Merchandise-Driven Saturday-Morning Cartoon created by Ruby-Spears that ran on NBC for the 1986-87 television season. The show was created primarily to sell items from Worlds of Wonder's Lazer Tag game.
In 2061, master criminal Draxon Drear and his henchcreatures the Skugs are trapped in suspended animation beneath the Atlantic Ocean, after the Skugs damage the shuttle Drear was using in an attempt to escape to Mars.
In the year 3010, 13-year-old Jamie Jaren is the champion of the popular sport of Lazer Tag. She is also the only person with the ability to use the StarLyte (the name, both in-show and in the toy line, for the "gun" used in the game) as more than a toy, primarily as a kind of telekinesis and, more importantly, to travel through time. At least, she is until Draxon Drear is discovered and released from his suspended animation.
Drear, realizing the potential of the StarLyte, promptly steals one, takes himself and the Skugs back to the past, where he intends to murder the Starlyte's eventual inventor, who happens to be Jamie's distant ancestor. Needless to say, Jamie takes it upon herself to travel into the past to defend her ancestral family from Drear's machinations.
This show provides examples of:
- Alliterative Name: Jamie and Draxon both have them.
- Didn't Think This Through: In the pilot episode, Draxon Drear traveled back in time to capture Beth to obtain a ransom from the future. Subverted in that neither he, nor anyone else, pointed out the flaw in his plan if he actually had to go through with his threat to kill her.
- Forklift Fu
- Imagination-Based Superpower: StarLytes essentially work this way, for those with the ability. "Point, and think."
- Merchandise-Driven: It was meant to support the Lazer Tag toys. Even without the Terminator Twosome antagonist and protagonist, it still revolves around the Starlyte pistol being one of the most advanced weapons built by man.
- Parental Abandonment: Jamie's parents are never even mentioned.
- Plot Holes: Many of them. Per episode.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Draxon Drear and his Skugs are essentially this until his release in the pilot.
- Syndication Title: When Saban Entertainment acquired the series, it was re-released as "Laser Patrol", which aired on the Sci-Fi Channel (now "Syfy") back when the channel had an animation block, for one season as part of a rotating half-hour of various different shows. It hasn't been seen since.
- Terminator Twosome: Jamie the heroine goes back in time to prevent Draxon from retroactively destroying her family. Unusual for this trope, they are not "trapped in the past" and several episodes involve chasing Draxon further in the past or back to the future.
- Time Police: Jamie.
