Mar 27, 2021

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin

Saw Starchaser: The Legend of Orin.  It was an animated film which was mostly a campy good time.  It ripped off Star Wars a lot and had some seriously rapey bits (it was made in the 80s) but mostly silly, self-serious space opera.

It follows Orin, who belongs to a race of enslaved crystal-miners who are ruled by evil robots and told never to "dig up".  After finding a sword hilt which projects a Call To Adventure, Orin digs up and discovers the surface world is not a blasted hell-scape as he had been led to believe.  He teams up with a suspiciously Han Solo-like mercenary and a suspiciously Princess Leia-like daughter of some crystal tycoon and tries to free his people.

There's also a suspiciously C3PO-like femme-bot who is the subject of the rapey bits: they abduct her much to her robo-dismay, reprogram her via an access panel in her butt to be more compliant, and attempt to sell her into slavery!  Her entire arc is heinous and makes the film quite awkward in a Jazz Singer kind of way.  It's so much more shocking now than it was intended to be and it's jarring to see the characters just kind of accept all this.  Why does this robot have feminine features anyway?  Why does she have mammaries?

Anyway, that aside, the film has the soothingly nonsensical and nostalgic feel of an NES game.  Robots and aliens and mutants jostle past each other in a colorful parade as items are gathered and pits are jumped.  The protagonist is attractive and floppy-haired, the side characters are funny (I liked the ship computer) and the film involves a lot of suspiciously Star-Wars-like derring-do.  It's not exactly a hidden gem, but involves some strangely dated and adult stuff which reminds me strongly of Ralph Bakshi's work.  It's inconsequential nonsense and it's reasonably entertaining as well (I mean except for that stuff with the femme-bot, good lord.)

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