I haven’t seen Masters of the Universe: Revelation because it hasn’t yet been released though it’s got Kevin Smith written all over the teaser.

Smith, the director of movies like Clerks (1994), Mallrats (1995), Chasing Amy (1997), Red State (2011), Tusk (2014), etc., is a child at heart, seemingly making him a perfect choice to write the story of a bunch of characters that adamantly refuse to grow up.

Watching the teaser joyfully takes one back to the early 1980’s, where outlandishly named characters like Triclops and Stinkor reigned.

It’s fascinating stuff though in that fascination likes the problem with trying to build a franchise based on Mattel’s Masters of the Universe action figures, namely they’re made for children in such a way that there’s no plausible deniability that they’re made for children.

There’s a reason that 1987’s Masters of the Universe failed – to be fair there’re lots of reasons that 1987’s Masters of the Universe failed – though an important one is that the characters never transcend the material.

Transformers, as goofy and equally nonsensical as it for the most part is, at least has characters that are capable of moving beyond the origins of the material – as Transformers (2007) and Bumblebee (2016) prove.

By comparison, Masters of the Universe is firmly entrenched in the past, which is a problem when everything else has moved on or at least marginally, grown up.