“One day, a lawman appeared. With powers of hawk, wolf, puma and bear. Protector of peace, mystic man from afar. Champion of justice, Marshall Bravestarr!” As if to carry the baton for the aging Masters of the Universe line, Mattel introduced their new toyline, Bravestarr, to the scene in 1986. And just like MOTU, it was accompanied by a Filmation cartoon to help sell those toys the following year. The Native American Space Marshall and his equine companion, 30-30, helped protect the good citizens of the planet New Texas and its rich deposits of Kerium Crystals, which had amazing healing powers. Both the toys and cartoon were something of a short-lived endeavor, but still fondly remembered by many 80’s kids. Despite so many toy revivals from the time, Mattel hasn’t resurrected the battle between Bravestarr and Tex Hex, so some industrious (and perhaps unscrupulous) third-party companies have decided to do it themselves, namely Ramen Toys and Dasin Toys. I have a little bit of nostalgia for the cartoon and toys, but maybe not enough to go for Ramen’s $90-ish figure, so I decided to go with Dasin’s $40-ish.

The figure has been officially solicited as The Sheriff, but what’s the point of pussy footing around when you’re literally branding the box with Bravestarr? Forget about the powers of Hawk, Wolf, Puma, and Bear… Damsin Toys had better hope that Bravestarr doesn’t call upon the power of copyright attorneys, because this is about as ballsy as intellectual theft gets. There’s some fine print on the bottom panel of the box, but other than that there’s just the window to let the contents do the talking. And the minimalist approach certainly works, because I was impressed before I even opened the box. As for scale, he’s pretty damn close to 6-inch scale, but he’s slightly smaller when compared to Marvel Legends and a lot smaller than McFarlane’s DC Multiverse.

Bravestarr comes out of the box sans hat and looking like he just jumped out of one of Filmation’s animation cells. There was a fair amount of differences between Mattel’s original figure and the animated version, and Damsin has clearly chosen to embrace the animated look over the vintage figure design. And I’m happy they did, as it isn’t just updating an old figure, but rather giving us something we haven’t had before. The coloring here is really nice, although the differences between the orange and the yellow can be subtle in most lighting. I like the deep chocolate brown they used for the boots and the red and blue on the chest and back really make the figure pop like the cartoon. The silver hits on the badge, belt buckle and gauntlet accents are sharp and snappy. Comparing this to the original animated character model sheet shows that these guys did their homework. But besides getting the details right, I cannot overstate how impressive the quality on this figure turned out. The colors are vibrant and the paint is super clean. The plastic feels great in the hand and the joints are all easy to work with right out of the box. Every bit of this toy feels like a professional and polished product, and that was quite a nice surprise considering this is my first experience with the company, and I had no idea what to expect.

For the portrait, you get five different heads and two different hair pieces, both featuring his stylish ponytail. One hairpiece is full and intended for display without the hat, while the other plugs into the hat to complete the head when he’s wearing it. It’s a clever system that’s easy to swap out and by making the hair and hat separate, it allows you to display him holding the hat if you want. The expressions on the heads include neutral, neutral with side eye, smirk, open mouth smile, and full on battle yell. Neutral and smirk are my favorites, while the shouty face feels out of character for The Marshall. I get a bit more of an anime vibe to the portraits, so I don’t feel they are a very close match for the cartoon, but from a technical standpoint they still look good. Filmation style portraits all have similar characteristics and I feel like Mattel and The Four Horsemen are among the few who have been able to get them right.

The hat scales really well for being a separate piece and sits perfectly on the figure. I think it’s worth paying a bit of caution toward the tiny antenna that juts up from the side. I will say that at one point I accidently bent it in my hand and was sure it was going to snap off, but it just bent and returned to normal without even leaving a stress mark. Still, I wouldn’t test that too much.

The articulation features ball joints and rotating hinges in the shoulders and hips, double hinges in the elbows and knees, rotating hinges and pegs for the wrists, swivels in the thighs and biceps, rotating hinges in the ankles, hinges and lateral rockers in the feet, ball joint in the neck, and ball joints in the waist and under the chest. All the joints on this figure are smooth as butter and he is crazy fun to pose and play with. The tolerances are solid and the shoulder joints are designed to pop out if overstressed, rather than break. But, I will throw out a few nitpicks. The elbow bends are impeded by the muscle sculpt, so about 90-degrees is as good as you get. Also, the design of the shoulder hinges do show more gap than I’m used to seeing. Neither are a big deal to me, but still worthy of note. You do get a total of five pairs of hands which include sets of fists, OK gestures, grippy hands, trigger hands, and relaxed hands. All of these are easy to swap and come on a clear plastic sprue.

Bravestarr comes with two weapons: His pistol and some kind of space bazooka. The bazooka has a cool pearlescent aqua-green finish and features minimalist detail to the sculpt, which I suppose is in keeping with the animated look. I don’t remember this weapon from the cartoon, but it’s pretty cool and Bravestarr can wield it with one hand or two. With that having been said, I would have much rather they included an updated sculpt of the scoped rifle that came with the original figure as I find that one to be pretty iconic. I doubt this one will get much display time.

The pistol, aka The Neutra-Laser, on the other hand is awesome and to me this is one of the more iconic cartoon weapons of the 80s. The original toyline focused quite a bit on this pistol with special figures designed to use battery backpacks and infrared beams to shoot each other and they released a full size Neutra-Laser toy that could also be used to shoot down figures, so I think they knew they had something special with this design. This accessory is a nicely detailed sculpt with some added paint hits and even some tiny western-style scroll work patterns that you sometimes see on vintage lever actions. They really put some love into this little gun and it looks so iconic in the figure’s hand!

And even with all of those goodies, in the box you also get a stand, which can double as storage to keep your extra pieces. The black storage box is even branded with the Bravestarr logo! There’s a very Figma-style hinged arm that pegs into the top of the base and can grab the figure around the waist to help with action poses or just to keep him standing. And if you don’t want the added elevation of the storage box, you can just use the top as a stand all by itself. Yeah, the ingenuity of the design on this stand really blows me away and it’s something that I’d love to see more toy lines embrace.

Damsin Toys did an amazing job on this figure and I really can’t stress what a polished and high quality toy this is. I’ve had Bravestarr on my desk ever since I got him and I find myself constantly picking him up and playing around with him. Everything in this box is excellent right down to the innovative storage stand and I couldn’t be happier with this purchase. Even better, the going price seems to be around $42-45, which feels like a great value for such a well produced figure. The only downside here is the uncertainty as to whether we will see any more figures in this line. Ramen Toys is already showing off a prototype for their 30-30 and I would really like to see Damsin at least give us Bravestarr’s partner. But I’d certainly be down for Tex Hex and Judge McBride! Both Damsin and Ramen Toys figures seem to be getting a lot of buzz in the collector community, and while I don’t expect Mattel to revisit this line, maybe if these sell well, it will inspire another company to work out a deal with Mattel to use the license.