User blog comment:Jkl9817/Top 30 Animated Shows of the 2000s, Part 3 (10-1)/@comment-1874924-20120413024957/@comment-1874924-20120416024704

In addition to the original being explicitly geared to kids, the main dramatic difference is that the original had fewer major characters, or so it seemed to me. The remake seemed more of an ensemble show. The remake also had more sophisticated artwork and animation.

The remake also had a couple of major characterization changes. The most obvious difference is that Cringer/BattleCat (a green-and-yellow tiger who is Adam/He-Man's sidekick/steed) could talk in the original but not in the remake, and taking away the cat's meow, so to speak, was largely what created an opening for other characters to assume larger roles. Beyond that, the biggest characterization difference was for Ram Man. In the original, he was a squat little guy who would have trouble matching wits with a rock, and was a purely comic character. In the remake, he was of more or less average intelligence and much taller--a truly mighty warrior with a physique befitting his superpower, which was that he was basically a living battering ram. (He was afraid of the dark, though, which is something I reference in LTDI.)

The action takes place on a fictional planet called Eternia, which is also the name of the kingdom where the protagonists live. One episode in the original series, though, explicitly established that Marlena, the Eternian Queen, is from Earth. She was stranded on Eternia when her one-seat spaceship crashed. She eventually married a man who would later become King of Eternia.