Recently while messing around on YouTube I stumbled across an old animated series I hadn’t seen since childhood. Chances are you don’t remember The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, and that’s a shame, because the show was truly groundbreaking for its time.
Galaxy Rangers premiered in a long-forgotten fall TV season of the mid-80s. Its original run consisted of a single 65-episode season, but it ran for three years in syndication. The show was pitched and marketed as a space Western, but various episodes included strong doses of space opera and horror.
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| GR had some seriously horrifying content & themes for a kids’ show. |
I remember that the show would come on in the morning while I was getting ready for school. To a younger grade school-aged kid, Galaxy Rangers was mind-blowing. It wasn’t just the 80s standard “all-American/virile paragon good guys foil the bumbling terrorist/evil wizard bad guys” every episode. The characters had some layers to them and were often self-conflicted. There were black hat stock villains but also ambiguous antagonists who were mostly out to make a buck for themselves. Most unusual of all, the good guys didn’t always win, and when they did their victories were sometimes Pyrrhic.
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| Spoiler alert: Zachary never got his wife back. |
After re-watching the first episode alone, it struck me how much of an influence Galaxy Rangers has had on my work–while I remained blissfully unaware of how the show molded my aesthetic sensibilities.
Case in point: The main villain is a necromancer who uses a fusion of magic and technology to steal beings’ souls for long-term storage in big red gems.
Galaxy Rangers was also one of the first American-Japanese anime productions. The show was written by Americans but drawn by a Japanese animation studio. As a result, the writing–especially the quirky but never tonally dissonant humor–remained accessible to US audiences while the animation blew away pretty much anything that American kids’ show animators were putting out.
If you enjoyed The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers as a kid, or even if you’ve never heard of it before, I recommend checking out at least the first episode. It holds up surprisingly well.
Bonus: The main theme is a totally badass 80s power ballad!
To see the bastard offspring of this and other 80s and 90s cultural influences, read my action-adventure/space opera/horror novel Nethereal.
