As I have oft remarked before, few cultural phenomena, past or present, offer us the same veritable cornucopia of cultural introspectivity as does He-Man (laugh now if you must, but some day I’ll write a terribly silly thesis paper and get nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize or something, like Jimmy Carter, The State of Missouri, and the Snufalufagus, who, in case you haven’t been reading the papers, has recently made great strides in bringing peace to the Middle East through an innovative fusion of interpretive dancing and punching people in the face). Today, we’re going to take a closer look at an issue that He-Man always dealt with this surprising and brutal yet refreshing frankness: The place of giant talking cats in society. Okay, not really, that one’s for later. In truth, we’re taking a look at the eternally aggravating and befuddling generation gap.

Seriously, no show ever dealt so honestly and openly with the inevitable frictions which arise when children choose a radically different path than their parents did. For instance, He-Man’s parents were King Randor and the ever memorable Queen Whatsherface. One imagines that they expected their only son to grow up to be a king (or, barring that, a tolerably butch queen of some sort). Much to their certain disappointment, he spent most of his days wearing tights and a pink sweater vest around the palace while hanging out with the Cowardly Lion’s brother and some kind of a faceless wizard in a giant monogrammed tube sock. And you thought your parents were dismayed when you came home sporting a mullet that one time (assuming, of course, that a person truly can, in any real sense of the word "sport" a mullet).

And what about Teela’s mother and adoptive father, the Sorceress and Man-at-Arms? I’m sure that between the two of them, they expected her to spend all her time mumbling incoherent prophecies, wearing a suit of armor with a built-in feeding trough while frequently turning into a bird and getting captured by Skeletor. Instead she goes gadding about Eternia all whored up with some skanky valkyrie armor on, beating all manner of things with her energy staff and maintaining an on-again-off-again relationship with a large, deeply tanned man who goes about in his underwear and talks like the god of monster truck announcers.

But that’s just the beginning, for I find it extremely doubtful that Fisto’s parents wanted him to buy a wife-beater off a dead pirate and start a career in the lucrative field of having a giant metal hand that looks silly and makes you walk in circles like Grover Cleveland. They wanted him to be an accountant with a giant metal hand that looks silly and makes you walk in circle, like his father, Carl Fisto. And of course Spoutsnout’s mother was absolutely apalled when his guidance councillor steered him into the field of having an aluminum elephant for a head; she wanted him to be a rabbi like his Uncle Mordecaisnout.

Last of all, we come to the saddest of tales, that of Beast Man and his estranged but ever beloved son, Bob Dole. Beast Man, who had always hoped young Bob Dole would follow in his footsteps as an evil comedy relief flunky was terribly disappointed when his eldest son enlisted in the armed forces instead, but what really drove them apart was when Bob Dole decided to run for the Senate as a Republican. Beast Man, of course, was a stalwart pro-union, yellow dog Democrat through and through, just like his coal mining forefathers back in Eternia City, West Virginia had been before him. Of course, for his son to throw his lot in with the GOP was simply too much for him to bear, and aside from getting the occasional tear in his eye when a Viagra ad comes on TV, Beast Man denies to this very day that he ever had a son at all.

Take note then, lest any of you fall to similar fates, for if tragedies such as these can strike such noble souls as Beast Man and Spoutsnout, just think what may befall us lesser mortals. To close with the immortal words of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (Young not available in Alaska, Hawaii, or Puerto Rico), "Teach your children well, otherwise they’ll turn into Bob Dole."