GSB’s Flashback Fridays: STARCHASER – THE LEGEND OF ORIN

Welcome to another one of Geek Soul Brother’s FLASHBACK FRIDAYS!  This is my blog series where I suggest old Movies and Television shows for all you ‘younger’ geek brothers and sisters to watch.  You may think they are just old and corny, but if you give these films a chance, you might find yourself really diggin’ them.

I was looking at my list of movies and TV shows that I wanted to feature for upcoming Flashback Fridays posts, and I noticed some of the classic feature animation that I enjoyed in the past.  Since the last Flashback was FIRE AND ICE by Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta, I figured I would make a little series out of it and hip you on to some other animations.  All of them came out in the 70′s or 80′s.  And their target audience wasn’t the typical Tom and Jerry watchers.

The second Flashback animation is STARCHASER: THE LEGEND OF ORIN.  It’s a film about Orin (of course), a young man who’s life is filled with drudgery and misery because he and his people are slaves in a mining cavern, tasked by robot masters to mine energy crystals for a shadowy god called Zigon.  While digging, Orin finds this sword hilt and (after he gets a crazy message an old guy projected from the hilt) embarks to find the blade of the sword in ‘the world’ that is supposedly above the mining caverns.  Orin finds out that the hilt (sometimes!) manifests an invisible blade that can cut through anything, including Robot slave masters.  Escaping his robot enslavers, Orin soon discovers that Zigon is a fake god and the universe is much bigger then he imagined, with evil cyborgs and spaceships and whole other cultures on distant planets.  In his dangerous quest he meets Dagg Dibrimi, a space thief and smuggler and owner of the starship – Starchaser.  Together with Dagg’s fembot Silica, they continue the adventure of locating the lost blade that belonged to the hilt.

This animation was pretty cool when it came out.  I caught it on VHS in the 80′s (video tape for you young cats).  I wish I saw it in the theater.  Because in writing this post, I’m just realizing it was in 3-D.  What was really hilarious about the film was the total rip-off they did from Star Wars.  The spiritual old man projection, the likable space smuggler, a princess and a sword hilt that manifested an invisible blade that could cut through anything.  I wonder if Lucas tried to sue the producers at all.  But I liked it because it wasn’t your everyday animation.  Rent it or check it out on youtube if you get a chance.  To read more about Starchaser you can go to the wiki page here.

Geek Soul Brother

Geek Soul Brother is here to give news and reviews from the geek old school. I love to talk about movies, television, books and comics featuring science fiction, fantasy and horror.

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