Inside the Masters of the Universe art department: the set visit Pixel Dan sat on for a year

Mild spoiler warning: the video this post is built on discusses the film’s designs and locations, and so does this article.

The most interesting thing about Pixel Dan’s new set visit video is when it was filmed. He went to London roughly a year ago, walked into the Masters of the Universe art department, and then had to sit on everything he saw until now. No trailer had dropped. No costume design was public. Nobody outside the production knew whether Travis Knight’s film was going to look like Eternia or like a car park in Vancouver.

Every frame of art department material in that video is below, captioned board by board and threaded through the story it belongs to. Twenty seven plates. Click any one to open it full screen, then arrow through the rest.

The full set visit, filmed in London and published August 1, 2026. Video: Pixel Dan. Watch it there, it is his footage and there is a lot more in it than we cover here.

The first thing through the door was a Fright Fighter

Dan’s account of walking in is the part worth pausing on. The first concept art he saw was the Fright Fighter, spinning blades and all, and he says he recognised it instantly. Around it were the Sky Sled off the front of the Battle Ram, the Roton, and a plate of Teela’s ship being chased by Fright Fighters.

That reads as unremarkable now, because the marketing has since shown most of it. A year ago it was the answer to the only question that mattered. The vintage vehicle line-up was locked into this film long before anyone outside the building was told, and it was locked in looking like the toys rather than like a grounded reinterpretation of the toys.

Guy Hendrix Dyas, and the end of the silver and gray world

The production designer walking Dan through this is Guy Hendrix Dyas, who came to Eternia off a run with Christopher Nolan, Ang Lee and Steven Spielberg. His pitch for the look is refreshingly blunt: he describes the job as liberating because the film is “no longer just stuck in that sort of silver and gray world.”

That single line explains most of what people have responded to in the finished film.

It also explains why the art department was working from a printed design compendium rather than a mood board, which is the sort of detail that tells you how seriously a production is taking its own world.

Snake Mountain in the finished film. Source: Amazon MGM Studios.

He was annoyed about the cartoon’s geography, so he fixed it

The best moment in the video is Dyas explaining why he drew proper maps of Eternia. His complaint is one every kid who watched the Filmation series eventually had, which is that characters get “from Grayskull to Snake Mountain in 3 minutes. It doesn’t make any sense.”

So he built a world with real distances in it, and gave Castle Grayskull a job. In his design it is not just a fortress with a secret in the basement, it is Eternia’s seat of government, the place the important people meet. At its centre he put a giant column of stone with each of the kings carved out of it, which is the kind of idea that quietly does a franchise’s worldbuilding forty years late.

The sketchbook pages are where that work lives. Plate 11 is the map itself, routes and distances annotated in red.

The Castle Grayskull that did not get built

Dyas drew full plans for Castle Grayskull and pushed hard to build the whole thing practically. He lost, twice over. It was going to be enormous and enormously expensive, and it was also judged too much of a giveaway to have standing on a stage where it might be seen.

The compromise was to build the lower section around the drawbridge and, in his words, spread the wealth to other sets. That is why the castle reads as real in the shots it appears in, and it is also why you never get a clean establishing walk around it.

There is a lovely footnote to this. Grayskull’s teeth were pulled off the set when it came down and put into storage, so somewhere in a facility outside London there is a crate with the jaw of Castle Grayskull in it.

Practical sets carried a large share of the film. Source: Amazon MGM Studios.

What it cost to build for real

The miniatures Dyas shows are the working models for sets that were then constructed at scale. He points at one cutaway piece and notes that they built large portions of that environment on a massive stage, before adding that it is all but gone now.

Struck sets are normal. Hearing a designer say it out loud about a film released two months ago is still a small gut punch, and it is the strongest argument in the video that this production spent its money where the audience could see it.

Dan says more from the trip is coming over the next few weeks, including costumes, weapons and the sets themselves. On this evidence it is worth following.

If you want this material properly printed rather than screengrabbed, the official book is Masters of the Universe: The Art of the Film by Dan Jolin, with a foreword from Travis Knight. It is 224 pages from Mattel Press, dated September 22, and it covers the same design process in far more depth. It is linked below.

Sources

Film stills: Amazon MGM Studios, rehosted to heman.org. Set visit footage, all concept art frames and all quotes: Pixel Dan. Concept art and Design Compendium material remains the property of Amazon MGM Studios and the production’s art department; frames are reproduced here for commentary and reporting.

• Masters of the Universe Production Designer Reveals Secret Concept Art! - Pixel Dan (August 1, 2026)
• ‘Masters of the Universe’ Is Officially Doing What Modern Fantasy Movies Forgot How To Do - Collider
• Masters of the Universe: The Art of the Film - Mattel Press via Simon & Schuster
• heman.org: Nicholas Galitzine on building He-Man’s physicality and shooting Snake Mountain
• heman.org: Where to watch Masters of the Universe