You Knew This Day Thread Was Coming

It’s a video that needs no introduction…except, ironically, it kind of does.

“Fabulous Secret Powers” is of course a viral masterpiece of internet pop culture. And bizarrely, there’s a good chance you’ve never watched the original version. The upload on YouTube everyone knows–which has more than 229 million views–is in fact stolen. Didn’t you guys ever listen to He-Man at the end of each episode? “Stealing is wrong, kids! So please don’t do it. Thank you.”

The true version of the music video is actually longer than the one you’re familiar with, which removes some narration and a slower, more melancholy opening to the song as well as an equally downbeat conclusion. But the real reason this portion got taken out was that it credited the original creator–“SlackCircus”–and as such denied their channel of God knows how many potential hits. Again, didn’t you people listen to Man-at-Arms at the end of the episode? “Uploading someone else’s content on a profitable video-sharing platform without so much as crediting them is wrong but also technically not illegal in many cases, you scummy fucks!”

There are a number of convoluted reasons for why this was able to happen. For starters, the creation of “Fabulous Secret Powers” predates YouTube becoming the online powerhouse it quickly turned into–you are that old–and as such they were slow to put it on the website themselves. Others proved all to eager to beat them to the punch. But the real kicker came when they made the mistake of posting the video on Vimeo without a watermark and allowing users to download it in high quality. After that, it was open season. An attempt made by Slack to copyright strike the most nefarious reupload was met with so much backlash that they almost immediately reversed the decision. So they just had to make peace with their content being taken and there really being nothing they could do about it. And didn’t you guys listen to Orko at the end of each He-Man story? “Don’t eat too many sweets, especially between meals, or you might fill yourselves up like I did and have Mpreg fanart of yourself posted on DeviantArt, and good luck explaining that to your mom.” Look, the morals weren’t always connected to the episode, okay?

Slack would eventually kind of sort of get the credit they deserve with something which has practically become part of the Masters of the Universe brand by now. But only kind of sort of. To this day, they still have only a small fraction of the views of uploads from other channels, and nothing else they made ever really took off. They have made other He-Man music videos, and chances are you’ve never even heard of them, so here are two of them which are pretty funny if not far more niche than the one they should have become famous for. Didn’t you guys listen to Evil-Lyn at the end of each episode? “What are you looking at me for? I never did these morals, you stupid fucks! Away with you! I’ve got to help Skeletor commit felony tax evasion again!”

Have the power today, y’all!