Contributed by Rebecca P.
Wildfire‘s plot (as brilliantly encapsulated in its theme song) works as a metaphor (probably unintended) of the experience of the baby-boomer children of Holocaust refugees. Sara, the heroine, who is blonde and all-American despite her vaguely ethnic name, lives on a ranch in Montana. She thrives there, riding horses and yellow school buses, and generally living out a materially prosperous and idyllic existence, except for being troubled by bad dreams of a land she cannot remember. (“Go deep within my mind,” says the theme song. “And tell me what I find, or what I might become, if I could go where the dreams come from.”)
At thirteen, she is recalled to Dar-Shan, the fantasy land of her unquiet dreams. Dar-Shan has a generically European feudal structure (with kings and queens, and councilors) and a lot of castles that suggest nineteenth-century follies. While there, the all-American Sara must come to terms with her heritage as a princess in a distinctly un-American setting. The episodes, which deal with different aspects of the fantasy-land of Dar-Shan, are as much voyages of exploration as struggles against the evil queen who has stolen Sara’s throne and killed her mother. In that sense, Sara’s journeys with the magic horse, Wildfire, are akin to those of the American teenagers who backpacked through Europe in the sixties, seeking some shreds of a lost heritage.
The thing that clinches the metaphor for me is the episode where it is revealed that Sara’s “foster” father in Montana is in fact her biological father, a prince of Dar-Shan, who has been forced to lose all memory of his homeland and his late wife. During the course of the episode he remembers and fights to save his daughter from the evil specters who threaten her (the name “specter” suggests once again the ghosts of old evil), but at the end of the episode he chooses to have his memory erased once again, even though he is weeping as he makes the choice. The story provides a magical explanation of this phenomenon, but it rings true as the story of the refugee experience: adults refuse to look back and remember, because it is too painful. It is only through the tentative explorations of their Americanized children that they are forced to acknowledge some of the “dark void [that] was crossed” (again a quote from the theme song) when they fled and took up residence in a new country. Amnesia is the price of safety and prosperity in the new land.
There’s a good site about this cartoon at http://www.wildfirecartoon.tk.