Thesis: BraveStarr is Awesome
Entertainment is subjective. There's no set rule about what people are going to like. I like Breaking Bad, you may not; it doesn't make you wrong, it just makes me hate you. But still, everyone is entitled to their opinion. Because of this, I always supposed that there couldn't be any “best” television show or movie. There wasn't an “end” of entertainment. I was wrong.
Welcome to “Bravestarr” ladies and gentleman, the best thing you can find on Netflix, or, for that matter, anywhere.
Bravestarr is a cartoon show from the 1980's featuring the single-greatest cast of characters ever assembled. It's like the Justice League, only nobody is dragging down the team awesomeness level by being Aquaman. Our protagonist, Bravestarr, is a space Marshall on the planet of New Texas, and sets the bar pretty high for coolness and college applications in the universe by being both a space cowboy AND a space Indian.
Bravestarr fights the minions of the evil “Tex Hex,” a space outlaw who operates under the orders of “Stampede,” who is a demonic-looking Broncosaur skeleton. Reread that. You got it? No you don't. Read it again. Now you got it. Holy shit, that's awesome.
And here's the thing about the show. You'd think that the awesomeness would have to taper off at some point, but it never does. Does Bravestarr ride a horse? No. He rides his deputy, who is a horse that can talk, stand up on his hind legs, and fire a rifle. Why can he do all these things? Because fuck you, that's why. But seriously, the real reason is because it's awesome. This show isn't impeccably written, paced, or directed, but it is completely and unapologetically committed to being cool, or selling toys, either way it works. Don't believe me? You're saying, “sure, this show has a cool hero and villain, but what 80's show doesn't? You expect me to be impressed? You're pathetic.” Fair point hypothetical person who has the same voice as my Dad. So lets look at even the minor characters that make up Bravestarr's universe.
This is the description, provided by wikipedia, of the Bartender, named Handlebar. Now,
being a bartender in a Western is literally about as much of a secondary character as you
can be -- it's one of the only roles that fits the category of “scenery” more than character. So let's take a look at Bravestarr's approach to this background character: “A hulking, 14-ton, green-skinned bartender and former space pirate from the Rigel star system, with a bright orange handlebar mustache and a Brooklyn accent. He mostly serves BraveStarr and Thirty Thirty a drink called "sweetwater" in his bar, as they sit and discuss the moral lesson learned in that day's episode, although he does engage in a fight with a mechanical steer named Rampage in one episode and wins. If faced with trouble in his bar he uses the serving trays as throwing weapons.”
You can literally read any single sentence of that description, and have enough coolness to completely fill a characters “awesomeness” quota. Then they put it all together. The pitch meeting for Bravestarr characters must have literally been a room full of men shouting adjectives that gave them erections.
Next time I tell a girl that I'm gonna “rock her world*,” I'm just going to take her back to my place and show her an episode of Bravestarr. We'll both have more fun than if we had sex.
So there you go reader. There's a lot of ways to procrastinate in college, but there is none cooler then watching Bravestarr. I understand my praise may seem hyperbolic to you, but you have to understand, that as a writer for Sherman Ave, I'm a journalist. I wouldn't write this unless every word I said was true. That would show a lack of integrity, and I learned about integrity from an Indian space-marshal, so you know I learned it right.
*The only time I've rocked a girls world is when I ran over my ex-girlfriends cat. She cried. A lot.
