Forty years of SilverHawks, and an archive that can actually be finished

Most fan archives are a promise. A property runs for a decade, spawns three continuities and four toy lines, and the site covering it opens with a fraction of the material and an intention to add the rest, which it never quite does. SilverHawks is the opposite problem and the opposite opportunity. It ran once, for sixty five episodes, from the eighth of September 1986 to the fifth of December, and then it stopped. There was never a second season and there has never been a reboot.

That looks at first like a shortage. It is the reason this site is built the way it is.

Sixty five episodes is a run one site can finish. So the episode guide runs to all sixty five, with air dates and writer credits taken off the title cards rather than copied from another wiki. That is slower. It also catches things a copied credit never will. The encyclopedia goes past the six characters everybody knows to ninety seven entries, covering the squadron, Mon*Star’s mob, the Fighting Hawks as characters in their own right, the civilian cast Limbo is actually made of, and the places and machines they use. Six production scripts, the real ones, typed and mimeographed, sit behind the member gate. The crew who made the show are credited by name, from the title cards. Checking our own data against those cards turned up four writer credits we had wrong.

The galaxy is stranger than the show gets credit for. Limbo has no sun, only a machine that burns fuel somebody has to deliver. Daylight becomes a supply line, and a supply line is something a criminal organisation can cut. It has a legal boundary drawn across space, and Poker-Face parks his casino on the far side of it so the SilverHawks cannot touch him, and the answer the show reaches for is to tow the casino back inside the line rather than to shoot anyone. A children’s cartoon from 1986 wrote a jurisdiction problem into its map and then wrote episodes about it!

Where the sources disagree, and on this subject they disagree constantly, the entry says so instead of picking a winner. The team ship is Mirage in the dialogue, MARAJ on the Kenner box and Miraj in half the fan record, and all three are right about themselves. Kenner packed Steelheart with Rayzor and the cartoon gives Rayzor to Steelwill, and the confusion starts on screen in the title sequence of the very episode that introduces them. Nobody has ever published a per-character voice credit for this series, because Rankin/Bass credited the cast as a block, so where a name appears here it is named as consensus and not as a credit.

One thing that ought to be better known: SilverHawks is not finished. Dynamite relaunched it as an ongoing comic in January 2025, Ed Brisson writing and George Kambadais drawing, and issue five of the ThunderCats crossover shipped three weeks ago. A show that ran for four months in 1986, and then stopped dead for thirty eight years, is getting new stories in 2026!

Forty years on, everything we have been able to find of it lives here. It opens today.