, I had no idea; it was the nicest period of my life. I didn’t know what was really happening. I mean we’re saying OK at the time; it must be what we should be doing. We did it as well as we could do it. We created a whole concept of how to settle things and got the networks all pissed off which they deserved…

Lou Scheimer kick started TV animation, when it was going though a slump at the time, with a Mattel toy licensing deal.

DH: [Laughs]

LS: [Laughs] But we really had something special.

DH: Well it felt from my perspective that TV animation was in a bit of a slump, going through changes and you gave it a kick-start with the Mattel deal.

LS: That’s a long story, but let me say a little about that. The Mattel deal actually started right after we did Black Star. They came to me and they had this product. They had this deal with the Conan people, I didn’t know they had this guy coming out of the forest with a sword, and [they] wanted to know if I could sell it to the networks. I said yeah, I would try. I really didn’t like the story; it was pretty much a long toy commercial.

We were lucky though, because right around that time we had sold the company to, well, Teleprompter had sold the company to Westinghouse, and so we suddenly had an arm of the company that distributed stuff. I went to Westinghouse and said we have an opportunity to do something interesting here. Mattel has this toy line that they’re not sure what to do with. They want to release it the following year, but nobody knows about it, and they didn’t know how to get it on the air.

Mattel came to Scheimer with the He-Man toy and wanted him to sell it to the networks. He redeveloped the story and interested Westinghouse in the series. Seasons 1 and 2 are now available on DVD.

We went back to Mattel and told them if they let us develop it the way we think is appropriate, give us a shot at it, we would try to sell it into syndication and, on top of that, I got Westinghouse to finance it!

Mattel was in seventh heaven. I did not know what a great deal it was for them. I thought, wow, we could end up doing 65 of these a year, and keep people working all year, the way it should be, and do something for the industry! I went back to Mattel with the concept of Prince Atom, a father, son, mother, a family. Well, they didn’t know what to do with it, but we made a deal with them to give us creative control, We financed it and it was a good deal for us; the money that came in from syndication, which was good back then, but it was all luck. If the show hadn’t worked, it would have been death. We ended up doing about 223 episodes. That’s a lot of stuff!

DH: Yes, it kept me busy for many years.

LS: (laughs) Well, yeah, me too! I did not realize at the time how lucky we were. It seemed like it would never end.

DH: One of the things that impressed me about you, Lou, was your dedication to keeping the work here. It seemed you were one of the last holdouts.

LS: I found no joy in taking the work we do here and sending it overseas. There is no satisfaction in that. It just became a business without a heart.

DH: So Lou, how did you go from He-Man to She-Ra?

LS: Yeah, let’s talk about She-Ra. After a year or so of He-Man, Mattel came back to me and said they would like to do something with a girl character. We had done Isis and you had Supergirl, but what could I do to figure out how to do something with He-Man? Maybe it could be a sister that he didn’t know existed, something like that! Well it worked. Although Mattel had a bit of a problem, because now they didn’t know how to market it. Was it a girl’s toy in an action/adventure role that is usually reserved for boys? They didn’t know what to do. The show took off anyway. It was a hit. It broke all the records. It worked out having He-Man’s role in She-Ra. The network knew some of what they were getting, and girls actually already liked He-Man, so despite of the marketing confusion, it worked out great.

DH: Lou, I brought a few of my favorite designs in to show you.

LS: Oh, I would love to see them!

[At this point, I pull out model sheets of Frosta from the She-Ra series.]