BraveStarr: The Cartoon That Was Too Good to Save Filmation!

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:01]Bravestarr >> Ah, yes, Bravestarr. The show that looked at first-run syndication in 1987 and decided the appropriate response was, "You know what 6-year-olds generally need in their afternoon cartoon block? A Native American space lawman on a desert planet orbiting three suns wrestling with drug addiction, colonial exploitation, and a universal thoroughly indifferent to human aspiration that it would let a child die of a overdose and then refuse to bring him back to make the point stick."

[00:00:30]And they were absolutely right. They just forgot to mention any of this in the toy commercials. New Texas, 23rd century, 600 parsecs from Earth, roughly 2,000 light-years since we're being precise. A desert planet orbiting three suns, its surface layered with a red mineral called Kerium that powers half the galaxy's infrastructure, the premise's functionality. A gold rush western transposed to deep space with one difference, the people being exploited for Kerium are other prairie people, New Texas' indigenous inhabitants. And the show does not pretend otherwise. Already in the premise alone, Bravestarr is doing something animated television of that era categorically did not do, depicting colonialism with a straight face, no redemption arc, and no cleanup, just the thing acknowledged sitting in the frame.

[00:01:22]Marshal Bravestarr polices the frontier from Fort Kerium. His powers are invocations, calls to the animal kingdom drawn from ancestral heritage. Eyes of the hawk for enhanced vision, ears of the wolf for heightened hearing, strength of the bear rendered with the visual commitment of animators who understood what a bear can actually do to a structural wall, and speed of the puma. These are not tech powers, they are not alien upgrades. They are inherited. In the decade when every cartoon hero was either swinging a sword or pointing a laser gun, that distinction is not cosmetic. It's the entire argument of the show. His horse 30/30, named for the rifle, is a cybernetic equisteroid who stands upright, carries his own firearms, he calls Sarah Jane, and speaks in the flat, battle-worn gruff cadence of someone who has lived long enough to be finished with sentiment. 30/30 is BraveStarr's operational partner, and in the episode that earned it, his best friend. Their dynamic carries the emotional weight of the series with a restraint that most live-action westerns of the same era couldn't manage. And then there's Tex Hex. Tex Hex is a villain who had a backstory before backstories was fashionable in children's animation. A man who sold his soul to Stampede, the show's generally unsettling supernatural antagonist manifested as a spectral bull skull that exists primarily to demonstrate what cosmic benevolence looks like when it requires no justification in exchange for power. He got the power, and he lost everything that made power worth wanting. Hex is corrupted, visually grotesque, and periodically human in ways that complicate the grotesque without softening it. Classic villain architecture delivered in 1987 to children via afternoon syndication, and damn does it land. Now, let's talk about the price.

[00:03:16]The price is a BraveStarr episode which a young boy named Jay discovers a drug called Spin, a fictional narcotic delivering euphoric highs and catastrophic rapid dependency, and dies.

[00:03:28]Not nearly dies, not almost dies before BraveStarr intervenes, dies of an overdose while the people who love them stand around his body and understand with no narrative reversal offered to them that is the result, and the story is over. Mind you, this is a syndicated animated series from 1987 that killed its guest protagonist to make a point about drug addiction, and then committed to that decision through the closing credits. Lou Scheimer stated that Filmation would only go to dark places if they were making a genuine moral argument, not darkness for spectacle, but consequence for meaning.

[00:04:06]The price is the proof. The universe in this episode does not care how much Jay wanted to belong, it just watches.

[00:04:14]This was peak Bravestarr grimness.

[00:04:18]Another episode, Sunrise Sunset, depicts in the same 30 minutes a character's wife giving birth and his elderly father dying. Both events, same episode.

[00:04:29]Treated with the same quiet gravity, neither sentimentalized nor undercut.

[00:04:33]Life enters, life exits. The show does not offer a moral lesson at the end of Sunrise Sunset because the episode is the moral lesson.

[00:04:42]That is not a formula, it's a philosophy. Whatever else Bravestarr was, a Mattel toy commercial, Filmation production carrying all of Filmation's budgetary fingerprints, a show that desperately needed a He-Man's marketing machinery and didn't get it. It was a show made by adults who had decided that animation was allowed to say something and acted accordingly.

[00:05:04]But let's keep it a buck. Bravestarr was also, by explicit design, a Mattel toy commercial. The arrangement was transaction from the start. Filmation pitched the concept. Mattel agreed to produce and distribute the toy line in exchange for the series. This was the He-Man model, merchandise first, mythology second. Except where He-Man debuted his show before the toys reach retail, Bravestarr inverted the sequence. Mattel had Bravestarr action figures on store shelves in 1986.

[00:05:31]The television series didn't premiere until September 14, 1987. The toys sold without distinction, and the show launched into a market already conditioned to perceive Bravestarr as a product that hadn't moved, rather than a property that deserves a chance.

[00:05:47]Filmation's limited animation was forgivable in 1983 when He-Man was culturally inescapable. But, by 1987, audiences, including the 6-year-olds, had a working tolerance for better production. Transformers, G.I. Joe, shows with Japanese animation partnerships that could afford actual movement. BraveStarr looked like a Filmation show because it was one. And in 1987, that carried a visual tax that no amount of genuine and creative ambition could fully offset. 65 episodes, one season. The show ran its syndicated course by February 24th, 1988, and did not perform the franchise metrics Mattel required. The toys underperformed, the ratings were serviceable, not transformative. The next He-Man did not have the power. And then, Filmation made their move.

[00:06:39]Because, why not? BraveStarr: The Movie, released in Europe as BraveStarr: The Legend, opened in North American theaters in March 18th, 1988. 91 minutes, produced by Lou Scheimer, directed by Tom Tataranowicz, and written by Bob Forward, the film serves as the origin of everything the series told you after the fact, discovery of Carrian on New Texas, and how Tex Hex became Tex Hex, how BraveStarr arrived on the frontier and became its Marshall.

[00:07:07]It was among the first animated feature films to incorporate computer-generated imagery. The three-dimensional machinery, vehicles, weapons, structures, sequences moved with a geometric precision that Filmation's hand-drawn repertoire could not touch.

[00:07:21]Despite being deemed Filmation's greatest artistic triumph, the movie bombed. Combined with the disappointing theatrical performance of Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, the math on Filmation's financial position was becoming difficult to ignore. And then, out of nowhere, Z French ally. In April 1988, negotiations between Group W Productions, the Westinghouse subsidiary that owned Filmation, and Paravision International, a French television consortium whose principal owner was L'Oreal, the cosmetic and luxury goods conglomerate.

[00:07:54]Scheimer was assured that the sale would preserve the studio. He was told Filmation would continue unchanged under new ownership. Thus, he signed off. Now, let's fast forward in February 3rd, 1989. 229 Filmation employees reported for work as usual, but by the end of day, they were terminated effective immediately. No transition, no warning period. The Worker Adjustment and and Retraining Notification Act, which requires employees to provide 60 days before mass layoffs of 100 or more people, went into effect on February 4th, 1989. L'Oreal fired 229 people the morning before the federation employment protection law would have stopped them.

[00:08:41]Lou Scheimer, who had kept those 229 people employed through the lean years through the Recycle Recycles, through every Gilligan's Planet and Failed Experiment, because he believed that was what a studio owner owed his people, watched his studio absorbed into a corporate asset portfolio. The last thing Filmation made was Bravestarr. The best thing Filmation made was also the last thing they were allowed to make.

[00:09:08]And the inventory of what died with it goes further than 229 jobs and a closed building.

[00:09:16]Scheimer was building, not just running a show. He was building a universe much prior to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

[00:09:25]The He-Man crossover was in development.

[00:09:27]A young Bravestarr before the badge and before Fort Cariam encountering He-Man, the former hero of Eternia, as the catalyst of the origin story. The series was never fully told. He-Man inspires a kid from New Texas to become a lawman.

[00:09:41]Think about what that is structurally.

[00:09:43]Bravestarr's origin handed to the audience through the lens of of the character Filmation has spent years making into a global franchise.

[00:09:53]The mythology of one universe lending weight to the mythology of another. A hero passes the torch without making it a ceremony. It would have been the best episode in either series, but it was never written. There was at least one spin-off that was developed alongside it, Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century, a direct continuation of two Bravestarr episodes that had already placed Holmes in this universe, Victorian deductive logic in futuristic London. An artifact in his own era still correct about everything surrounded by a century that had outrun him. That premise, which Filmation had already established in his own existing continuity, eventually got made by a different studio in 1999 as an entirely separate production. They got there 12 years later and without the Bravestarr universe underneath it.

[00:10:41]None of it got made. The crossover, the Holmes continuation, all of it died on February 3rd, 1989 with 229 employees in a building loyal at or where they decided wasn't theirs anymore. The universe doesn't judge. It just follows the paperwork. I'll hear what Bravestarr is. When you set down the toy catalog and the syndication numbers and the cosmetic company assets ledger. Lou Scheimer spent the post-Filmation years in consultation work, convention appearances, and quiet advocacy for animation history. He wrote a memoir. He gave interviews. He remained by all accounts a man who had made his peace with what happened, which is either admirable or heartbreaking depending on how you choose to read it.

[00:11:26]Scheimer died in October 2013 at the age of 84.

[00:11:31]And the Filmation library eventually made its way into partial release.

[00:11:36]BCI Eclipse issued BraveStarr episodes on DVD until the mid-2000s out of continuity order without the movie. The complete series took years longer to surface in any organized form.

[00:11:48]BraveStarr the movie the film called Filmation's greatest artistic triumph remained difficult to find through official channels well into the streaming era. The movie that should have been the beginning of a franchise has spent 35 years being harder to watch than the show it was designed to launch.

[00:12:08]And it is a show that built a universe quietly, methodically inside a studio everyone had written off before the studio was taken away. The He-Man crossover would have reframed both heroes and the home spin-off was a decade ahead of everyone else. And that is the correct lens for BraveStarr, not the show that underperformed He-Man, not the product that moved insufficient units, but the show that built a real mythology and real space with real consequence and earned its darkness by grounding it in moral conviction.

[00:12:42]Deep in its expansion plans when a cosmetic company arrived and decided 27 years of animation was just a line item.

[00:12:53]Whatever.