How's He-Man bright light special effect done?

[TteFAboB]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc484IPLgxY

Though it doesn't look the same as on TV. Either the effects don't work on my monitor, or converting it to Flash ruined it, or these have been re-colored/re-mastered/re-whatever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKQxpDg9mag - This one looks a little better.

How the heck is that done if you remember the real effect, the real shiny white light at an extreme level of brightness? It can't be paint. You can't paint brightness on a piece of paper or plastic or whatever, there's no light-emitting magic paint out there. It's something else.

Here, this time the effect is in the water:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGV7WsNAZyc

There are other cartoons with these bizzare light effects. How the hell are them done and why don't they work properly on YouTube and have also disappeared from modern cartoons? Perhaps HDTV ruins the effect too?

EDIT: One more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjct-EHBYNY - this one apparently was recorded off a TV screen, so you can actually see a white blurr around the green cat. The top grade queer Spanish theme song sounds like something out of a cheap Village People cover record. Not that the whole thing isn't a gay kid's dream already. Now that I think of this, the shiny effects makes sense...

EDIT 2: Nevermind, this is the ultimate gay He-Man and it has the white blurring aswell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkFBKO9z08U

[TteFAboB]

Rotoscoping...

No wonder they use the same scene over and over again, that must have been a huge pain to make. They record something that glows alot and add it in the place of the manually made mask.

So simple, exactly like Lightsabers on the original Star Wars trilogy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rotoscoped_works