Daniel Pemberton, who chooses not to work on many franchise films or sequels, was only able to participate in creating the music for the new Masters of the Universe if he could create music inspired by Queen and ABBA.
Thankfully, not only was it exactly what sound director Travis Knight had hoped for, but Pemberton happened to run into Queen co-founder and guitarist Brian May while recording some of the early Masters of the Universe songs at Abbey Road Studios in London. After telling him about the project, May expressed enthusiasm for collaborating with the “Project Hail Mary” composer.
Jeff Spicer/Getty Images on Amazon MGM Studios and Sony Pictures
Musically, everything clicked in the studio when May pulled out her famous Red Special guitar. He built this guitar from recycled household materials as a teenager and used it during Queen’s live performances.
“While he was playing it, I thought, ‘This is actually the equivalent of Master Universe’s Sword of Power, because it’s an instrument forged in fire,'” Pemberton told Variety about the key guitar amp used in the film’s triumphant theme song. “He’s the only one who can play it and has the power to play it. And I think it’s a tool that saved a lot of people’s lives. When you look at it as a weapon, it gave the world so much hope and love.”
Based on the 1982 toy line-born Masters of the Universe universe, Knight’s take on the story maintains the silly ’80s tone of the original live-action film. Set on the planet Eternia, Nicholas Galitzine plays He-Man, and the film begins as a young child named Adam. After the evil Skeletor (Jared Leto) takes his parents away, Adam is plucked from Eternia and returns from the human world years later to assume his true identity as He-Man and save the Earth.
Pemberton and May co-wrote the theme song, “Electrica,” to coincide with He-Man’s transformation from an average young man to an all-powerful being, wielding a sword like no other. The song is a three-minute ballad featuring a 100-piece choir, 80-piece orchestra, rock band, and numerous synthesizers.
“I wanted grown men to feel like little boys again, and I wanted little boys to feel like grown men,” Pemberton says. “I wanted the weight and seriousness of a hard rock track mixed with the color, campiness, and a touch of cheese of a poppy Euro song. The surrounding influences[of the ’80s]were very pop-driven. I wanted the film to have a sensibility where as soon as it started, you knew something fun was about to happen. That’s the most important thing about this film. It’s unashamedly fun.”
Avid fans will be familiar with the theme of the animated show He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and probably expect to hear it, or at least expect to hear it. Pemberton teases that fans should hear it towards the end, but says incorporating original songs by Shuki Levy, Haim Saban and Lou Scheimer into the theme song didn’t work: “What’s interesting about ‘He-Man’ for me is that the baggage is just the aesthetic. I mean, obviously there’s a theme song, and it’s phenomenally catchy and an iconic part of people’s childhoods, but we tried it elsewhere in the movie and it was very difficult to make it work within the action beats of the movie, but that theme is at the beginning of every cartoon. It plays for 10 seconds, but it doesn’t last as long. ”
To compose the entire 140-minute film, which features 35 songs, Pemberton leant toward creating a “maximalist” score, writing it with “more of a rock and pop sensibility. It’s about being ridiculous and yet incredibly sincere. So we’re writing this music that’s very flashy, very theatrical, very flashy and very fun. It’s really all about the content.”
The release of Masters of the Universe comes after a particularly busy season for Pemberton, in which he scored two of the year’s most critically acclaimed films, Project Hail Mary and The Drama. As a composer who has dabbled in a variety of music genres, including composing for the films “Into the Spider-Verse,” Pemberton has become aware of the traditional sound of blockbusters and has deliberately moved away from them.
“Music is becoming less outwardly emotional, and that’s difficult. If you want to write incredibly emotional music or incredibly powerful music for a movie, it can feel ridiculous in modern idioms,” Pemberton says. “I always wonder when I see films with incredible scores like Star Wars: If that happened today, would studio executives throw it out in two seconds? Would audiences throw it out in two seconds?”
Pemberton isn’t shy about his thoughts on what superhero and blockbuster movies get wrong: “If you look at Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight,’ they took themselves very seriously, and the movie worked because it was very serious. But that’s not all superhero movies are incredibly serious. I think it led to the idea that, to me, most superhero movies are kind of ridiculous in nature, and they’re often afraid to admit it, but I think one of the characters called He-Man is called Fisto and Lum-Man!
In the end, he credited Knight with giving him a “very clear vision” for his Masters of the Universe from the beginning, saying, “You can’t overstate how important a director is to getting a good score. A director supports you, trusts you, and keeps you hooked. Travis definitely gets me hooked!”
