Eternia is where now?  According to a rumor on IESB, the new "Masters of the Universe" flick is having some pretty severe growing pains in the jump (back) to the big screen.  Blogger Robert Sanchez wrote: "I was told the current idea is to make Eternia here on Earth, kind of like a modern day Middle Earth."

As fans of the original series and its spin-offs know, this is a sharp departure from the setting we knew and loved.  Eternia was a sword-and-sorcery-and-tech landscape peopled with weird creatures and humans alike.  The link to Earth was via HeMan/Prince Adam's mother, a stranded astronaut named Marlena Glenn.  A fantasy setting meant the suspension of disbelief worked; changing the background, as cheestastic as it was, will not in fact make it the new "Lord of the Rings," but just another knockoff.  That Marks seems to be planning on doing the same thing to "Voltron" is not encouraging either.

Fans are fans and fans will come to films from the stories they loved, but the more the story changes, the less impetus there is to believe this is the same product.  (see: First He-Man Movie)

Writer Paul Dini, best known for his time on Lost and Batman: The Animated Series, worked on the original He-Man series back in the day, and commented on it in his blog recently :

Here's the deal with He-Man. When I wrote on the show way back when with Michael Reaves, Larry DiTillio, Tom Ruegger and a few others (I missed [J. Michael Straczynski] by a couple years) we did have some fun working on the initial stories and concepts. However, Mattel had come to Filmation to create an entire world from their then sparse toyline, and they made it painfully clear that none of the creative people at the studio, from the writers creating new characters for the merchandising lines to the artists designing the characters, would ever see a dime of that merchandise money. There were, I think, a few writers from prime time TV attached to the concept, and their deals specified that they got cuts of the ancilary money (they got paid better then we did, at any rate) but few, if any, of their ideas or concepts were ever used. Still they made money off the thing and the people really creating the show and characters got d*cked as far as the backend went. Wait, that's not entirely true. I did get an offical [sic]Mattel-produced pad of Masters of the Universe stationery with my name on it out of the deal. I still have it somewhere. Maybe I should sell it on e-bay and try to recoup that lost cash.

(Additional Source: Paul Dini's blog)