Nerding Day: Highlander the Animated Series

Looking back at the '80s it feels like almost random chance as to which films became personality-defining franchises and which have sort of soldiered along without utterly warping the brains of now 40 to 50 year old men. Like, I appreciate the original Ghostbusters. It's a fun movie. But why haven't any of these guys made a movie like The Highlander their whole reason for existing? Maybe the trenchcoat and sword aesthetic is too radioactive at this point. Maybe The Highlander, as a franchise, is too gauzy and romantic. Maybe its core fantasy — of being an undying, beautiful man with long, luscious hair — simply isn't well-aligned with American tastes.

That isn't to say that The Highlander was one and done. There were theatrical sequels, of course, and anyone who was home sick during the Clinton administration may have some lurking feverish memory of Highlander: The Series, which aired in first-run syndication from 1992-1998. But did you know there was a concurrent children's series about ageless sword maniacs trying to cut one another's heads off? Featuring a gavor with "galloping" action when saddle button is pressed!?

The original Highlander was essentially a 111 minute Queen music video with some scenes of a French guy trying to speak English to a Scottish guy pretending to be a Spaniard tossed in while Clancy Brown wanders around the city freaking out clergymen. It fucking rules, but you'd be hard-pressed to make an episodic children's TV series about it. On the difficulty scale of adapting R-rated '80s movies into Saturday morning cartoons, it falls somewhere between Police Academy and Aliens — you can't just have Connor McLeod make random sound effects to pad the runtime, but you also don't need to include ambulatory murder penises. I mean, you could do both of those things, but only in an Argentinian wrestling ring.

So the creators of Highlander: The Animated Series decided hey, why not just throw all of this shit several hundred years into the future? The premise is that some horrible event — implied to be the release of Highlander 2 — has wiped out civilization. The remaining Immortals decide to call time out on their game of fighting each other to the death in favor of collaborating to become stewards of humanity's forgotten knowledge. They all swear an oath to this effect — all of them except Kortan, who immediately betrays everybody and declares himself emperor of the earth. Dick move, Kortan!

Highlander: The Animated Series was produced by Gaumont Entertainment, whom you might remember from Dragon Flyz. Abrams-Gentile wasn't involved in this one, however — it was purely a French project. The live action Highlander series was also a European joint, and again, I think there's just something about the concept that appealed to old world sentiment. Further research is needed, but it is my hypothesis that Highlander was always a little too fruity to truly get off the ground stateside.

The cartoon stars Quentin MacLeod, who in the first episode loses his home and family to Kortan's merciless Hunters. But it turns out he's the prophesized Immortal who will rise to destroy Kortan, since he wasn't around to take the Oath several hundred years earlier. Apparently Immortal Oaths aren't just, like, gentlemen's agreements. All of the Immortals who swore the Oath are now physically incapable of winning a fight, which, again, maybe you should have thought that through a little first.

Quentin's got to travel around the world and meet various Immortals, developing his skills so he's eventually ready to take on Kortan. There's an obvious problem here: Immortals in Highlander gain the knowledge and power of a rival when they kill them, and we can't have our plucky teenage hero doing that. So instead of the awesome Quickening, Quentin does the kind of embarrassing "sharing" that results in him learning how to build aqueducts or sequence the human genome, and the Immortal who had that knowledge becomes a regular human being.

One odd thing about the show is that it kind of ducks the core premise. The whole point of Highlander is that these guys can't die unless their heads get chopped off. So put that little Link-looking dude through the wringer! Blow him up! Shoot him with lasers! Run him over with a truck! Maybe they thought it'd be too violent to have Quentin get shot and stabbed every episode, but imagine the PSAs they could have gotten out of it. "I'm an Immortal. I will never die, unless someone cuts my head off. You, however, will. One day, everyone you know will be dead. Don't play with the stove."

So yeah, Highlander: The Animated Series is basically fine. It's not a bad attempt at translating the source material into an adventure cartoon. But where it really shines, for an expansive and ironic definition of the word "shines," is in its character designs. Remember, these are French people we're talking about. This is the country that created Baby Follies. They're going to go places with the idea of post-apocalyptic sword maniacs fighting for the future of humanity. Time for an Immortal fashion check!

Mangus is the first Immortal Quentin meets on his quest and holy shit is there a lot to talk about right off the bat. He's wearing what appears to be a clerical collar with a necklace made of the doorbells of his enemies. He doesn't have eyebrows so much as he has enormous, powerful browbones, between which he has painted his Immortal power symbol. Last but not least, he's got a magic gem on his belly like he's a Troll doll. But this isn't actually unique to him — it's the way the cartoon identifies Immortals, for some reason.

See, here's Don Vicente Marino Ramirez, played by a guy doing a Sean Connery impression.

Wait, I've got a better image of him.

There it is. A fully accurate depiction of Sean Connery in Highlander.

Ok, this next one isn't actually a single character, it's a whole bunch of them. They're members of a multicultural child gang called the Rainbows, who fight against a bunch of guys with shaved heads who call themselves the Paleys. Future Teen Race Wars always was my favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers album.

We've got shirtless, western Egyptian Uncle Sam; split striped/polka dot dress; thigh-high boots with eyeball belt buckle and power medallion; and a guy who I can only describe as Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z if he was a French clown. Fantastic. Here he is fooling a hardened member of Kortan's child-murdering armed forces into falling down a clearly visible pit.

Delightful!

Sometimes the animators seem to have trouble keeping all these weirdos on-model. Like, here's a closeup of the teen gang leader.

And here she is moments later.

That's a different lady! Or maybe that's just her face before and after watching someone plummet into an open manhole to their death.

I've saved the best for last. One of Kortan's goons is a Salacious Crumb-type guy. Every king needs a jester, right? In this case, he's less a jester and more… I don't know where to start, actually. Let's take it a little at a time.

Here he comes! Long, white hair. Batman mask with a pointy nose. No shirt? Fingerless gloves. Oh baby.

It gets better! Lightning body paint or possibly tattoos! The fingerless gloves have little bells on them like you would place on a cat to keep it out of trouble!

Meet Malone. Here he is kissing Kortan's kitty cat feet for forgiveness. Malone is Kortan's "human key." Whenever Kortan wants to get his sword or armor out, he has to make Malone go stand in a little alcove to open up his vault.

It's a foolproof plan to prevent anyone else from getting into his stuff, except that Malone is a little scamp who opens the vault to mess around with Kortan's gear whenever he feels like it. So either Kortan hasn't heard of regular keys and brainwashing a capering mime into playing a Japanese game show is his honest best try at securing his most prized possessions or this is a weird sex thing for the two of them.

Highlander: The Animated Series got two seasons and a few toys. There was also a video game. "Huh," my 45-year old male target demographic is now thinking, "I don't remember a Super Nintendo game based on this show." No, your memory does not deceive you, my sophisticated, older brother-coded readers. Highlander: The Last of the MacLeods wasn't on the Super Nintendo or the Sega Genesis. Possibly the Turbografx-16? No. It wasn't on the PlayStation or the Sega Saturn. It wasn't even on the Atari Jaguar. It was exclusively released for the Jaguar CD, an optional CD attachment for a video game console nobody owned. I thought that the Rifts game coming out on the NGage was the worst case scenario for licensed video game exclusivity. I was wrong.

Atari tried to sell this as the state of the art of video gaming in the '90s. I remember reading magazine ads for this thing and being impressed. As bad as video games are today — with their microtransactions, exploitative design, and culture wars over female characters' chins — at least there aren't six different companies trying to get their hardware in your house. The last time somebody tried to launch a new video game console, it was Tommy Tallarico, and that ended up with him being blasted from the face of the earth by a video pointing out that everything he's ever said was a lie.

It would have cost you $500 to be able to play Highlander: The Last of the MacLeods in 1995. That works out to a little over $1,000 in 2025. But for that measly sum, you would have gotten access to an advanced entertainment experience far beyond anything available on th— sorry, no, I'm hearing that it was so unplayable that thirty years later most of the footage on YouTube is still just someone walking into walls before getting killed by the first guy they run into.

Highlander: The Last of the MacLeods was so bad that even though only six people actually played it, it completely obliterated the idea of making a video game based on a premise that seems tailor made for the medium. There was an attempt at another back in the late 2000s, but it was never released. In other words, Highlander: The Animated Series indirectly destroyed the franchise. Yes, there were a few other movies after it. And yes, one day — maybe someday soon — the Hollywood remake machine will churn out a new film. But it won't feature a giant man in a cat suit choking out a mime, so who fucking cares.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: John Minkoff, one of the handful of people who actually had a Jaguar CD, and still didn't play the game.

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