[3][4][5] Mike is a struggling artist who draws the Brenda Starr comic strip for a newspaper.

Brenda heads to the Amazon jungle to find a scientist with a secret formula, which will create cheap and powerful fuel from ordinary water.

In 1981, it was reported that Deborah Harry would star in a film version of the comic with George Hamilton as Basil St.

[6] In 1984, a small production company called Tomorrow Entertainment, under Myron Hyman, got the rights to make a movie about Brenda Starr.

This was Sheik Abdul Aziz al Ibrahim, a brother-in-law of Saudi King Fahd.

Ibrahim's representatives created Mystery Man Productions, a New York-based company, to finance the film.

[9] Mystery Man hired Robert Ellis Miller to direct, and Bob Mackie designed Shields' dresses.

[7][10] Mystery Man obtained limited rights to the Brenda Starr character from the Tribune Entertainment Co., owners of the comic strip, in April 1986.

[12] During filming, Timothy Dalton, who had the male lead, was cast as James Bond for The Living Daylights.

New World wanted to cash in on the fact that Dalton had been cast as James Bond and the impending surge in comic-book movies such as Batman and Dick Tracy.

One of Ibrahim's representatives said their client was "prepared to keep the film on a shelf and watch it in the desert on Saturday nights" if he could not have the kind of distribution deal he wanted.

[8] Mystery Man kept the film's negative locked up, claiming New World had not signed a contract.

New World then discovered that Tribune, the company that owned the comic, claimed to hold all television rights to Brenda Starr.

In September, New World sued Tomorrow, Mystery Man and the film's sales agents, claiming fraud, breach of contract and civil conspiracy.

"[15] New World sold the film to Zambia, Japan, Belgium, Colombia, Norway and Swaziland.

[16] However, this deal fell apart, and Ronald Perelman's Andrews Group instead purchased New World that April, indicating that while New World's television operations would continue, their motion pictures and home video operations would be cut back significantly.

Owen Gleiberman, writing for Entertainment Weekly, graded the film with an F, stating that the title character "... comes off as a giggly (if spectacularly elongated) high school princess" and that the film "is so flaccid and cheap-looking, so ineptly pieced together, that it verges on the avant-garde.

Brenda Starr is not as bad as the also-rans that Hollywood traditionally dumps on us before Labor Day... it's a heap worse.

"[24] Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, commented, "This would-be comic romp is badly dated in several conspicuous ways.

Its cold war villains are embarrassingly outré (even allowing for the film's 1940's look, in keeping with the peak popularity of Brenda Starr as a comic strip heroine)...most dated of all is Brenda herself, the 'girl reporter' who worries chiefly about not running her stockings or breaking her high heels, and who in one scene actually uses a black patent leather handbag as a secret weapon.

"[25] Pamela Bruce, in The Austin Chronicle, was highly critical of Brenda Starr: "After gathering dust for five years, some studio executive decided that there just isn't enough dreck in the world and decided to unleash Brenda Starr upon us poor, unsuspecting mortals.

The film is presented in full frame, 1.33:1 format, with English Dolby Digital stereo sound.