{"id":8775,"date":"2025-07-20T16:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-20T16:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/8775\/"},"modified":"2025-07-20T16:00:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T16:00:10","slug":"bring-back-bucky-ohare-the-weirdest-animated-series-of-1991","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/8775\/","title":{"rendered":"Bring back Bucky O\u2019Hare, the weirdest animated series of 1991"},"content":{"rendered":"

Deadline reported<\/a> this week that Netflix is working on a live-action adaptation of the \u201990s animated series Captain Planet and the Planeteers, a project which has been in development hell for nearly a decade. While that\u2019s great news for \u201990s animation fans, I\u2019m hoping it paves the way for the revival of a different \u201990s cartoon about fighting climate change and the excesses of capitalism. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only person I know who even remembers the 1991 series Bucky O\u2019Hare and the Toad Wars!, a show so weird that when I\u2019ve tried to describe it to people, I have been accused of making it up.<\/p>\n

Bucky O\u2019Hare feels like a loving parody of Star Wars. The eponymous green rabbit serves as the captain of the spaceship The Righteous Indignation, leading a crew of anthropomorphic animals representing the Sentient Protoplasm Against Colonial Encroachment (or SPACE) in the fight against the oppressive Toad Empire. The Empire\u2019s rank-and file-troops are called Storm Toads, one of the biggest villains is a toad with a mostly mechanical body creatively named Toadborg, and the crew\u2019s first mate comes from the planet Aldebaran. The creators even lampshade the parallels in the first episode, where a character mistakes a flashlight for a lightsaber.<\/p>\n

Bucky O\u2019Hare was co-created by Larry Hama, who wrote G.I. Joe and Conan the Barbarian comics for Marvel, and Michael Golden, who co-created the X-Men\u2019s Rogue. Bucky O\u2019Hare and his crew made their debut in 1984 in the first issue of Continuity Comics\u2019 anthology series Echo of Futurepast<\/a>. The Bucky O\u2019Hare comics became a cult hit, and Jem head writer Roger Allen Slifer, who had previously written for DC and Marvel and co-created the character of Lobo, turned them into a Saturday morning cartoon in 1991.<\/p>\n

While plenty of shows borrowed Star Wars\u2019 space setting and fantasy trappings, Bucky O\u2019Hare and the Toad Wars! kept George Lucas\u2019 revolutionary politics. The Toads were once relatively harmless, though highly materialistic, until they developed an AI dubbed Komplex to make their lives easier, so they could spend more time watching TV. But Komplex went rogue and used television to hypnotize the Toads, turning them into a hyper-militaristic society focused on enslaving all mammals. <\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Michael Golden\/Continuity Comics<\/p>\n

Bucky and his crew are perpetually outgunned, fighting the Toads mostly through trickery, like letting themselves get captured to learn key information, or smuggling their robot sidekick, Android First Class Blinky, past force fields that keep all warm-blooded creatures out. While many of the Toads are incompetent, Komplex, Toadborg, and the medal-obsessed Toad Air Marshal come up with some decent plots of their own. Toad Borg captures Blinky, reprograms him, and lets him escape so he will sabotage The Righteous Indignation. When Komplex realizes Bucky has cracked his codes, he sends a message designed to lure Bucky into a trap.<\/p>\n

The early \u201990s were a golden age for kids\u2019 animation, with creators experimenting with more complex characters and stories. Bucky O\u2019Hare wasn\u2019t nearly as rich as X-Men: The Animated Series<\/a>, Gargoyles<\/a>, or Batman: The Animated Series<\/a>, but it was serialized in its plot and character development. The season opens with a three-parter where Bucky learns that the Toads have captured his homeworld, Warren, enslaving all hares and using a \u201cclimate converter\u201d to turn the once-beautiful planet into a giant swamp. The season ends with a particularly frantic episode where the crew of The Righteous Indignation fights Komplex, reprograms the climate converter, and frees the hares.<\/p>\n

\"Frix<\/a><\/p>\n

Image: Sunbow Productions<\/p>\n

Bucky is the series\u2019 protagonist, but the show devotes entire episodes to developing the backstories of each of his crew members: the feline first mate and pilot Jenny, the Chewbacca-like berserker baboon Bruiser, and the highly aggressive former space pirate Dead-Eye Duck, who is constantly itching to \u201ccroak some Toads.\u201d <\/p>\n

As a young girl, I adored Jenny because there were so few characters like her on TV. She\u2019s extremely confident and competent, never portrayed as a damsel in distress or a love interest. She\u2019s psychic, but not the sort who just has vague intuitions, or swoons when she uses her powers. Instead, she\u2019s part of a sisterhood that has to keep the extent of their abilities secret (which feels a bit like Dune\u2019s Bene Gesserit), which conveniently gave the writers the excuse to bust out new abilities for Jenny as the plot demanded, like mind control and astral projection.<\/p>\n

Bucky is an extremely capable hero, but he\u2019s made a richer hero because he\u2019s willing to share the spotlight. The finale of Bucky O\u2019Hare and the Toad Wars!\u2019s single 13-episode season begins with Jenny being captured, but ends with Bucky revealing that was actually her plan. When Bucky goes off on a solo mission, he gives Jenny command of the ship, with full confidence that she\u2019ll have his back. Part of the show\u2019s progressive bent can be attributed to Jem creator Christy Marx, who worked as a writer on Bucky O\u2019Hare and called Jenny her favorite character<\/a> because she loves both cats and \u201ccompetent female characters.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Chairman<\/a><\/p>\n

Image: Sunbow Productions<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s most radical episode, \u201cHome, Swampy Home,\u201d is primarily set on a slave colony, where a group of hares keep talking about how Bucky is their only hope of rescue. The fox Mimi LaFloo grows exasperated with their hero-worship, urging them to instead take matters into their own hands and engage in acts of sabotage and espionage.<\/p>\n

When Bucky does show up in disguise to rescue them, he discovers an already well-established resistance movement, and he follows Mimi\u2019s lead, only stepping up to help when things get dangerous. He then recommends Mimi get command of her own ship to continue fighting the Toads. Their romantic chemistry is built on mutual respect, and I would have loved to see it developed more. While most of the series focuses on Star Wars-style space battles, \u201cHome, Swampy Home\u201d tones down the action and winds up feeling like a kids\u2019 version of Andor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But while the characters and plots are surprisingly rich, the best thing about Bucky O\u2019Hare is Toad TV. The Air Marshal\u2019s bumbling minions Frix and Frax are constantly glued to the screen, and Komplex\u2019s programming is also used to torture mammal captives, who understandably don\u2019t appreciate that Toad TV mostly consists of commercials for disgusting products. There are creams that enhance wart growth (a symbol of Toad masculinity), a Spam-like food made from crushed flies, and wallpaper that doubles as flypaper, so the owner always has a snack at hand. Toad women are always either presented as \u201950s housewives or bikini-clad models that Frik and Frak drool over, a clear contrast with Bucky\u2019s progressive gender views, and meant to show how gross and contemptible the Toads are.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Image: Sunbow Productions<\/p>\n

Despite all its strengths, it\u2019s hard to genuinely recommend watching Bucky O\u2019Hare today. The show has some very annoying characters, like Bruiser, who\u2019s constantly shouting \u201cAwooga!\u201d and making weird grunting noises. The series would be much stronger without token human\/audience surrogate Willy DuWitt, a preteen engineering whiz from San Francisco who invents a device he can use to travel to Bucky O\u2019Hare\u2019s universe. He\u2019s not all that obnoxious on the ship, but the show crawls to a halt when it follows him in his human-centric home universe, trying to deal with skateboarding bullies or his hippie parents.<\/p>\n

Like The Transformers, Jem, and My Little Pony, Bucky O\u2019Hare was distributed by Hasbro for the explicit purpose of selling toys \u2014 which is ironic, given how anti-capitalist Bucky O\u2019Hare is. Hasbro\u2019s goal is obvious in the show itself, given the constant introduction of new allies and adversaries, which at times make the storytelling overstuffed. But both the action-figure line and show were quickly canceled. Bucky O\u2019Hare did inspire both an NES game and an arcade game, both released in 1992, where players could control the crew members of The Righteous Indignation.<\/p>\n

Slifer kept making kids\u2019 TV after Bucky O\u2019Hare and the Toad Wars!, working as head writer for 1996\u2019s G.I. Joe Extreme and Street Fighter. In 2001, he penned some episodes of Spider-Man Unlimited, and he served as a producer on the first season of the North American version of Yu-Gi-Oh! He was seriously injured in a hit-and-run accident in 2012, and died three years later.<\/p>\n

Neal Adams, who co-wrote Bucky O\u2019Hare\u2019s season finale, made some effort to keep the series alive, republishing the original comic<\/a> in 2006, and teasing a CGI Bucky O\u2019Hare movie<\/a> that never manifested. He died in 2022, but had a rich legacy fighting for comics creators\u2019 rights<\/a> and co-creating DC Comics characters, including Batman villain Ra\u2019s al Ghul and the Green Lantern John Stewart.<\/p>\n

Those deaths and the show\u2019s abandonment by Hasbro means there isn\u2019t much demand for Bucky O\u2019Hare\u2019s return, and that\u2019s a shame. The series\u2019 anxieties about climate change, AI, capitalism, and imperialism feel even more relevant today than they did in 1991. Animators working today could do even more with the show\u2019s serialized storytelling and progressive values, further fleshing out the crew as they liberate planets from Toad oppressors. Best of all, they could probably have endless ammo for new horrifying products to shill on Toad TV, interspersed with mindnumbing content.<\/p>\n

Bucky O\u2019Hare was good and daring enough that it deserved another season. Disney may have saturated the market for Star Wars-esque cartoons by producing more than a decade of actual Star Wars cartoons, but I still think there\u2019s room for Bucky O\u2019Hare\u2019s approach to science fantasy, free of ties to a bigger franchise. Besides, a new generation of viewers deserves the simple joy of croaking some toads.<\/p>\n

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