OK, settling in now to watch this... oh hey. This isn't the movie I thought it was. I thought this was Roger Coreman's shameless Star Wars knockoff, but no, this is animated.

... this is animated by the same people as the Dungeons and Dragons and Mr. T cartoons! Rock on! Nice budget too, so rare I see American animation this old that doesn't make me cringe with its low frame rates.

So anyway, we've got a bunch of people working as slaves in a mine and apparently they've been indoctrinated that the entire world exists within this mine, and that life was created by their evil robot overlords. So anyway, yeah yeah, suffering miners for a bit, then the main character finds uh... a unique interpretation of The Sword in the Stone... in that he's using his laser jackhammer and actually finds a legendary magic sword encased in solid rock. A convenient old guy begins to explain how this is the sword of legends and whatnot, but is kinda sidetracked by a robo-guard coming by, so he creates a diversion by charging at him with a pickaxe and gets a laser whip wrapped around his face for the trouble... and hey, nice touch on the whip marks being red where they hit skin and black where they hit hair. In strictly technical terms, this is a really surprisingly well done movie.

"OK, the religious indoctrination to "Never dig up! Up is hell!" is amusing.... anyway, the holy sword eventually projects a holographic old dude who explains that there's a surface where people used to live and blah blah bl- .... wait a minute. This is like, EXACTLY the same plot as Gurenn Lagaan! And a few other things. Come on silly giant robot head! Anyway, after delivering a prophecy, hologeezer says something to the effect that the official chosen one will be whoever finds the blade... at which point the hologram and blade of the magic sword both disappear. What a jip!"

So Orin immediately takes his hilt and his ego boost, and goes to confront... god. Usually that takes the whole movie. So yeah. He goes and confronts evil freaky-horned robo-god, who it turns out is actually just a human A-hole with a really snazzy costume and mask. He also sounds KINDA like Tim Curry, but I'm pretty sure that's just a side effect of his "Congratulations Mr. Bond... unfortunately, you won't be telling your friends at MI6 anything!" speech. So a fight breaks out, a tunnel caves in, and Orin figures now's a good a time as any to break what has officially been called the First Commandment of his religion at this point, and starts to dig up... by, you know pointing his laser-jackhammer up at an angle.

He's at this a while, then he takes a break for a nap, and in his sleep is attacked by freaky burrowing leeches that glow red when they're full. Huh. Fancy that. This doesn't turn into a fight scene or anything, it's just, you know, gah! Leeches! So he tosses them up and keeps digging and uh... almost immediately hits the surface. OK, I know we established that this was at least the better part of a day here, but I kinda figured the huge subterranean mining operation was a BIT deeper than that, what with at least the vast majority of the population being born down there and having a religion denying any sort of outside world and all... I guess there was just a lot of lateral movement going on.

So he crawls out onto The Surface, and he's all wowed by nature's beauty and splendor... and I'm pretty impressed too because I was expecting it to just be, you know, generic earth forest or even barren wasteland, but no, we've got a Dark Crystal sorta deal going on here with all kinds of weird crazy twitchy plants and a dead 7 meter tall preying mantis and stuff. Yeah, that's relatively impressive. So he wanders around a while until being ambushed by a bunch of... crazy cannibal cyborgs!

OK, for what is, ostensibly, a kids movie (granted 1985 had a pretty darn hard PG rating going), this is a pretty dark scene. You know that camp of discarded robots from A.I. who just kinda go around cannibalizing whatever spare parts they can find, so they're all twisted deformed robo-zombies? Yeah, these dudes are like that, but they harvest humans for scraps too. So... they're all weird mixes of deformed people bits (including their leader's exposed complete digestive tract) and really random robo-bits, like, same guy has a wrench-like hand at the end of a Bender-style robo-tendril-arm, and they're talking about hacking our hero into various bits and calling dibs on them. It's rather ambiguous whether they started out as humans, got blown to bits, and aren't digging their cybernetic replacements, or they started out as robots and they're trying to do the whole Millennial Man bit by force. In any case, the leader is the least weird looking of the bunch.

So yeah, they're strapping him down for harvesting, and they get distracted by the magic sword hilt, which they start fighting over... and suddenly they all wind up accidentally killing each other with it because apparently it's secretly really a light saber with an invisible blade... or a broadsword with an invisible blade possible.... no, that's a total lights saber sound. So yeah, the survivors freak out, thinking it's some sort of "human magic", he picks up on what's going on right away but runs with it, threatens to mentally slice and dice the rest of them up if they don't wave his magic talisman around his bonds, and he escapes to some really rockin' 80s techno.

So anyway, he flees, and literally runs into... a cigar smoking Lando Calrissian, who identifies the cyborgs as "mandroids" which is hilarious, points out that the surface folk think the mines are crewed entirely by robots... which come to think of it WOULD probably make more sense since, well, they HAVE robots, and apparently the funky Red Rocks they're mining get carried up to the human-populated surface, but I guess they're only programmed to whip. Anyway, Lando is suddenly cut off because some giant green sea-horse-headed tentacle-armed-caterpillar thing looms up behind him and attacks. Zsroom zsroom maimed and chased away. Lando says "thanks but scram!" which offends C-3P0 who thought he was talking to him via his giant cell phone.

So anyway, Lando's trying to get some work of some kind done here, but he's being pestered by Orin, C-3P0, and uh... Tinkerbell apparently. OK, have I mentioned how generally crazy and awesome this movie is?

"Come on! There's a patrol coming!" "What's a patrol?" OK, stupid question Orin. You've spent your whole life in the evil robot slave mines, the word "patrol" should be in your vocabulary, defined as "robots looking around for people hanging out in restricted areas, and killing them on sight" which, conveniently enough, is how it's being used here. So Lando grabs Orin and hauls him off to his ship where it's revealed that C-3P0 is actually the ship's computer, and not the clunky gold robot I was sincerely expecting. C-3P0 (whose actual name is like, Arthur or something, but I'm not correcting it) points out, and this is actually a pretty good point, that it's rude to refer to him as the ship's computer, and not just referring to him as, you know, the ship. "I don't go around calling you meat-brain, do I?" And WOW that ship taking off and turning was nice. If this were made more recently, I'd swear that was Futurama-style CGI painted to look hand-drawn.

So anyway, they leave. Meanwhile in the Death Star, which totally has the same sound effects as the bridge of the original Enterprise, we've got evil people doing stuff. So anyway, we're just kinda transitioning into a general pastiche of every space battle from the first Star Wars, with the millennium falcon (which technically looks more like the Defiant from DS9), weaving and tilting through the trenches of the death star (which is really just a big techy fortress on the ground), flying between the legs of AT-STs and blowing off their kneecaps, and crushing standard human-sized guard robots with its landing gear. WOO. FRELLING. HOO. This movie is great.

Suddenly, we cut to deeper inside the Death Star, where we have some... robot secretaries. I had to pause the movie to describe this. We've got a girl-shaped robot (think the Leslie-bots from that one Venture Bros., or the cover illustrations of like, half of all 50s sci-fi books, or heck, C-3P0 with boobs), fumbling with a giant stack of paper, and whining to the other girl-bots about all the noise outside. Oh, and Lando has his own little squad of 4 killbots, which he's just kinda hiding in the middle of while they assault the base. He blows the door open mid-fight with a sticky-timed-mine. Orin really doesn't seem to be in the movie at all, it's just Lando and his robot/spaceship pals. I'm not complaining.

So then the doors of the base open to reveal Tim Curry without his robo-suit, and instead he looks like... Mola Ram from Temple of Doom if he were a He-Man villain. Sadly, he executes the kill-bots. So anyway, a big fight breaks out, one of the robo-secretaries comes out to ask about the noise, so our heroes GRAB HER AND HAUL HER OFF, and she starts calling sexual harassment on Lando when he's opening her back to, presumably, reprogram her for evil... I mean- good, yeah, good. Oh, and they're actually called Fembots- OH DEAR GODS! OK, pausing the movie for this one.

Lando can't find her personality circuits, so he asks C-3P0 where they are. C-3P0 is pretty embarrassed and takes a while to blurt it out, but eventually reveals that "all fembots have their personality circuits in their, er... posterior." Much to the horror of our fembot in question. Incidentally she has a big red light on her forehead, who wants to bet it'll turn blue by the end of this scene. So yeah, she's screaming to the point where Lando has to TAPE HER MOUTH SHUT BEFORE PROBING AROUND IN HER BUTT WITH A SOLDERING IRON.

Just so we're clear on this. I'm watching an animated blatant Star Wars knockoff, whose audience is PRESUMABLY like, 8-10, and we have one of the good guys reprogramming a robot through what is a shockingly thin rape metaphor. Wow.

... anyway, Lando isn't a freedom fighter or anything, he just steals these red crystals to, you know, sell on the black market. OK, Lando is clearly not a good role-model... especially since it turns out that he wasn't reprogramming his new fembot from evil to good to find out the evil-overlord's secrets. No. He was reprogramming her from secretary to slut. I'm completely serious. Lando, you magnificent bastard!

So anyway, while we recover from uh... seeing that last scene, we switch over to the bad guys putting out a bounty on our uh... "heroes" so we get a nice pan-over of Mos Eisley, which lacks the awesome flute band, but does feature a 3-boobed table dancer and Gregor Samsa on keyboard.

Meanwhile, Lando takes Orin to his home on Tatooine, where they head down to the pretty cool underground city of chaotic good sleazeballs. Huh. The ship is called the Starchaser. Weird the ship and the computer having separate names. So, Lando just kinda ditches Orin, presumably so he can go bang his new robo-slut in a sleazy hotel room. Yeah, I'm totally serious. Oh nope. He's just taking her to a slave auction. Man Lando, you are a real piece of work! Oh, and the auctioneer is an Auctioneer, with the voice of the Micromachines guy. 1985 was a REALLY good year for him.

Anyway, Orin wanders off to try and fulfill his prophecy in the laziest possible way by by hitting the detached sword blade outlet hut, but no go. I say it's cooler as an invisible lightsaber anyway. Meanwhile Lando's heading to someone's harem to try and sell off his crystals (conveniently just called Crystals). Orin sees a fortune teller... who is a rather out of place fat old gypsy. Really, she'd fit in better in like, The Last Unicorn. She says the blade is in the rain forest. Orin runs out on the bill for this because he sees robogirl getting auctioned off. The high bidder is apparently Princess Leia (who wants her for a maid, things aren't getting THAT debauched here), who is being escorted to the slave market by uh... hmm... already used C-3P0... he's kinda got this weird white bulky squared off torso and a forward-tipped monitor instead of any sort of head, so let's go with IP-0D.

Orin has moral objections to a robot being sold as a slave. Man, that kid really got his morality screwed up living as the slave of a bunch of robots didn't he. So, he starts getting into a bidding war with Princess Leia, which he wins, but uh... he doesn't actually have any cash. He reports to Lando how he's so proud of rescuing her from slavery. Lando is POed, and let's the auctioneer have the kid as a slave, which is apparently the penalty for skipping out on your bill... but has an immediate change of heart, foots the bill (zero sum game for him really), and everyone leaves because, well, remember that whole price on their heads bit?

Fight scene occurs with some red storm troopers, Dot Matrix there distracts them by, you know, being all slutty, Lando rolls out around the corner and blows their heads off, they leave. He is so my favorite character in this. So Tim "Mola Ram" Curry is shouting at his troops. Seriously, everyone else is wearing evil empire uniforms and you're wearing a Conan-Wizard style red-and-black vest/loincloth combo, what gives? Anyway, calm scene, calm scene, hangin' out on tatooine...

Lando cuts a deal with a desert lizardman riding a dragon-horse to finally unload his contraband (harem-dude wanted too much for it). Lizardman's human boss recognizes the hilt, points out to Lando how hey the kid's bounty is. Lando threatens to kill everyone for bringing the issue up. I LOVE THIS GUY! Orin, in an oddly accusatory tone, asks why he didn't take the deal. What the HELL is wrong with you Orin? Seriously! Oh and hey, turns out Tinkerbell snuck on board after all. Dot grabs a gun and tries to kill it, but it turns out Tinkerbell was just trying to warn them that there was a bomb stuck in the treasure chest of gold pieces Lando got for his crystals. So they double back, toss it out the window, and NUKE THE HOLY HELL out of the desert camp they made the deal in by tossing it out the door at'em. Probably doesn't hurt that crystals are apparently pretty darn explosive.

So they head off to their next planetary destination, arrive, a security storm trooper on a hoverboard flags them down to ask for their papers, Lando just blows him to pieces, and picks a fight with all the reinforcements, by buzzing right through a uh... horse farm, looping around, shooting them, just generally being a crazy badass psycho, eventually they wind up taking out the last of them by uh.... accidentally ramming them, blowing out their windshield, and delivering a fatal blow to C-3P0 ("if there's a heaven for computers, I'llllllllll..."). So yeah, now we're on the planet, Fantasy Land. Turns out this is where Princess Leia was from, because she rides in on horseback, alongside IP-0D, also on horseback... which is a ridiculously awesome image really. So everyone's kinda getting KOed and split up, and they haul Orin off (he kinda went through the windshield) while Lando and Dot are captured by storm troopers. "You're in the most heavily guarded bedroom in this star system, so don't try anything!" Oh, and at some point, Orin has managed to acquire a Back to the Future style puffy-vest, so this scene is now channeling a very different movie. Anyway, Leia totally doesn't by this human-operated mine story of his, because her father is apparently the king of space. Oh hey neat, the blade on the invisible lightsaber is velocimeter activated. That's just pure style.

Meanwhile, Lando is getting tortured by Tim Mola Ram. "Try to imagine a needle, the thickness of a human hair, thrust between your eyes and penetrating your skull." "I'd rather not." So uh, he starts doing this. I mean, technically it's a laser, but still, boring through his skull. Ow.

Meanwhile, Orin is getting history lessons on all the crazy weirdoes who used the holy sword to defeat various other evil empires over the years. Nice to see these things getting recycled. Usually each holy sword just gets to take down one evil emperor, then goes on the shelf in case they ever come back from the dead somehow. Anyway, Orin and Leia get a proper search warrant to see what's up with the mines, get some red tape, Leia just goes nuts to this, kill the security guard IP-0D. They saber-slash the door down, and... oh hey, apparently we've returned to the death star. Tim Curry is known to Leia by his proper title of "Commissioner Zygon." Commissioner? Really? You're corporate? And you dress like this?" Anyway, bum bum bum! One abortive fight scene later, his cheek is slashed, and it turns out he's secretly a robot!

So wait. We've got a robot, who disguises himself as a robot, so he can undermine human society and let his robot army take over, who gets his funding by running a mine, supposedly run by robots but secretly run by human slaves, who he appears before by disguising himself as a robot. This actually makes plenty of sense in context, but it's pretty weird. Also, yeah, I guess the whole mandroid bit makes more sense now. Creepy.

Oh, and it turns out Dot wasn't captured, she's off in the woods repairing C-3P0, who is mortified that "I'm naked! Put my ship back on you perverted fembot!" Dot calls him, word for word, an "ungrateful son of a bitch." Weird little exchange.

I really need to decide what I'm calling Zygon.. I'm just gonna stick with Mola Ram because he really doesn't sound much like Tim Curry beyond the one speech. "We have two things in our favor! Surprise...." Say and fear! Say and fear! Oh, right, Princess Leia as a hostage. Bah. Meanwhile, Leia confesses that she doesn't care about the plight of underground mine-slaves, she just think's Orin's hot. But then she's dragged off by evil robot guards before anything can come of this confession.

Mola Ram gives a big solliloquy where he, and I am dead serious, refers to Deep Blue as his personal hero, before launching his attack. Awesome.

Anyway, Orin and Lando are in jail, things are looking grim. Suddenly they're rescued by Tinkerbell, who it turns out is not just an annoying glowing bug, but really is some kind of magical fairy, at at any rate can talk, pass through solid objects and takes out the robot guard outside by, get this, flying into his head, and messing around, until he puts his own gun to his head and blows it clean off in really satisfying graphic detail. Tinkerbell laughs. Awesome. Tink then sneaks into Mola Ram's control room, enters the light saber, and thusly carries it back. It can cut through doors, and also eviscerate backup robot guards, so out they go. Seriously, who needs the matching blade? Thing's awesome!

Lando at some point decides to try and take out another guard with fisticuffs because he isn't armed yet... yeah, bad call. I'm disappointed in you Lando, you're not the comic relief, you're just the loose cannon badass!

Oh, and the good empire the robots are trying to take down? They're called the Vortigon... which is REALLY close to Vortigaunts, the cool 3 armed psychic race from the Halflife games. Just pointing this out. Anyway, dootdedoo, sneaking around the evil robots' star destroyer... Quick, let's hide from that patrol of guards by opening this door! Behind which are like, 50 more. But it turns out it's an airlock, these are the first wave ground forces. They space the lot of'em, which really freaks out everyone looking out the windows. Anyway, Orin and Lando head to the bridge, go kill happy on the crew, in what's honestly a pretty cool fight scene, rescue Leia... yeah, how did I ever even think Mola Ram sounded like Tim Curry? Anyway, he is, interestingly enough, not on his own flagship. He stayed behind at the main, well fortified base.

Lalala, crazy spaceship dogfight in the grand canyon... there's still dismembered robot corpses strewn around the bridge, I love it. The evil warships actually fire missiles, instead of some lame energy weapon... Tinkerbell saves the day some more by showing Lando how to detonate all these missiles remotely from the bridge of the flagship, destroying the rest of the warfleet. Yeah... design flaw that.

So, to recap, we've got the humans in the commandeered evil robot flagship, while Dot and 3P0 follow behind in 3P0/Starchaser/the millennium falcon/whatever I've been calling it. Both of these are flying into the heart of the Death Star, because we haven't ripped off the tractor beam bit yet, or the crazy tunnel run through the 2nd death star. This thing is SO blatant about ripping off Star Wars some times, it's really ridiculous. Anyway, big fight scene, ending with a kamikaze attack on the flagship (the one Lando's piloting). That's the second ship he's taken straight to a windshield. So anyway, eventually they land, and Orin runs off to free the slaves. You remember the slaves, right? From the beginning of the movie? Before it revealed itself to be Star Wars? So yeah, he goes down and delivers a big inspiring speech from the mouth of the flaming robot devil head... did I mention that? Yeah, Mola Ram in his Robo-God disguise had an awesome podium to give speeches from there. Anyway, he comes in to denounce Orin in god-disguise, but he knocks the mask off to reveal him to just be an ordinary mortal human (who's actually a robot disguised as a human, but the slaves don't really need to process all that right now, and thankfully it doesn't come up). So anyway, Mola Ram steals the hilt in the ensuing struggle, but Tinkerbell tells him he never really needed it. It was just a cheap prop, and Orin really CAN just slice people to pieces with his mind. He was telling the true to those wacky cannibals and didn't even know it! Which uh... gives us kind of a plot hole when, you know, other people, like the aforementioned cannibals, are swinging it around. Uh... I'm going to go with it being some sort of Gil Hammilton style psychic power. No that still doesn't work... fine, it's just a plot hole.

Anyway, he cuts Mola Ram down with just his mind, he's a load bearing boss, so he grabs the hilt, and chucks it at the roof all Krull-Glaive style to blow an exit open. Oh. Is that how it works? The hilt is an invisible light saber, but in addition to that, the blade is a separate, psychically manifested light saber the main character had all along. Weird. So anyway, they're all free, there's this blind slave kid from the beginning of the movie I didn't really specifically mention but she had a lot of screen time and uh... Orin restores her vision by laying his hands over her eyes. Apparently he's like, Light Saber Jesus now.

Oh wow, he really is. The ghosts of all the dead hippies who formerly owned the sword appear, and offer to let him shed his physical body and uh... ascend to heaven with them, kinda. And apparently that' what Tinkerbell is. Some kinda force-ghost-fairy-form of a past incarnation of Light Saber Jesus. Anyway, Orin says he'll take a rain check because he'd kinda like to, you know, enjoy the after-party of saving the universe. They go, yeah, fair enough, and ascend off into space to join the really really specific constellation of the sword hilt. Seriously, it's stars packed so closely together that it's like a rubbing of a tomb wall not a connect the dots and squint deal. And the movie is now over.

Seriously, that movie was just crazy crazy awesome all around. I'm going to need to like, buy my own copy, and force everyone I know to watch it.

Of course, I'm kinda creeped out by one detail of the way things ended up here. OK, the slaves are free, that's cool. The chosen one is Jesus, well, it's better than the usual delivery. He presumably hooks up with the princess, that's fine. So, who does that leave Lando to hook up with? And this is seriously implied by the ending? The robot he turned into his personal love slave via rape. OK, I realize it was handled in a classy fashion, and kinda played for laughs, but that's seriously what happened there! That is MESSED UP! That is PROFOUNDLY messed up! I mean, OK, he gets away with it by just being so absurdly awesome the whole movie, but dude!