BRAVESTARR-- THE LEGEND (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, metaphysical, sociological*

While no company wants to fail, if that's what fate has in the cards, it;s generally best from the POV of posterity to go out on a high note. 

Filmation Studio had many high and low points in its twenty-something years of existence. The last animated teleseries from the company, the "space western" BRAVESTARR, recapitulated in almost equal measure most of the studio's good and bad habits. But the main problem with the teleseries was that, unlike most celebrated toys-made-into-cartoons, the toy line didn't appear in stories until a year or so after the series had run its course from 1987-1988. Then, as if to gamble on a big-screen version of their last effort, Filmation rolled the dice with BRAVESTARR-- THE LEGEND, something of an "origin story" for the show's heroes and villains.

I concur with one online review to the effect that the animation on this project was the best the company had ever produced, particularly in the opening scenes, which loosely riff on the Superman story. A mysterious father-figure of Native American ethnicity, later given the name Shaman, has just escaped some great catastrophe in a spaceship. Shaman's only companion aboard ship is an unnamed young man, also a Native American, in a cryosleep-capsule. However, though the audience doesn't know anything about the relationship between the two, Shaman uses the ship's equipment to send the capsule down to a planet inhabited by a society of galactic marshals, while providing a soliloquy, for the benefit of the viewing audience, about how the young man will someday become a great hero, implicitly the Marshal Bravestarr of the title.

While I can see why the filmmakers wanted to put off a long origin-tale to keep from slowing down the story, here it's better to explicate the backstory right off. Prior to the catastrophe, the Shaman lived with his people, the Amerindian-looking "Tribe," on an unnamed world. The Tribe was attacked by monstrous "broncosaurs" under the control of a huge bull-demon (I think) named Stampede, who was seeking some sort of power-source controlled by the Tribe. But Stampede's attack causes the power to run wild and destroy the whole planet, and all of the people except Shaman and Bravestarr, though Stampede escapes to another planet, later to be named New Texas. 

After Shaman deposits the roughly teenaged Bravestarr on Marshal-world for his training (which we never see), Shaman pursues Stampede to New Texas, planning for some reckoning in the distant future. At the time the planet is sparsely populated by a handful of "Kerium miners." Stampede, aware of Shaman's arrival, decides to suborn an evil mortal as his right-hand man, and finds a convert in a miner named Tex, who betrays his partner McBride and leaves the latter to perish in the wilderness. Stampede transforms the evil miner into Tex-Hex, a nasty zombie-looking magician, and Tex-Hex begins gathering other evildoers into his circle. Shaman finds and saves McBride, sending him to a medical planet for assistance. This action ensures that other members of the galactic society learn of McBride's discovery of huge veins of the precious mineral Kerium, resulting in a "Kerium rush." The settlers of New Texas are imperiled by the influx of lawless emigrants and from Tex-Hex's gang, so they send for a marshal.

In "real" movie-time, Marshal Bravestarr's advent to New Texas follows the origin-teaser. He arrives in tandem with two other passengers: "good prospector" McBride and his adult daughter J.B., a feisty young woman who's also been assigned to New Texas, but as a galactic Judge. In an incident that probably could not have appeared on the TV show, Bravestarr and J.B. first meet when he seems to be ogling her butt from afar.

Once on New Texas, Bravestarr's life is just one character-intro after another. He gets hassled by Tex-Hex and other roughnecks but trounces them easily, in part because he has special animal-powers that are never well explained. (Had they been a bequest of the power-eruption that destroyed the Tribe's world, that would've been another good Superman-trope, but I don't think the powers' origin is specified.) He meets a diminutive comedy-relief furball, "Fuzz," who belongs to the indigenous Ewok-ky "Prairie People" of New Texas; eventually Fuzz will become Bravestarr's deputy. After some more flare-ups with the local owlhoots, Bravestarr eventually meets Shaman, who reveals his extremely indirect role as a director of the hero's fate.

Shaman's main function in the story is to direct Bravestarr to go looking for a special weapon. This results in the hero's most compelling encounter, when he meets Thirty-Thirty, the last surviving "Equestroid," an anthropomorphic horse-man with cyborg-parts (which may have something to do with his ability to assume a four-footed horse-form). Bravestarr thinks he's supposed to claim Thirty-Thirty's weapon, a big blunderbuss, and they have a really good fight-scene, one of the best in animated features and certainly the best one Filmation ever produced. Once the two formidable badasses have taken each other's measure, Shaman belatedly reveals that the "weapon" he referred to was a partnership-- and Thirty-Thirty makes it his business to become the marshal's partner-in-law-enforcement (but not a deputy, since after all, he also functions as the marshal's horse). 

Stampede finally decides to launch a major offensive on the townsfolk and their protectors, using both his outlaw-pawns and a herd of animated bull-skeletons. Prior to the big end-battle, Bravestarr and J.B. put aside their squabbling to engage in some prolonged tongue-wrestling, which I think is also a first (and a last) for Filmation. After all that set up, the final battle is a little underwhelming, but that may be because the movie's a prequel and must leave all the principals in the status quo that dominates the series.

One online review asserted that Stampede may not be a demon, but the last survival of an alien race, possibly related to the "broncosaurs" wiped out on the Tribe-planet. But he definitely functions as a Satan-figure, while Shaman is something of a Merlin who counsels the hero in his adventures. So Stampede, Bravestarr, Shaman and Thirty-Thirty are all the last members of their respective tribes-- which trope I relate to the Western trope of the "Vanishing American," the idea that Native Americans more or less faded away before the relentless vitality of the European immigrants. If LEGEND had done more with this trope, I would have graded the movie's mythicity higher.

Despite some good character moments between Bravestarr and his two strongest allies, the judge and the horse-cyborg, Bravestarr himself is no Superman. He varies between being a smart-ass and an "aw shucks ma'am" Westerner, and though he's a de facto Native American, he has no connections with the vanished culture of the Tribe. Thus he often feels like a White guy in "Redface," except for his gimmicky conjurations of his animal-powers and his occasional conferences with his perceptor Shaman. Had the writers thrown in a few scenes of his tutelage on the marshal's planet, this could have communicated the hero's ethical compass, in roughly the same manner as SUPERMAN comics did with stories about Young Clark Kent's Midwest upbringing. This was a fault with the TV series as well, and the problem may spring from the fact that the series allegedly started from producer Lou Scheimer's desire to develop a western-themed space opera because he took a liking to a prototype "Tex-Hex" character from his animated GHOSTBUSTERS teleseries. Bravestarr's journey to hero-dom ought to be a main concern of the movie. Instead, when this plot-thread appears at all, it feels like an afterthought.

LEGEND received a limited theatrical release, but it probably would have had to enjoyed STAR WARS popularity to have reversed Filmation's fortunes. But even with its flaws, LEGEND provides a good monument to the company's history of providing a variety of both decent and mediocre fantasy-entertainment.