Space Strikers E1: "Best of Friends, Worst of Enemies"

This review was commissioned by @krinsbez.


Another mid-nineties SatAm cartoon, and it's a Violent Space Adventure one rather than an Animal Superhero Team one. The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I'm not sure if I ever saw it or not. This series came out in 1995 and had only one season, but it was a sizeable twenty-some episode season, so it seemingly wasn't a total failure. Whether that has any bearing on quality, of course, is sort of in the eye of the beholder, so behold it we shall.

Without further ado, let's check out some toy commercials!


The beginning is...confusing. Almost disjointed. A blur of badly clashing CGI space fights and hand-drawn people in control rooms, with frantic shouting over comms that it's hard to connect with any given character or spaceship. From what I can decipher, there's a character named Beemo or Nemo or something whose doing something reckless and heroic, and another someone named Master Phantom who wants to conquer the galaxy or something. With a name like Master Phantom, you kind of have to be either a SatAm villain or a minor Dark Souls boss. Or maybe a really tryhard edgy theatre kid, that's also possible I guess.

A person who I think is the Phantom Menace himself also seems to have a grudge against the status quo on account of an event that left him badly disfigured. His disjointed dialogue clips on the subject suggest that this was a "betrayal" rather than a mere defeat in battle, so this guy may have a legitimate grievance possibly, not that that justifies galactic conquest.

The heroic person named...is it actually Nemo? It really sounds like his name is "Nemo." That's silly af even for this medium...reminisces about how he and Master Phantom used to be friends until "they" rebuilt the latter into a monster. No explanation of who "they" are. Phantoms, perhaps? Also, Nemo thinks he's the only one who can stop Master Phantom now, though he isn't explaining why.

...then it turns out that this was just a really, really ill-advised teaser. I'd been kind of suspecting that, and hoping it. In media res teasers are a well worn convention, but there's a reason that clipshow teasers didn't ever become popular. What I just saw might work as an announcement trailer if you added in a more coherent voiceover explaining the concept and framing the imagery for us, but on it's own it just feels like a jumbled mess.

Granted, it's possible that that's exactly what this was, and that the version I'm watching jammed it into the front of the pilot for some reason, so I won't hold this against the show just yet.

Anyway, beginning the pilot proper now!

A squadron of bad CGI starfighters fly through an asteroid field. Actually, is this supposed to be 3D? Oh dang it is! I checked, and you're supposed to wear 3D glasses to watch this. No wonder it looks like shit. Well, anyway, squadron of fighters flying through space, their pilots exchanging tactical reports as they approach the enemy. Some of the "phantom warriors" on the front line are holographic decoys, it turns out, so they need to be careful to target real bogeys and not waste time and ammo on the fakes. Contact is made. Bad CGI explosions happen. The enemy ships look really, really goofy, and not even in an evil-coded way, just in general. After the battle one of the pilots - named as Dana - does a body check. Flight leader Nemo is in bad shape; his cockpit got deformed by an enemy hit, and he's physically stuck in it now.

Those are some damned sturdy space suits they wear!

Dana says she's going to couple their ships and get him out of there. He tells her to take remote control of it instead, but she says that he looks fucked up enough that she needs to look at him up close before they try to make it back to base. Can she just ignore his order without consequences? Maybe she just knows he won't actually enforce it.

She also sounds strangely chipper about this whole situation, but that might be a voice acting flub rather than intentional characterization. I'll have to see more before I can decide which.

Anyway, it turns out that they're not coupling their fighters, but rather she's just spacewalking over. Also, from the look of things he isn't IN a fighter, but instead piloting a somewhat larger ship. Possibly the mothership/carrier for the fighter squadron, although still much smaller than such ships are usually portrayed in scifi. I may be misunderstanding this whole setup, idk. Anyway, Dana spacewalks into his shattered cockpit (holy shit, it's literally blasted open and exposed to the vacuum! I'm amused that the camera of his comm system is still working lol) and starts prying him out of the wreckage over his own objections. He insists that they need to get out of here immediately, before more phantom warriors arrive; Master Phantom would surely love to kill his personal enemy off once and for all. Dana refuses to move them while Nemo is literally hanging out into the vacuum, because that would just solve Master Phantom's problem for him.

Then, apropos of nothing, Nemo starts telling himself and Master Phantom's backstory. Dana seems surprised to know that they have personal history, despite everything about the conversation so far suggesting that it's no secret; maybe she just knows Nemo is delirious and is playing along to keep him talking so he stays calm. Anyway! The man known as Master Phantom was born by the name of Vincent Burke, and he and Nemo were BFF's back in the earth space force academy. Here are a couple of off-model cadets walking side by side to prove it:

Cadets Nemo and Burke are approached by their commandant, who congratulates them on the creative misdirection tactics they just employed against a simulated enemy and tells them that they've been selected to serve on a real deep space mission. Only the top-performing cadets get to do this, so this is a big honour and career asset for them. They're both pretty excited about it, and seemingly for each other's sake as well as their own. Dawwww.

Their early tour of duty proves to be boring, as they're mostly just standing guard aboard a ship in the middle of nowhere without anyone trying to attack or infiltrate it. However, their chance to be relevant comes when the ship's CO (who is also the commandant from the academy. Eh, probably just simplifying all the one-off brass in this backstory into a generic "commanding officer" figure to not confuse the kiddies) sends the two of them alone on an asteroid mineral survey. They're given a little two-man shuttle and head off to land on some rocks and take some samples; their first time alone in space.

Cut back to the present, with Dana trying to cut the rest of Nemo's body out of the cockpit. He can't feel one of his arms, which is a bad sign. Then we jump over to Master Phantom's ship, where a biomechanoid-looking underling is telling him that the squadron they just lost reported dealing crippling damage to Nemo's mothership before going black. Master Phantom rages at his pilots for giving their lives for him in an only-partially-successful operation; not because of the loss of lives or resources for his army, but because they didn't completely succeed. Lol, he's a SatAm villain already.

He turns his Bane-ish mask toward the officer and starts ranting about how he hates Nemo more than any other being in the universe. It was Nemo's betrayal of him that led to him losing faith in all of humanity and wanting to see it destroyed.

You can't just have your characters say what they're feeling, show. That makes me feel angry.

Return to the flashback. Acting Crewmen Nemo and Burke are flying their survey ship around scanning the rocks. Nemo understands that this is exactly the sort of routine-but-demanding assignment that you'd give to cadets to give them a chance to prove themselves, and that trusting them with a ship - even a small ship, and even temporarily - is actually pretty significant. Burke disagrees, and thinks that if they were just going to have them do mindless gruntwork like sampling rocks that have been on the starmaps for over a century then they might as well just have kept them doing simulated mindless gruntwork back on Earth.

To their surprise, they detect a celestial body that hasn't been on the starcharts for over a century. In fact, it isn't on the maps at all, which is extremely strange given the size and mass of the asteroid. Nemo wants to report this in immediately and await authorization to survey this unknown rock. It's not clear if that's established protocol, or if Nemo is just being overly formal, but in either case Burke tells him not to do it. When asked why not, he says that if they report this in, the mothership will likely send a full team to investigate, and if they find anything valuable it'll be their CO who gets the credit and naming rights and so forth. So, first he wants to survey it himself to make sure that they're the ones who get credited with discovering anything useful that the asteroid might contain.

That's illogical and stupid for at least half a dozen reasons that immediately come to mind. I'm not sure if it's unbelievably illogical and stupid for a gloryhound cadet who's high on his own supply after getting special attention. If I saw this in a news article or something I guess I wouldn't have too much trouble believing what I was reading, so I won't call this bad writing. Failing to screen what should have been an obvious problem child out of the advanced service is believable military incompetence.

Over Nemo's objections, Burke goes down and starts taking mineral cores. He's at this for a long time. Long enough for them to find out that this new asteroid didn't arrive by itself; a cloud of micrometeors is being drawn toward it, and they're coming in hard and thick enough to damage their ship, to say nothing of their suits. By the time Nemo detects the incoming storm, it's too late for him to fly to Burke's location before it arrives, or for Burke to get back to his lander. They both try their hardest, but Burke gets one of his legs shattered by an impactor, and Nemo can't get close to the part of the asteroid he's on without getting the shuttle torn apart.

Also, the shitty-ass CGI reaches a new low with this external shot of Nemo in the cockpit. In which the micrometeors are clearly all using the same model as the big asteroid that Burke is on.

Seriously, if you don't have the budget for proper 3D, just don't try to do 3D. It's really not worth it.

As he's trying to figure out a way to rescue Burke, Nemo gets a transmission from the mothership asking what the hell is taking them so long out there. When Nemo explains the situation, the officer's outraged response makes it pretty clear that no, Nemo wasn't just being over-officious, they were supposed to report anything out of the ordinary as soon as they found it and get authorization to poke at it further.

Even if Burke's plan had gone perfectly and they'd found high-grade dilithium crystals or whatever down there, I'm pretty sure that captain would have seen through the motivations and made sure the mark on their records wasn't positive. Or, if their shuttle cockpit takes audiologs, give Nemo the credit for the discovery and Burke the demerit after hearing Nemo try and fail to get him to follow the rules.

Nemo is ordered to get out of the micrometeor cloud and come back to the mothership immediately. Nemo refuses to leave his copilot behind. Even when the rocks shatter his cockpit canopy.

...you know, if those transparent canopies really are that much weaker than the rest of the hull, maybe they should consider doing away with them and using cameras instead? That's twice in two space action scenes now that this has happened lol.

Also, I don't want to keep getting caught up in the show's spaceflight animation issues, but take a look at this shot:

See, when I look at an image like that, I start getting excited. That almost-perfectly repeating landform, forming deliberate looking rows along a flat roadway, on an asteroid that we already know has shown up out of nowhere without explanation, in the backstory of someone who we know will end up working with a hostile non-human faction. Like, I don't need to point out the obvious here, do I? This imagery in these circumstances should be able to speak for itself.

But no one is reacting to this the way you'd expect. Neither Burke not Nemo have said anything about the landscape looking artificial, or expressed wonderment at the unnatural symmetry. Even though the asteroid's mysterious appearance should already have them in the headspace to expect something weird like alien megastructures. Which makes me think that this really is just the result of lazy repeating animation, and really it's supposed to be a natural landscape. And that's really too bad, because I want this to be exactly what it looks like.

Worst case scenario: the asteroid really is artificial, and its creators end up turning Burke into Master Phantom, but it was supposed to look natural. In which case the lazy animation ended up being misleading twice over in the process of accidentally foreshadowing the truth. Hopefully it's not going to be that.

Since Nemo can't or won't navigate out of the storm, the captain informs him that they'll be taking remote control of the shuttle from the mothership and flying it back.

...

Erm...okay, I can handwave the liability of making your own ships remote controllable with the assumption of some 100% effective anti-hacking cartoon tech. What I can't handwave is the assertion that the mothership can remotely pilot its parasite craft but can't see through their sensors. Mission control should have seen that asteroid the instant that Nemo and Burke did, and they should have gotten orders on how to proceed then and there. At the very least, the captain shouldn't have to ask them what's taking so long before jumping straight to the "what the hell do you clowns even think you're doing?" part.

This is something that would have probably bothered me even if I was watching this from within the show's target age demographic (notably, they explicitly are manoeuvring the shuttle around the micrometeors to safety, which I can't imagine them doing without using the shuttle's own sensors). So I can't let it slide on the grounds of it being a kids' show.

...

The little survey shuttle, missing its cockpit canopy but with its remaining occupant still intact, is maneuvered away from the site. Nemo tries to take back control of the shuttle, pulling the helm's manual override so hard that he breaks it off, but no use. On the asteroid's surface, Burke watches the ship depart with a feeling of deep betrayal and absolutely zero self awareness.

Cut back to the present, with Master Phantom monologuing to his alien ("phantom?") firstmate. This was the worst day of his life, betrayal, yadda yadda. Then he continues the story, and we flash back to his dead body laying out there on the rock. The micrometeor storm has ended, and miraculously the body has avoided being hit again and completely shredded, but it's pretty clear he ran out of oxygen a while ago. Then, aylmao ship flies overhead and tractorbeams his body aboard. The captain of this vessel is...the same guy who Master Phantom is telling the story to in the present.

I think this is one of the worst cases of "as you all know" that I've ever seen.

Especially since the listener was actually alive and conscious during this part of the story and the storyteller wasn't. Like, hello?

Well, anyway. I was expecting the "phantoms" to be more homogenous looking, but these guys are a motley crew of many different species. We have lizard guys, fluffy walrus guys, insectoid guys, and as noted previously the leader looks like some kind of Gigertech synth. They're surprised to have found a human all the way out here, and quickly make to incinerate the body as is protocol with their hated human enemies. Dang, what did we do to piss these guys off? However, the giborg captain guy - now named as Metalus - commands them to resuscitate him instead. His underlings are incredulous at this, pointing out that the boss will be furious about this, but Metalus curtly shuts them up and tells them to do as ordered.

Or, as Metalus puts it, "are you really trying to explain prison rules to me, lieutenant?"

Huh. "Prison" rules? What sort of organization is this, exactly?

Curious.

Whoever these guys are, they fly their ship to an underground hangar on some barren-looking planet, and Metalus brings Burke's remains to a lab facility where he starts experimenting.

He has some kind of procedure in mind to create a superpowerful cybernetic warrior. Given his own appearance, I wonder if Metalus is trying to improve on a procedure that was used on himself in the past? Seems likely. If so, I wonder if he's a mad scientist type who self-augmented, or if he's the product of a military cybernetics program just trying to take things a bit further than the standard upgrades.

Hmm. Big collection of species all working together, but with a particular hateboner for humans. I'm starting to get the feeling that we might be the baddies here, but I won't jump to conclusions. I'm still trying to puzzle out the whole "prison" thing and how that might relate to the astropolitics.

As they graft armor, weapons, and sensor systems onto Burke's reconstructed tissues and nerve endings, the surgeon assisting Metalus reminds him that "Mawrik" will have both their heads if he finds out they brought a human back to life. Metalus assures him that the subject's human origins won't be apparent at all once they've finished, and no one will have reason or opportunity to look too closely. The fuzzy surgeon guy then says that even without that affront to Mawrik's sensibilities, he might just see Metalus' surreptitious creation of such a powerful combatant as proof he's planning to make a move on him. Metalus doesn't answer this part.

It seems like these guys are probably just pirates, now. It explains the mixed crew, and the informality. This latest bit of dialogue makes it sound like it's just the unseen overboss Mawrik who has a personal grudge or bigotry against humans, with the rest of the gang not really caring one way or the other. Alright, that makes sense.

The framing also makes it seem like Metalus is someone who we should maybe be rooting for, if indeed he's planning to overthrow Mawrik and take over. We haven't been given a reason for why this experiment calls for a human rather than any other rando alien, so his decision to save Burke instead of just vaporizing him seems more like mercy than anything else. As pirates go, Metalus seems like a pretty okay guy, especially compared to their current overlord.


Dang, this pilot got a lot meatier at around the halfway point. A surprise, given how it started, but not an unpleasant one. Hopefully it won't disappoint me in the second half. Either way though, looks like I'll be splitting it here.

Also, the show didn't do the thing I was afraid it was going to do and accidentally make a natural-looking alien construct look unnatural due to cheap animation. That would have been hilariously bad, and I was fully expecting it to happen, so it's nice that it didn't.​