Against all odds, Masters of the Universe is a masterpiece. Much of that credit goes to director Travis Knight, who took the visual storytelling skills he developed directing modern stop-motion classics like Paranorman and Kubo and the Two Strings and combined them with the explosive scale mastered making the best Transformers movie ever to unleash a candy-coated sci-fi fantasy summer spectacle. However, none of that would work without the movie’s bombastic orchestral-rock soundtrack from composer Daniel Pemberton (best known for the Spider-Verse and Bad Guys movies) with an assist from a literal rock and roll legend.
If you stick around for the credits of Masters of the Universe, you may notice one surprising name pop up: Brian May. The knighted rock god best known as lead guitarist of Queen gets a special shout out for his contributions to the movie, which help explain why the soundtrack rocks as hard as it does.
For Knight, working with May was pivotal to capturing the correct tone for Masters of the Universe, which drew from another classic sci-fi fantasy movie.
“The big musical touchstone was Flash Gordon,” Knight tells Polygon. “I loved Flash Gordon as a kid and I think one of the many reasons was that incredible, iconic score that Queen famously did. It was amazing. It had such joy, such spirit, such theatricality — this operatic, larger than life feel — but it also had real sincerity at its core. And that comes down to those incredible musicians. So Queen was definitely a touchstone for me and Daniel.”
There’s also a circular logic to modeling Masters of the Universe after Flash Gordon if you know your pop culture history. Back in the 1970s, George Lucas originally wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie, but when he couldn’t get the rights, he created Star Wars. Mattel then created He-Man and the Masters of the Universe franchise to compete with Star Wars toys. Bringing back May to help score Masters of the Universe completes the circle.
Still, it was nothing short of a miracle that the music icon said yes.
“Fast forward a year later, and we’re in Brian May’s home recording studio, and I’m just sitting there watching him on his Red Special playing with his sixpence,” Knight says, describing May’s custom-built electric guitar and the vintage British coin he uses to strum it in place of a traditional pick. “It was a surreal moment.”
Even then, Knight expected May to spare an hour or two at most for the movie. Instead, he spent an entire day working on the score.
“We were with him all day for like 10, 11 hours,” the director says. “It was almost midnight by the time we left this house.”
Finally, at the end of the day, May revealed why he not only agreed to work on Masters of the Universe but devoted an entire day to shredding on guitar for the movie.
“At the end of the session, he disappears,” Knight recalls. “I thought he was just tired, but then he shows up a handful of minutes later and he’s carrying two giant boxes of He-man toys that he still had in his attic from his son Jimmy. He put them on the ground in his recording studio. He pulled out the characters. He knew who they were. It was a crazy bizarro moment for me to be sitting there with Brian May as he’s talking about Skeletor and Man-E-Faces. It was so weird and also so cool.”
Masters of the Universe is in theaters now.
