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Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix Review
Image Credit: Netflix
Loading...Recently there has been a lot of discussion over streaming services and what they’ve done to the entertainment industry. How they bombarded us with shows and movies to rack up subscribers, budgets be damned, in pursuit of stock market success. And when the drive for subscribers was exposed as a shell game then they raised prices and filled these streams with ads. While we just wanted to watch cool shit at a reasonable price, our corporate overlords turned us into a numbered content consumer on a spread sheet.
There’s that dreaded word: “content”. Every asshole executive wants to call my favourite shows “content”. They want to call Primal “content”? They want to call Twin Peaks Season 3 “content”? They want to call The Shivering Truth “content”? They want to call Too Old to Die Young “content”? All this amazing stuff that takes the film/TV medium to new, unexplored places of fine art and mind-fuckery is just a checkmark on a list of “content” used to Ponzi scheme a new mansion for some CFO on the backs of creators and fans.
So I don’t know how much longer there’s going to be shows so insane that they really shouldn’t exist in the belt-tightening, post-strike / pre-AI era of “content” creation on the co-opted internet, and that’s why we need to really appreciate something like Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix while we can.
Netflix’s new six-episode animation mash-up lets super producer Adi Shankar (Power/Rangers, Machine Gun Preacher) go all mad scientist with different characters from the Ubisoft video game library. Chiefly inspired by Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, this “remix” shakes up the personalities of many familiar characters to long-time gamers and places them in an ‘80s aesthetic post-apocalypse.
Everything rocks in these generally 20-odd minute episodes that never feel padded or tailored for second-screening like so much of Netflix now does. The characters themselves are fighting against the no-win system in the show’s narrative almost like the show itself is fighting against the incursion of ads and corporatizing “content” filling up your personal Netflix interface.
Let’s not forget, Adi Shankar is the person who took corporate IP and made bootleg fan films on YouTube back when it was mostly a place to upload your wedding and vacation movies, and before the owners of that content even thought you could make their kid’s content violent and weird. He didn’t ask, they didn’t pay him, and he did it anyways, and it was awesome. This bulldozing continued in his producing work, from Dredd to Bodied to Castlevania, that took things people didn’t think were possible in the mainstream and made them a reality.
Captain Laserhawk gleefully takes up where Shankar’s savagely underrated Guardians of Justice left off in terms of mixing media and pumping agonizing life into the tropes and cliches of geekdom nostalgia. Captain Laserhawk isn’t just a simple animated show, but rather takes visual cues from wrestling, manga, JRPGs and even Sega CD cutscenes, to meld with the anime action in a pastiche you just can’t find anywhere else.
The general spoiler-free story, as best as you can summarize it from Episode 1, is about the titular main character, a cyborg assassin shit-disturber who ends up in a super-max prison as part of a Suicide Squad-esque hit squad. From there, things quickly start going haywire and pivoting with neck-twisting speed, but also slowing down at unexpectedly poignant moments to pay off surprisingly well-earned drama beats.
The weaknesses for you might be depending on how precious you are about the characters from games like Rayman or Assassin’s Creed being flipped on their head. Or you may not be a big gamer and find yourself wondering about character origins since there is no context given for who or what is being remixed. For me, I fell in the second camp and at times wanted to grab my phone to figure out what was being skewered, but happily there wasn’t much let up where I would have been able to perform such a search.
Overall, Captain Laserhawk‘s six episodes flew by and I was quickly caught up in this weird and transgressive world. I’m just happy there are shows like this – and gives me hope that streamers can still use the extra rope they have from their most popular movies and shows to bring up innovative creators that are trying something different. Everything doesn’t have to be like this, but we need stuff like this with our everything.
