Orko (Revelation)

In the 1983 Filmation cartoon Orko is the court magician at the Royal Palace, a floating red hat and robe with no face showing, and a Trollan whose spells keep going wrong on Eternia, usually to comic effect. Lou Scheimer voiced him, credited on screen as Erik Gunden, and the main Orko entry covers that run, his figures and every other era.

Masters of the Universe: Revelation opens as though it were the next episode of that cartoon, with Filmation-style narration, the same palace and the same jokes. It is a separate continuation made for Netflix, and this site treats it, like every series after the Filmation original, as additional material that sits outside the classic canon. This page covers Orko as Revelation writes him, voiced by Griffin Newman, across Part 1 and the finale of Part 2.^[1]

At the palace party for Teela's knighthood in "The Power of Grayskull," written by Kevin Smith, Orko is still the Filmation clown. Cringer panics at the fireworks, and Orko answers with a rhyme that seals the cat inside a soundproof bubble, then admits that Cringer cannot breathe in there. By the end of that episode He-Man is gone, the Sword of Power is broken and Teela has walked out of the palace.

In "The Most Dangerous Man in Eternia" magic is draining out of Eternia and Orko is fading with it, so ill that Teela's errand in the episode is a cup of enchanted water to keep him alive. When Roboto offers to reforge the Sword from Duncan's memories, Orko insists on coming along anyway, with a plea for one more adventure that ends "I'll be good." Duncan starts to apologise to him and breaks off before he can finish.

Tim Sheridan wrote "Land of the Dead," and Orko is at the centre of it. Subternia scatters the party on arrival, and he lands with Evil-Lyn, first in an illusion of Trolla and then in a library built around the Spellspring, a fountain that has run dry. Evil-Lyn spends the early minutes calling him a simpleton and an imbecile, until the two of them sit down in the library and he starts to talk.

His parents named him Oracle, he explains, after the place of honour they expected him to reach; a small child's pronunciation turned it into Orko, and he thinks they were glad it stuck. Then he tells her, "I was the least of them, now I may be the last. That's funny, right?" Evil-Lyn does not console him. She tells him he will have to fight for everything nobody hands him, and that people who call him weak do not understand how far even a small strength can reach; a moment later she admits that nobody ever called her Evil, and that she added the word herself.

Scare Glow tells Teela, "I have the power... because you surrender it," and she beats him by refusing to give hers up. Orko does the same at the gate. When the party reunites and Evil-Lyn opens a gate to Preternia, Scare Glow attacks, and Orko puts himself in front of the demon and casts him out with a spell he is thrilled to see working: "Look! Lyn! I'm doing it! Me!" The spell takes everything he has, and when the light fades Teela is left holding his empty cloak.

Clipped from our own copy of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Energy Beast (1984), 1:46 to 3:27, 1 minute 42 seconds. Nothing is added and nothing is sped up. Copyright Mattel.

Orko is missing from the rest of the story until the finale, "Comes With Everything You See Here," written by Eric Carrasco. Scare Glow is standing over King Randor with a spear when Orko arrives back from the dead in a white robe and red tabard, and he faces the demon without fear. Scare Glow has been saying that a king's fear tastes best of all, and Orko hands the line back to him: "I heard you say a king's fear tastes best of all. So that means the king of fear must be delicious."

Before the episode is out he tells his friends, "I knew I'd have to go back," and adds that he is grateful for the chance to say goodbye this time.

Orko is alive again in Masters of the Universe: Revolution, the 2024 sequel, and its first episode, "Even for Kings," sends him back down to Subternia with Adam to ask Scare Glow for the souls of Clamp Champ and Fisto. Later in that series Adam hands him the Sword of Power at the coronation, and in the final episode he and Evil-Lyn are given the job of protecting Teela.

The 1987 live-action film has no Orko at all: he was planned, but proved too hard to realise on screen, so the film created Gwildor, the inventor of the Cosmic Key, played by Billy Barty, to take the sidekick's place. Revolution later puts Gwildor himself on Eternia as a locksmith in "More Things in Heaven and Eternia," and Orko tags along to see him. The 2026 Masters of the Universe film saves its Orko for the end, where Christopher Ragland voices him in the first of the post-credits scenes.