What is Bass X Machina based on? A real lawman who may have inspired the Lone Ranger
The man Brian Tyree Henry plays in Bass X Machina has a robot arm that turns into a shotgun, and that's the least surprising thing about him.
Bass X Machina is a six-episode animated series that Netflix released on November 3, 2026. LeSean Thomas, who made Yasuke and Cannon Busters, created it, and Studio Mir animated it. Henry voices Bass and is an executive producer, and Janelle Monáe voices his wife, Glory, and sings the opening theme, "Sand." The setting is the West after the Civil War, rebuilt with war machines, a monorail and supernatural outlaws.
"I'm interested in the punk rock Western," Henry said at Anime NYC.
The real Bass Reeves
The history underneath it is real. Bass Reeves was born into slavery in July 1838 in Crawford County, Arkansas, and grew up in Texas, enslaved by the Reeves family. During the Civil War, George Reeves took him along to the Confederate army. Bass ran.
He escaped to Indian Territory, in what's now Oklahoma, and lived among the tribes there long enough to learn their languages and their tracking. That was exactly what the federal court in Fort Smith, Arkansas, needed. In 1875, Judge Isaac Parker's marshal, James Fagan, hired Reeves as a deputy, at 37, to work a territory of more than 75,000 square miles.
He kept the job for about 32 years. He made more than 3,000 arrests, and in 1902 one of them was his own son, Bennie, wanted for murdering his wife. Reeves died in Muskogee, Oklahoma, on January 12, 1910.
The Lone Ranger theory
The theory comes from one historian. In his 2006 book Black Gun, Silver Star, Art T. Burton called Reeves "the closest real person to resemble the fictional Lone Ranger." He was clear that he couldn't prove the two were linked. The parallels he drew:
- The mask — Reeves often worked in disguise.
- Tonto — Reeves often rode with a Native American posseman.
- The white horse — court records show Reeves once rode a gray or white horse.
- Silver — Reeves reportedly paid a family that helped him with a silver dollar.
- The name — the Lone Ranger was originally a Texas Ranger named John Reid.
- Detroit — the radio show started in Detroit, and many of the men Reeves arrested ended up in a Detroit prison.
The internet took it from there.
The case against it
Christian Wallace looked into it for Texas Monthly in 2021 and concluded that "each connection that Burton makes is tenuous at best." Plenty of lawmen worked in disguise and rode with Native guides. Silver dollars were ordinary money. Reeves rode hundreds of horses, and the one he's best known for was a bay or sorrel with a blaze face. Tonto didn't even appear on the radio show until its 11th episode.
The radio historian Martin Grams Jr. went through the correspondence of the Lone Ranger's creators, George W. Trendle, Fran Striker and director James Jewell, and found how the character came together piece by piece. Striker came up with the silver bullets. Jewell suggested the Native sidekick.
Most likely, Wallace wrote, the creators "had never heard of Reeves."
Burton doesn't seem to mind. Asked about the comparison, he told Texas Monthly: "I don't think that's a bad thing."
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What Bass X Machina invents
Almost everything else. Alison Herman's Variety review sums up the split: after Reeves's escape and the Civil War itself, "the rest is all glorious invention."
The robot arm is invented, and so is the man responsible for it: General Rivenbark, a Confederate commander who chained Bass to a machine in a grisly experiment and is still at large. So is Glory. The real Reeves married Nellie Jennie in 1864 and had eleven children.
He's had more conventional versions on screen, most recently David Oyelowo in Taylor Sheridan's Lawmen: Bass Reeves in 2023. Bass X Machina goes the other way.
"Because most of the time in Westerns, our visibility is excluded," he said.
For the record: The Lone Ranger went on the air in Detroit in January 1933, 23 years after Reeves died.
Previously we wrote: Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku: restart death list — all 13 in the order they go, and the three who walk out