He has the power ...

Toys Henry Jenkins offers a spirited defence of He-Man toys for their ability to inspire a child's imagination:

"The child themselves might become He-Man or some of the other characters through Halloween dress-ups and the web is full of yellowing family photographs of children of my son's generation physically embodying the heroes of their programs. Their mothers (or in my son's case, their grandmothers) might be coaxed into decorating birthday cakes with images copied from He-Man coloring books. And those lacking coloring books (or possessing artistic temperaments) would draw their own pictures of these characters which gave another tangible form to their fantasy lives. My son wrote countless stories which he dictated to his mother and I about He-Man and in the process, he moved from playing with physical objects to playing with words and with the basic building blocks of narratives."

The ropiness of some of the animation in the tv series would certainly have been a catalyst for some of this, though of course that also made the characters easier to draw. I wonder if new television shows which are far more information rich (visually as well as in terms of describing a context) is still having the same effect.