Bring back the coolest animated series (and coolest animated sword) of 1981

And so it went, yr after yr, with the bulletins about 2018’s Netflix reboot of She-Ra: Princess of Energy, 2021’s He-Man reboot Masters of the Universe: Revelation, the CG model of Inspector Gadget, the American Voltron replace Voltron: Legendary Defender, half a dozen new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers initiatives, a little-loved second Thundercats collection, and each single Smurfs film. I get it — the youngsters of the ’80s are producers and writers and showrunners now, with sufficient clout to get their childhood reminiscences was new reveals. However apparently none of them watched Blackstar, simply one of many coolest animated collection of the Nineteen Eighties, constructed across the coolest sword.

There’s a direct genetic line between the success of 1977’s Star Wars and the wave of space-set, fantasy-themed Saturday morning cartoons that intently adopted. Star Wars beget ABC’s common Thundarr the Barbarian, a post-apocalyptic dystopian-future fantasy a few muscular hero who fought oppressive magical villains whereas carrying a fur skirt, hanging out with a leotard-clad sorceress, and roughly carrying a lightsaber and touring with a Wookiee. Thundarr helped encourage Blackstar, CBS’ equal present, a few muscular hero who fought oppressive magical villains whereas carrying a fur skirt, hanging out with a leotard-clad sorceress, and carrying his personal type of laser sword. (No Wookiee, although — as a substitute, collection hero Blackstar obtained to experience a dragon.)

Each reveals had been on the vanguard of the post-Star Wars darkish fantasy wave, which included films like Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, and Dragonslayer. However in contrast to most of these ’80s fantasies — Flash Gordon apart — Thundarr and Blackstar saved a foot in Star Wars’ science fiction roots, hanging onto the concept of worlds the place expertise and mysticism met and clashed. Thundarr was extra common, however Blackstar was extra compelling: a weirder, darker, richer world with much more occurring, and a way more imaginative sword that wasn’t only a calmly reskinned lightsaber. Although the present solely managed a single season and 13 episodes (in contrast with Thundarr’s two-year, 21-episode stint), Blackstar’s potential nonetheless sticks with me a long time later.

The story in short: An astronaut from a future Earth, John Blackstar, enters a black gap in his experimental timeship, and winds up trapped on an historical alien world, filled with magic and monsters. (It’s basically an isekai collection, a long time earlier than isekai was the most popular development in anime and manga.)

The native Sauron equal, the Overlord, dominates the planet Sagar with an artifact known as the Powerstar, an enormous two-handed crystalline vitality sword. One way or the other, the Powerstar will get damaged into similar halves, producing two badass weapons: the Energy Sword, which the Overlord nonetheless holds, and the Star Sword, which falls into Blackstar’s palms. Blackstar winds up because the figurehead in a rising rebel in opposition to the Overlord’s tyranny. In the meantime, the Overlord needs not simply to squash this budding rebel, however to reclaim the Star Sword and take up the Powerstar once more.

In a collection of interviews for Blackstar’s 2006 DVD launch, the creators and writers cop to a few of their influences in writing the present: The protagonist is slightly bit John Carter of Mars (the unique Edgar Rice Burroughs model, not the 2012 fantasy-movie model) and slightly bit Flash Gordon, although he additionally intently resembles the protagonist of the 1979 live-action collection Buck Rogers within the twenty fifth Century. The Trobbits — tiny comedy-relief individuals who discover and rescue Blackstar after his timeship crashes — take slightly inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits, and much more from Disney’s seven dwarfs, full with the “one character trait apiece” dynamic, and a youngest member who by no means speaks. (There are additionally seven of them.)

The Overlord is someplace between Darth Vader and Ming the Cruel, whereas Blackstar’s sorceress companion, Mara, is mainly only a reskin of Thundarr’s Princess Ariel, with very related powers, an analogous elegant, educated character and position as social gathering historian, and related apparent crush on the oblivious hero.

Though these characters not often really feel distinctive, the mythology and setting of Blackstar’s world very a lot do, and the central plot machine of the Powerstar is exclusive in fantasy animation. The symmetry of the central villain and hero every having half of the world’s most legendary weapon — which is to say, half of the ability left in a world struggling to outline itself — is a intelligent riff on the concept heroes and villains ought to mirror one another for max thematic influence. Their connection via the sundered Powerstar provides the protagonist and antagonist an intimate private connection, a cause to conflict time and again.

It additionally helps outline their characters, and what they do with energy. It’s no coincidence that within the Overlord’s palms, the Energy Sword is all blunt drive, used solely to blast or slash, whereas Blackstar makes use of the Star Sword as a finesse weapon with versatile magical talents. (Too versatile, actually: Its magic is ill-defined, and the present’s writers invented new Star Sword powers in practically each episode.) The concept of those two swords as yin and yang, excellent halves that assemble right into a better complete, is unusually elegant for an ’80s cartoon — and one of many collection’ many concepts that was by no means actually explored to full benefit.

For contemporary viewers, Blackstar is pretty near unwatchable. Its manufacturing firm, Filmation, emerged from a collection of business jobs within the Sixties, however by the Nineteen Eighties, it specialised in budget-priced tv animated totally in America, quite than in cheaper abroad manufacturing homes. That necessitated a number of cost-saving units, like recycling the identical hand-drawn sequences many instances over, usually throughout the similar episode, and utilizing a hilariously restricted library of sound results.

Blackstar’s sound design is garish and repetitive, with vocal work that seems like virtually everyone seems to be shouting. The scripts are clunky: Blackstar is conceived as a quippy hero who peppers his foes with snarky one-liners, however his jokes are cataclysmically stiff. About the perfect he can muster is a jaunty “Placing on slightly weight, aren’t you, Rocko?” when hefting one rock elemental to toss it onto one other throughout a battle.

And the collection is designed for the syndication of the period, which means that episodes would possibly re-air in any order. So there’s no story improvement, no character arcs, not even a gap episode to ascertain Blackstar’s origins. Continuity glitches, inconsistent design and storytelling, and budget-saving gradual pans throughout work abound.

However the world it’s set in is fascinating. There are hints right here and there of historical applied sciences and centuries-old civilizations buried underneath what’s turn into a verdant forest, centered on the magic of the large central Sagar tree, a mystic font of energy the Trobbits reside in and have a tendency to. Sagar is a world filled with bizarre creatures that appear both like evolutions of acquainted animals, or like magical constructs — shark-bats and frog-rabbits and monkey-birds, lengthy earlier than Avatar: The Final Airbender made these sorts of amalgams a working joke. These slow-pan, cash-saving portray backgrounds are wealthy, elaborate, and colourful, suggesting a world with the darkness and element of Jim Henson’s The Darkish Crystal.

Whereas a lot of Nineteen Eighties animation was in regards to the clear line between good and evil, there’s a way all through Blackstar that a lot of the world of Sagar isn’t aspected in such a black-and-white means. It’s only a chaotic wreck, the place hungry monsters, prim however weary civilizations, and barbaric enclaves all exist facet by facet, divided by deadly geography. Each scattered outpost and wandering monster is equally harmful to Blackstar and the Overlord, however ripe for both of them to take advantage of for a bonus of their ongoing warfare. There are even hints at a nuanced system for magic, the place the psychological energy of sorcery and the fundamental energy of nature magic are various things that work in several methods.

After Blackstar’s single season ended, Filmation instantly adopted it with the Mattel-backed and much better funded He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, a collection primarily based on an current toy line, however simply as clearly primarily based on components borrowed from Blackstar. As soon as once more, there’s a muscular hero in a fur skirt with a magic sword, battling a sorcerous villain in a chaotic techno-fantasy world filled with environmental hazards and bizarre, wildly various humanoids.

Filmation common Alan Oppenheimer voiced each Blackstar’s Overlord and He-Man’s Skeletor; equally, Linda Gary voiced Blackstar’s main woman Mara and He-Man’s Teela. Filmation employees author Tom Ruegger developed the collection bible for each reveals, and it reveals, in all the pieces from the same heroes’ and rogues’ galleries to the sprawling high-and-low-tech world the place magic and robots co-exist. One He-Man episode, “The Treatment,” even reused a number of Blackstar sequences, reintroducing Blackstar’s dragon-horse Warlock as a beast He-Man saves from a large spider, then rides round.

Whereas He-Man had lots of the similar budgetary and aesthetic limitations as Blackstar — regularly recycled animation, obnoxious sound design, goofy and sometimes ineffectual comedy aid — He-Man was instantly extra common. So common, in reality, that toy maker Galoob tried to nab a few of Mattel’s gross sales success by placing out a weirdly modeled toy line for Blackstar, two full years after the present was canceled. (These toys didn’t do properly.) Now, we’re in an period the place He-Man will get reboot after reboot — an all-ages animated model, a CG model for youths, a brand new live-action film scheduled for 2026 — whereas Blackstar is all however forgotten.

And I discover that so unusual. The bid to reboot and replace each hit cartoon of the Nineteen Eighties looks as if a pure sufficient development for an period of media fueled by nostalgia, however I’ve by no means understood why there isn’t extra of it for Blackstar, a collection that was extra imaginative and bold than both the predecessor it was making an attempt to outdo or the follower that obtained all of the glory.

In the way in which of so many different ’80s cartoons, my curiosity in a reboot is far much less about re-creating an usually janky, restricted, cheaply made TV collection, and way more about realizing the potential these characters and this world couldn’t benefit from within the Nineteen Eighties. A contemporary model with up-to-date animation may give John Blackstar a correct backstory, and truly make some sense of the largest hero/villain themes the ’80s model calmly touched on. It may benefit from the retro-future magic setting and the sprawling authentic world of Sagar in methods Filmation by no means dreamed of.