Thursday, January 17, 2013

First drawing of She-Ra Princess of Power

A few days ago on January 11 my blog entry was an early concept drawing I created from the development of the original He-Man animated TV series in the early 1980s. I was also on the development team for the follow up series "She-Ra Princess of Power" in 1984. I have a lot of artwork from She-Ra that's never been seen before. 

Both of the franchises have a big worldwide following and there's an organization dedicated to preserving the history of the shows called the The Power and the Honor Foundation. Few people realize this but Filmation Studios which was the production company that created the cartoons would routinely discard the original artwork that was created by their artists once it served its purpose. I made it a point to save as much of what I did as possible. Thus the collection I have today preserving at least my creative contributions to what was happening at Filmation in the 1980s.

The Power and the Honor Foundation has been collecting art from that time as well. They surprised me last year in 2012 when they sent a copy of this drawing  to me that I forgot I did. It's the very first drawing of She-Ra from when we were developing the series in 1984. You can see how worn it is along the edges from years of handling. I thought it would be fun to feature it here and share it. I'll be following up with more art from She-Ra in days ahead.

4 comments:

Evelar said...

Mr. Zembillas:

This art of She-Ra is simply awesome. It's so good to have a chance to watch this art of yours. Splendid. Could you PLEASE post some more art? By the way, i'm from a Latin American site called MOTULA.org and is specialized in MOTU and all about it. It's in spanish for L.A. but believe me, there are people like me that love this kind of art. The original. The ones that started it all. We LOVE FILMATION. and you're part of it all!! Amazing! (I'm Mer-Man there, ha,ha!)

Charles Z said...

Hi Emerson. Thanks for your comments. Your site looks great! I'll do what I can to start getting more He-Man and She-Ra art online. I have a large archive of original work that's never been seen before. That's one of the problems I'm facing in getting it out. There's so much of it a major effort to digitize everything is needed. That plus I'm being pulled in several directions at once.

Now that I know there's a community I'll do my best in making more images available for fans to see. Thanks for checking in and good luck!

ToonJukka said...

Hello Mr. Zembrillas.

Saw you recently on the "Power of Grayskull - The Definitive He-Man" documentary. There was a quick glimpse of your early Horde Trooper concept sketch or two. Of them being different races. I'm a big fan of Horde Troopers and working on an "evolution of Horde Trooper" video for he-man.org. Wanted to ask your help if you can share these images of the Horde Troopers?

Sincerely Yours, Jukka Issakainen

Charles Z said...

Jukka Issakainen I apologize for the delay in responding to your comments. I'm not getting email notifications from Blogger for some reason concerning incoming comments. Anyway I'm going to be at this year's Power-Con in LA on Sunday Aug 26. There's a panel in the morning that I'll be part of. It's about the design of the original He-Man and She-Ra series which I was a part of. I'm bringing a collection of the unseen art from the development of the series. If you're there come on by and I'll show you what I've got.