Naked men in gay pride meme
Then came the resounding chorus, which could be construed as a sort of sexual awakening and need to take action: Just to get it all out what's in my head, What’s more, the lyrics to “What’s Up?” suited a narrative they were hoping to construct.įirst, there were the verses of questioning and hopelessness:Īnd so I cry sometimes when I'm lying in bed, Allen, a huge karaoke fan, liked the idea of He-Man straining to hit the high notes that Linda Perry crushed with 4 Non Blondes. The project, which they decided should be a music video, was a good excuse to meet up in person. “The guiding philosophy for it was ‘Let’s just try to make the most fabulous video ever,’” Allen recalls. They adored the emerging genre of adult cartoons on Cartoon Network, like Sealab 2021 (spoofing 1970s Hanna-Barbera shows) and Space Ghost Coast to Coast (reimagining its titular character as a talk-show host), and wanted to create something similar, so they purchased VHS tapes of old He-Man episodes off eBay. Both are straight and they’ve been friends since college. Haines lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Allen in Denton, Texas.
Neither realized they were about to create a meme, which 15 years later would go viral and change the toy universe forever.
#Naked men in gay pride meme tv
So, in 2003, two He-Man superfans, a 30-year-old web designer named Jay Allen and his 29-year-old friend Ryan Haines, who worked in TV production, decided to have a little fun with the tension. That’s a pretty positive message if you’re into the deeper undertones. WAS PRINCE ADAM battling against being closeted? If you believe that, then you can take heart in the fact that he transformed every episode-and always won, no matter what threats abounded. It’s super gay,” says Chlopecki, whose company has sponsored an adult-themed Skeletor art auction to benefit LGBTQ youth programs. It wasn’t until he became an adult that he interpreted what he had been seeing. David Chlopecki, owner of the men’s fetish-wear company Slick It Up and a lifelong He-Man fan, recalls feeling an unexplainable spark as a child watching He-Man. In the years after the show ceased production, others would share that opinion. “Everybody was saying, ‘Prince Adam is gay.’” “It was a joke in the studio,” Scheimer recalls. But Scheimer, who voiced characters in both He-Man and the sister-inspired spin-off She-Ra: Princess of Power, also points out that Filmation welcomed many openly gay artists throughout the 1980s who perhaps longed to see themselves onscreen. Erika Scheimer, the daughter of Filmation cofounder and He-Man executive producer Lou Scheimer (who passed away in 2013), says the show’s creators initially developed Prince Adam as a “soft prince” and He-Man as having “ten pounds of balls” to highlight the warrior-like transformation. Over the course of two seasons totaling 130 twenty-minute episodes, Adam’s sexuality gradually became a source of speculation for some viewers. After all, many fans seem ready for an openly gay He-Man, in part because for a lot of people, he has always been gay. Mattel has since announced new plans to reboot the series, with two shows in the works with Netflix- Masters of the Universe: Revelation (for adult fans) and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (to court the next generation), prompting a question about which version will appear next. (As the top comment on the video’s YouTube page puts it, “If this video is deleted will the internet die?”) Specifically, the popularity of a nostalgic and irreverent bootstrapped music video titled “Fabulous Secret Powers,” which redubs some of the original cartoon’s more evocative sequences to a techno version of 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” That homage went viral, with 170 million views on YouTube, and has since been clipped and shared as an endlessly joyful meme that both honors gay pride and serves as a sort of campy exclamation point for whatever adversity you might be experiencing, making it arguably a more indelible part of our culture than the show ever was. He was born out of something more modern and widespread: Internet mashup culture. Joe, Transformers, and the original He-Man series, Laughing Prince Adam wasn’t molded from a made-for-TV action figure.