The Copper Kidd production cel

Search the Heritage Auctions archive for SilverHawks and twenty lots come back. Eighteen of them are things that were sold to the public: twelve lots of carded Kenner figures, three graded copies of the Star Comics issue one, three pages of original art drawn for those comics. Two never were, and this is the one that went under a camera.

This is a production cel of the Copper Kidd, hand-painted acetate that passed under a camera in 1986 and became part of a finished frame. Heritage catalogue it to Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment and Pacific Animation Corporation, which is the right pairing: Rankin/Bass produced the series in New York and Pacific Animation Corporation did the animation in Tokyo, the same arrangement that had made ThunderCats the year before.

That the Kidd is the one who surfaced is a small piece of luck. He is the character the show built out of movement rather than dialogue, because he never speaks a line in sixty-five episodes, so a still frame of him is doing the work a still frame of anyone else would not have to.

How much of this material exists is not knowable from here. Cels from a Rankin/Bass show of this period were made in the tens of thousands and most were destroyed, given away or sold off in bulk long before anybody catalogued them. One appearing at Heritage in forty years tells you the market is thin. It does not tell you the material is.

Sources: the Heritage Auctions lot record, linked above. The photography and the full cataloguing stay with Heritage.