As the ‘80s cult classic turns 30 on Monday, Heat Vision took a look back via the documentary at some of the struggles the production faced, including a portion of the final battle between He-Man and Skeletor (Frank Langella) being fought on an empty stage, with a single light source because production had been shut down before they could finish.
“I saw the rough cuts, I listened to Dolph Lundgren’s voice and I just about had a heart attack,” Paul Cleveland, Mattel marketing executive says in the documentary. “It’s OK if He-Man has a little bit of an accent, but you have got to be able to understand him.”
The then-30-year-old Lundgren apparently struggled with his lines, and both Cleveland and director Gary Goddard wanted him dubbed, but the actor had it written into his contract that he got three attempts to get it right before he would be looped by someone else, the Mattel executive says in the documentary. “We actually did bring in a few actors to loop test, to show the studio, and one of them was flawless,” Goddard tells doc makers Corey Landis and Roger Lay Jr. “To this day, I wish we would’ve done it, but [producer] Menahem [Golan] was like, ‘Nope. We’re going to stick with Dolph.'”
