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“Daimar the Demon” is one of the earliest examples of a pretty awful trend on He-Man: the casting of Orko as a little kid. Now obviously, he’s the show’s sidekick and intended as an audience surrogate (as evidenced as being voiced by Lou Scheimer, who always voiced those characters at #Filmation), but episodes like “Dawn of Dragoon” show that he’s incredibly capable, if a bit lacking in confidence in his abilities on Eternia. This results in a bit of a misguided premise.
What saves the episode, I think, is that this was directed by Hal Sutherland, the last episode of he’d direct, and the next to last before helming Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, Filmation’s underrated (and shockingly dark) sequel to the book (and not the movie, as Disney tried to insinuate in a lawsuit that helped to doom #Filmation). While Sutherland’s use of stock footage has some wonky bits, and there are a couple of odd animation errors near the end, he paces things quite well.
While the wonky stock usage is strange since Sutherland’s role as He-Man’s production director meant that he directed the rotoscoped stock footage using local bodybuilders, the pacing and moments of truly good animation are no surprise given his record at #Filmation.
The meat of the story (finding friends and exercising personal choice over one’s life) are good, valid things that deserved the quality direction it got, but the infantilizing of Orko is not my favorite thing at all.