Ubisoft and Netflix’s new animated series Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix has very little to do with the Far Cry game series, from which it draws part of its title. Viewers of the mixed-media show don’t need to know anything at all about Far Cry, or its strange, neon-infused spinoff from a decade ago. But series creator Adi Shankar said it would be “disingenuous” to not referenceFar Cry 3: Blood Dragon, the 2013 video game that was a shocking aesthetic swerve in Ubisoft’s open-world survival adventure game.
Shankar said that calling his new mashup show, in which the worlds of Assassin’s Creed, Beyond Good & Evil, and the Tom Clancyverse collide, is him “paying homage, paying credit” to Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
“When you look at how important Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was, it’s a seminal fucking piece of art,” Shankar said in an interview with Polygon. “At some point people are going to look back and say there were seminal things [in that game] that seeded this online art movement, which continues to grow. Blood Dragon was one of them. So this is me wanting to acknowledge that.”
Captain Laserhawk is more like a reverential cousin to Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Both pieces of media are set in dystopian futures, and steal liberally from ’80s-era influences: synthpop music, VHS tapes, video games, and effortlessly cool action stars. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon’s hero was a mishmash of the T-800 Terminator and Kyle Reese wearing an NES Power Glove holding RoboCop’s hand cannon. Captain Laserhawk’s Dolph Laserhawk is similarly cybernetic, with a gun arm that evokes Mega Man’s Mega Buster or Samus Aran’s arm cannon.
There are clear similarities and distinct differences between the two Blood Dragons. Shankar described his show
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