After weeks of rampant speculation, over the weekend Nathan Fillion unveiled a Hail Mary plan to bring back Firefly, over two decades since it was unceremoniously cancelled. An animated series with most of the original show’s surviving cast returning, set between the series and its movie continuation, Serenity, the project—carrying the burden of 24 years of expectation and yearning—is still in its earliest days, with no studio commitment, just hope and some early concept art.
As we similarly learned this weekend, reviving a former Joss Whedon show, whether the problematic figure is involved or not, is no easy thing. An animated Firefly might be slightly more likely today than it was last week, but it’s still a big if as to whether we’d get it at all. But this is a pretty solvable problem anyway: just watch Outlaw Star instead.
Of the two Sunrise-produced sci-fi/western anime of 1998 that no doubt had huge influences on Firefly, Outlaw Star is perhaps the more unsung (the other is, of course, Cowboy Bebop, which has gone on to have a much more vaunted reputation). But of those two shows, it’s the series that feels like Whedon cribbed the most from, intentionally or otherwise.
Based on the manga by Takehiko Itō and directed by Mitsuru Hongo, Outlaw Star is set in a far future where mankind has journeyed across the stars, driven by the discovery of ether, the key to faster-than-light travel—but also one where the balance of power on Earth and in space has shifted between rival empires, allowing a lawless community of assassins, pirates, and outlaws to thrive.
Beyond the sci-western aesthetic, Outlaw Star carries an abundance of parallels with Firefly. The ragtag crew protagonist Gene Starwind forms—a plucky young assistant, Jim; the feral feline alien Aisha Clanclan; the distant contract killer Suzuka; and the android key to the titular ship, Melfina (introduced curled up naked in a container in a way that’s very similar to River Tam’s debut in Firefly)—has the same kind of abrasive, loving family dynamic as Mal and his own crew. Just as with Firefly, the worldbuilding of its FTL systems is rooted in Chinese influences, from the spirituality underpinning some of the show’s more supernatural aspects (for all the harder sci-fi elements of its ships, the show has softer fantastical roots on its western side) to the discovery of the material that makes interstellar travel possible taking place in China, making it a powerful influence in spacebound factions and culture, or even the fact that it was Chinese pirate factions that pioneered the grapple-arm-based ship-to-ship combat that makes the show feel so unique, almost like a mecha series in some ways.
It’s also, much like a lot of Firefly itself, a show built around a vibe as much as it is anything else. Although Outlaw Star frontloads a lot of worldbuilding and narrative hooks that become key by the end of its 26-episode run—Gene’s discovery of the titular ship and its connection to a mystical “Galactic Leyline,” long mythologized as being a place filled with vast treasures and power—for the most part it’s a heavily episodic series, as the Outlaw Star‘s crew travels around picking up odd contracts or running afoul of sinister figures also interested in finding the leyline, but for the most part it’s a show about watching the crew bond into an unlikely unit of goofy outcast adventurers, much as Firefly also backgrounds a lot of its serialized elements in favor of an episodic exploration of its characters and the western themes of its setting. Hell, they even shared similar fates, scrapped in their prime with planned continuations left on the drawing board.
If you’re missing a show that feels like Firefly but have a lot of complicated hang-ups about how the legacy of its cast and crew has developed in the long years since it came to an end, Outlaw Star is probably going to be right up your street (although not without its own product-of-its-time hang-ups, right down to a comedic hot springs interlude). It’s a bit zanier and more earnestly comedic than Firefly but has the same kind of heart and similarly big ideas that make its setting so compelling to just marinate in as you get to know its oddball crew. It’s packed with over-the-top action, from gunslinging magical shootouts to brawling ship combat (sometimes, a spaceship has arms, and sometimes those arms hold a sword, and that’s cool).
And perhaps above all: it exists right now. Sure, so does the live-action Firefly, but Outlaw Star has arguably aged much better—and if it’s the animated aspect of this potential revival that has you itching to don a browncoat again, that can be more than satisfied by this often overlooked gem of a series.
Outlaw Star is streaming on Crunchyroll.
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