Netflix's new anime series Captain Laserhawk feels like the future of video game TV shows
Oct. 24, 2023For better or worse…
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Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix really shouldn’t work. But it does.
The fast-paced, madcap cocktail of Saturday morning cartoons, featuring innumerableUbisoft-owned characters and techno-dystopian fascism, somehow thrives within its inconsistencies, turning what should be a trainwreck of kidnapped characters into a tightly controlled explosion, expanding our sense of what a video game adaptation for the screen can be.
There are a number of other fascinating Ubisoft cameos, which I won’t spoil here, butCaptain Laserhawknever feels like an overt advertisement for the publisher. Its eponymous lead character, Dolph Laserhawk, is a new invention, and the surrounding cast are allowed to fit into the story, coming and going as needed for the plot, rather than submitting to a dull Avengers-esque team-up where pretty much everyone has to make it to the finish line, with equal air time and representation to ensure maximum marketing efficiency for the cinematic product. It’s showrunner Adi Shankar’s world, and Ubisoft is just living in it.
At the time of writing, there’s aTwitter stormof incredulous reactions to the way the show depicts Rayman, a generally inoffensive video game mascot, snorting white substances, getting piss-drunk, and lounging in his high-rise apartment with a nude cow-woman hybrid and a plate of sushi. So far, soBojack Horseman.
I watched the show’s six episodes (more, please?) in a bewildered haze, unable to fully comprehend what Shankar, show creator and one-time producer of the excellentCastlevania Netflix anime series, was allowed to do with these characters. I was deeply impressed that no-one at Ubisoft had shut this down after the first pitch meeting, and relieved to see a publisher happy to keep a loose leash on its precious IP. Instead, we get a distorted, bootleg vision of these beloved characters that an Ubisoft game could never hope to reach.
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Captain Laserhawkis many things. It’s a dystopian hacker fantasy, a critique of totalitarian power structures, a queer love story, and a very silly show about lion wrestlers in rather fetching corsets. It’s a show that tries so little to be any one thing, and ends up encompassing countless things with little apparent effort. It’s a mess at times, but handles that mess with a love for its own inherent absurdity, showing a way forward for video game adaptations of the future – not sticking with a single game, or character, or franchise, but allowing various figures from gaming’s history to mix and match, bleeding into each other like the recurring exploration mechanics you see in countless Ubisoft games.
I’m not necessarily keen for our streaming services to be overrun with every publisher’s ‘version’ of Captain Laserhawk – like with the countlessSuper Smash Bros.imitators we see coming out these days from the likes of Warner Bros., it would get old fast. But I hope that this show inspires more publishers to let their creations loose, and see what chaos can be wrought in the right hands.
Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon remix is available to stream now on Netflix.
For more great series you should be watching, check out our recommendations of thebest anime shows.
Henry St Leger is a freelance technology and entertainment reporter with bylines for The Times, GamesRadar, IGN, Edge, and Nintendo Life. He’s a former staffer at our sister site TechRadar, where he worked as the News & Features Editor, and he writes regularly about streaming, games, D&D, and a host of home technologies including smart speakers and TVs. He lives in London with his Nintendo Switch (OLED) and spouse (not OLED).
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