Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: BraveStarr: "Skuzz and Fuzz"

In the BraveStarr episode “Skuzz and Fuzz,” the bandit Tex-Hex searches for the secret tunnel of the Prairie People, one that leads to a newly discovered mother-lode of the valuable ore, Kerium.

BraveStarr has selected Deputy Fuzz to help guard the Kerium. But when Tex Hex’s minion Skuzz interferes, a self-destruct mechanism is activated over the Kerium’s force dome, and the enemies must work together to prevent total destruction…

I have a rule about BraveStarr storytelling: a little bit of the Prairie People goes a long way.  

The characters are fine in small doses, but any more than that and the episode in question becomes unwatchable real fast.

“Skuzz and Fuzz” focuses primarily on the helium-voiced, slapstick-ish Prairie People characters, and consequently emerges as a not particularly good episode of the series. Both hapless Fuzz and arrogant Skuzz are supposed to be comic relief, but at the center of the drama they are…highly annoying.

The episode’s message is that “there’s a little good even in the worst of people.”  This message is voiced because Skuzz repays a debt and saves Fuzz’s life at one point, thereby proving the axiom.  Of course, just a few episodes back in “Thoren the Slave Master,” we had a different story (in that case, BraveStarr and Tex Hex) being forced to work together in a crisis.

Despite the generally irritating and over-sized presence of the Prairie People supporting characters in “Suzz and Fuzz,” the episode does feature some nice landscape vistas, with large moons looming over New Texas’s desert surface.  BraveStarr's persistent visual imagination is often a welcome relief when sub-part storytelling rears its head.

Next week: “Who am I?”