TV URBAN LEGEND: He-Man almost crossed over with BraveStarr.
Filmation formed in 1962 when Larry Harmon Pictures closed down and Hammon Pictures producer Lou Scheimer and director Hal Sutherland went to go work for a small animation studio before deciding to form their own partnership, along with producer Norm Prescott. The company initially tried to do motion pictures (hence the name Filmation), but things weren't working out and were on the verge of closing when they got the opportunity to adapt Superman to television in 1966 and that led to the company refocusing on doing licensed television animated work and they quickly had a string of hits in the late 1960s/early 1970s, with big successful shows like The Archie Show and Sabrina the Teenage Witch (the Archie show spawned a #1 Billboard hit song, "Sugar Sugar") and also critically acclaimed shows, like the Emmy Award-winning Star Trek animated series in the 1970s.
However successful Filmation was by that point, no one was quite prepared for what He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, based on the new line of Mattel toys by the same name, would do for the company in the mid-1980s. Government relaxation of children's television guidelines opened up a world of toy-based cartoons that were EXTREMELY popular and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was the king of them all. It was a monster hit and Mattel was making hundreds of millions of dollars selling the toys that the cartoon basically served as a daily advertisement for and naturally, Filmation saw all of this and wanted to get in on it, as well.
The company's first attempt at doing its own try at He-Man was tied to an old property of the company. In the mid-1970s, Filmation tried to do some live action series for Saturday Morning TV, including a series called The Ghost Busters...
When Columbia decided to do a Ghostbusters movie in 1984, Filmation owned the name still, so it worked out a deal where Columbia could license the name from them for roughly $600,000, but the deal did not include Filmation doing a cartoon adaptation of the movie. Ultimately, Columbia decided to go with DIC instead and so Filmation came up with the idea of countering them with is own Ghostbusters cartoon series AND a toy line based on the new cartoon, to try to cash in on the boom in action figures/cartoon tie-ins and, of course, the massive success of the Ghostbusters movie.
Columbia's Ghostbusters cartoon went by The Real Ghostbusters and launched at the same time. The DIC version was the winner in the marketplaces and the Filmation Ghostbusters toyline was a flop.
However, while producing characters for the Ghostbusters, one of the Filmation artists came up with a western ghost character, presumably called even at this point Tex Hex...
As the Los Angeles Times noted in an article about the creation of BraveStarr, "Scheimer, intrigued by this lean, wild-eyed wraith, pulled Tex Hex from the cast and asked Arthur Nadel, the firm’s vice president for creative affairs, and art director John Grusd to develop the character further.
What appealed to Scheimer in the villainous Tex Hex, and in his virtuous counterpart, BraveStarr, who was conceived soon afterward, was the memory of a thousand classic battles between good and evil fought on countless Saturday afternoons by such matinee cowboys as Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix and Gene Autry. By late summer, an informal team of about 15 staff artists and writers was at work on the idea of a futuristic Western to be built around Tex Hex."
That ultimately led to the futuristic cowboy animated series called BraveStarr...
While the Ghostbusters toy idea was not particularly well received by the big toy companies (it was ultimately made by Schaper Toys, most famous for its Cootie board game. Schaper was bought out by Tyco Toys in 1986), BraveStar was a great hook. A futuristic science fiction western that involved lasers and computers and seemed so primed for the 1980s and so this time, Filmation was able to convince its main He-Man partner, Mattel, to buy into the idea for a toy line.
As Scheimer pointed out to the Times, “The world we live in is different today. Kids have computers, not just radios. Children don’t play cowboys and Indians anymore--they play cowboys and aliens.”
However, initially, Scheimer wanted to extend the partnership with Mattel even further. You see, in the original series Bible for BraveStarr, it involved tying into Mattel's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe characters for a direct tie-in between the two series. The idea would be that He-Man would save young Marshal BraveStarr when BraveStarr was a boy and that would inspire him to become a hero in his own right. The notion would be that the world of New Texas, the setting of BraveStar, could be connected to He-Man's Eternia through some sort of dimensional gateway and that it would leave open the option of future tie-ins between the two cartoons, but at the very least, He-Man would show up to kick off the new cartoon, sort of like how Marvel Comics would often have Spider-Man show up in the first issue of a new comic book series to give the series a nice kickoff.
While Mattel was very much behind the BraveStarr idea, it did not approve of the connection of the two series, and so BraveStarr never technically crossover with He-Man in its original 65-episode run (and animated motion picture that was released into theaters, showing just how much faith everyone had in this concept, a motion picture release was part of their INITIAL plans for the character!).
Sadly, while BraveStarr was very well received critically (and is still a cult classic series), the series, film and toyline never quite caught on and since Filmation shut down before any further BraveStarr cartoons could be made, Mattel dropped the toy line (as it didn't make sense without a cartoon tying into it).
The legend is...
STATUS: True
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