Let me tell you a story. A human boy comes into possession of a bladeless sword hilt that only he can control and which only has a blade at his command. He teams up with a rogue pilot whose rough exterior belies a heart of gold and, alongside a sassy computer intelligence, they meet a space princess. They visit exotic locales like the desert, a swamp, and a hive of wretched scum and villainy. Before the end, the boy learns that he is part of a long line of people who wield a mystical power and who can appear after death as spectral guides in this metaphysical art, and he defeats an ancient evil in a dark cloak. Sounds like Star Wars, right?

I really didn’t know that much about Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. I’m not even really sure exactly when I managed to acquire a digital copy, or when I transferred that file to my phone for a potential future viewing (I’m not an Apple user so I’ve had the same phone for 4 years without a forced upgrade occurring as a result of planned obsolescence). I’m traveling at present and I did foresee that while journeying I might grow weary of the beautiful but nonetheless antiquated and challenging prose of Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s 1922 novel The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension, and had planned ahead by downloading a couple of episodes of Peacemaker while I was on Wi-Fi. I did not foresee that the HBO app would simply not load at all once I was in airplane mode, and thus after failing to simply sleep on the flight, looked at what I had in my videos folder, and there Starchaser was, waiting for me to finally give it my attention. Many worse things have happened on airplanes recently than watching Starchaser, but I still nonetheless failed to be engrossed. 

The eponymous Orin is an enslaved human miner living beneath the surface of the planet Trinia, where he and other humans toil with laser diggers for volatile crystals, which are then “fed” to a giant dragon-like face when the slaves are visited by their god, Zygon. One day, Orin finds a sword buried in the rock, and when he frees it, the grandfather of his girlfriend Elan tells him that it may be part of an ancient legend about a liberator, before the sword projects an image of an old man who speaks a muddled prophecy, then the blade disappears. Elan’s grandfather is killed, prompting Orin and Elan to take actions which eventually result in them climbing into a crystal shipment and travelling through the dragon’s mouth, where the scales fall from their eyes about the nature of their enslavement, and Elan is killed by Zygon. Orin manages to dig his way up to the surface, where he meets a smug smuggler named Dagg Dibrimi and his smart-mouthed ship’s AI Arthur, although Dagg doesn’t believe Orin’s claims that there are slaves beneath Trinia’s surface. Dagg completes a hijacking of some of the crystals from one of Zygon’s freighters, and in the ensuing firefight, ends up in possession of an administrative fembot named Silica, whom he reprograms (through a not-very-funny scene in which we learn that the relevant circuits are in her posterior, and it’s very uncomfortable to watch), causing her to immediately become devoted to him. 

Along the way, the travelers are occasionally annoyed by a sprite-like “starfly,” which eventually directs Orin to discover a bomb hidden within the payment that Dagg receives for his services, eliciting Dagg’s loyalty, and the two of them eventually meet Aviana, the daughter of the local interplanetary governor. She recognizes the hilt from her historical studies and accesses a library file that reveals that the hilt belonged to the “Kha-Khan,” a group of legendary heroes from eons past who vanquish threats to humankind, although the last of the Kha-Khan disappeared from history after defeating a robot intelligence known as Nexus who sought to enslave humanity, at which point the hilt disappeared. And wouldn’t you just know it, it turns out that Nexus wasn’t really defeated; he simply rebranded as Zygon and got a new job as the overseer of the robotic underground miners of Triana, although he quickly replaced his initial automaton workers with human slaves so he could then reprogram the mechanical miners into warriors, and uh-oh, here comes the invasion fleet! They’re defeated by the ragtag group, of course, and the starfly reveals itself to be the Force, um, I mean the spirit of the Kha-Khans past, who appear to Orin and the others as Force ghosts, I mean, uh, regular ghosts, I guess. 

Director Steven Hahn worked mostly as a production manager on animated TV shows, with eighties juggernaut DIC as well as other studios, after getting his start with Ralph Bakshi working on his seminal work Wizards. During the off season for the various TV series that he was working on (like the Mister T animated series, Care Bears, the anglicization of French series Clémentine, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Star Wars: Droids), Hahn wanted to keep his Vietnamese animators busy. If you just read the Wikipedia page for this film, you might think, “Oh, how thoughtful,” but the quotation that he provided to the now-defunct sci-fi blog Topless Robot reveals that he, like George Lucas, was a man with dollar signs in his eyes more than anything: “I’d been working in television animation and owned a rather huge facility in Korea. I’ll tell you why I came to direct and produce this film. It’s not something you might expect. During the off-season, I had nothing else to do! When you own and run a big studio, it’s difficult to sit around and pay everyone a salary when there’s no work. So, I had to do something, and I thought, why not make an animated film?” There’s nothing artful in that, so it’s not really all that surprising that there’s nothing artful in the final product, either. 

I’m being a little harsh. There’s not nothing worthwhile here. Although all of the character designs for the men are ugly as sin and Princess Aviana looks like she was traced from a He-Man episode, the ship designs are relatively cool, and the robots that we see are inoffensive even if they’re not particularly imaginative. The film also manages to have a couple of cool sequences when it manages to break free from its lockstep dedication to slightly misremembering Star Wars, with the most striking images from the whole film coming close to the beginning and the end. For the former, it’s the appearance of the decomposing “mandroids” living in the Trinian swamps, cyborg ghouls that are creepy and off-putting, and it’s unfortunate that they warrant mention only in the scene in which they appear. For the latter, there’s a moment during the climactic space battle in which Orin accidentally opens a bay door, unwittingly ejecting all of the robotic troops within the hangar into open space, which was a fun visual. The space battles are the most interesting things that we get to witness, and it’s worth noting that this is probably because the film was created to cash in on 3D movies, so it’s clear that all the budget that didn’t go into making Orin and Dagg not hideous to look at went into making Dagg’s ship look cool. Money not exactly well spent, but I suppose it was put where it needed to be the most. It certainly didn’t go into score composition, as there are moments where Luke Skywalker’s theme and the Imperial March are imitated so clearly that it’s shocking that Hahn didn’t get into legal trouble. Not for the faint of heart or short of attention span, this is to be viewed solely if your only alternative is unconsciousness and you can’t seem to sleep.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond