Image copyright Filmation
At the risk of being controversial (lol, jk, IDGAF,) I will say that, for girls outside the binary, the mid-eighties were not a veritable hotbed of choice, including but not limited to cartoons, and pls keep in mind how much I dislike using the word *hotbed*. Which is not to say that there weren’t interesting female cartoon characters: we had Barbie, Barbie and the Rockers, Jem, and Penny from Inspector Gadget, who basically invented the fucking laptop, only to have her triumphs against the pitiless Dr Claw usurped by her basically illiterate uncle and a fucking dog. We had the petty, gold digging wives of The Flintstones and the Jetsons, who lived in a futuristic wonderland in which women drivers were still a big problem. We had, in Scooby Doo, the attractive Daphne, who wore sweaters and had the canted hip down to a science, and Velma, who was always clever and introspective in spite of her plainness, and whom, for some reason, has a huge ass in recent reboots. Suffice it to say, everyone was white af.
1985 or so was a weird time to be alive. Ketchup was a vegetable. The government wanted us all to know that HIV/AIDS was not a big problem. People still thought Chevy Chase was funny. As a ten-year-old girl who did not know what consent- let alone binary- meant, I spent a lot of time paying attention to the actions of ppl who I assumed were good and intelligent. Like, my parents. I mean not so much my dad, even I knew he was an ignorant fuck. No one explained to me that men, or really any man, didn’t have and deserve access to my body, and that I couldn’t tell these men to fuck off to mars, or that I might not even be attracted to men, because my desire and happiness was so obviously not a factor. Still, me and my sister scoured books and popular culture for examples of cool, funny female characters who dgaf what their male counterparts said, thought or did, and could match them step for step and even, ok who am I kidding, definitely, surpassed them in talent and intelligence.
For some reason we became obsessed with the show He Man and The Masters of the Universe, which played every weekday at four in the afternoon on TV 44 KBHK in the greater Bay Area. This was before all your Cartoon Networks and Nickelodeons and whatnot, she wrote, sounding old af. We had cartoons on Saturday morning for a few hours before bowling started and we had cartoons on a few channels from like three to five in the evening, when the local news would keep us all abreast of streakers and local high school sports stars who would eventually become the owners of auto malls. Anyway, He Man. It was, wow, like, the most homoerotic shit ever, with ridiculous muscles and furry undies and unintentionally hilarious dialogue such as “GIVE ME THAT MAGIC STAFF OF YOURS!” and “I AM NOT THE KING OF BEASTS FOR NOTHING.” It centered on a kingdom named Greyskull in a future land called Eterna and a prince named Adam who was secretly Eterna’s greatest hero, He-Man. Hardly any knew for some reason even though Adam and He-man looked almost exactly alike and were constantly alluding to the fact that they were the same person by muttering shit that should have been parts of their inner monologue and terrible puns that no one questioned. The threat to Eterna was some manner of muscular, gay skeleton named Skeletor. It was never openly mentioned that Skeletor was gay, but, jesus christ, come on. I was ten but I knew who Paul fucking Lynde was. And Skeletor spent most of his time holed up in the dramatically named Snake Mountain draped over his throne giving out long fucking lamenting spotlight monologues like Brett Somers circa 1968 at the Hollywood Pantages Theater. I either can’t remember or never knew why he wanted to overthrow Eterna. IDK, maybe Castle Greyskull had better lighting or was closer to the restaurant district. Anyway, the whole thing of this was to explain that this show had exactly four women in it.
Teela: maybe Prince Adam’s girlfriend and also one of his parners in battle. Her dad was a deeply mustached character called Man of War, who was always on her ass for something or another. She had a very severe bun and a tiny waist and massively muscled things, I guess for use in battle.
Adam’s mom whom I’m too lazy to Google: Just kind of hung around in diaphanous robes wondering when Adam was going to get married LMAO.
The Scorceress: Like Teela but English for some reason and wearing an elaborate bird headdress. She contains the power of Castle Greyskull and decided to give it to a spoiled prince in furry undies with zero talent or charisma instead of...literally anyone else. Very breathy delivery, possibly on drugs but bogarting them.
Evil-Lyn: Fucking amazing eyebrows. Evil. Super done with Skeletor’s garbage. Often house-sat for him while he was away at Burning Man or whatever and was his most trusted ally which is not saying much because his other friends were named Gore-illa, Trap Jaw and Stinkor. Almost certain bi, thank the lord.
Our time with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was brief, as my sister and I quickly moved on to more serious pursuits like Robotech and Kiefer Sutherland, and our roughly eight hundred dollars worth of merch was eventually sold at a garage sale in Pacifica by my sister and her best friend, alongside opened cans of hairspray and a ColecoVision. What had we learned? That we needed to be creative regardless of the show we were watching, to add characters of color and Enby characters and just straight up femme characters that might pass the Bechdel Test, years and years before it even existed. We dreamed and wrote in Hello Kitty diaries that locked badly or not at all. We set our dreams to music, sometimes embarrassingly so. We saw a need and assumed that we were the only ones who felt that way. I lot of times, usually while drunk, I think about the person I would have been if I’d had Rey, or the Crystal Gems, or even Sandy fucking Cheeks from Spongebob Squarepants, but ofc that is irrelevent because my kids have these characters and though them and something even without them I have these characters now, too.
Nadine Darling lives in Boston with her family. She is the author of the novel She Came From Beyond!