A Rant On The New Thundercats
Like all children of the 80s I was raised on a diet of cola bottles and dumb. Olivia Newton John was at number one with Xanadu and Tom Hanks was on the big screen having sex with a mermaid. Life was good.
Cartoons played the biggest part in my emotional-development: Scooby Doo taught me teamwork, Spiderman taught me responsibility and He-Man taught me to never trust a skeleton. I loved these shows with the sort of foaming passion only Space Dust and WHAM Bars could fuel, and my absolute favourite was Thundercats.
The original show was classic 80s cartooning – it was produced by Rankin and Bass animations, a company that specialised in developing children's entertainment based upon animal-fetishism and karate. They were the creative minds behind the Silverhawks and the Tigersharks and were probably just 2 lines of coke away from a show entitled 'Fuck-Ducks'.
Thundercats conformed to every standard that 80s audiences demanded of their Saturday morning entertainment: laser-filled and rad. The show was indistinguishable from He-Man, Ninja Turtles and every other damn cartoon that wasn't Denver the Last Dinosaur with around 5 minutes of plot development followed by 17 minutes of monster-punching.
The Thundercats crash-landed on a planet inhabited by 100%-not-Thundercats and proceeded to spend 130 fur-lined-episodes sword-of-omen'ing-the-face off of everything they met. Occasionally they dropped a He-Man-style moral-bomb about 'not telling lies' or 'staying away from drugs' but usually it was just 22 minutes of football mascots kicking each others’ asses.
It wasn't perfect. Every character spoke like their mothers had been competitive paint-huffers and the storylines were comprised of plots Charlie Sheen might scream during sex – but we loved every minute of them. Every episode was pure, unadulterated, bad-ass; which was no mean feat considering that the terms 'bad-ass' and 'dressed-like-a-tiger' can, scientifically, never occupy the same sentence.
Since the metric system cannot calculate levels of excitement in boners and screaming, my reaction to news of a 'Rebooted-Thundercats' could only be described as 'Very'.
This excitement was sadly misplaced.
Re-imagined for an audience less 80s than 2011, 'New Thundercats' seems like some Japanese animators’ confusing apology to his father. Gone is the bright bad-assery of the 80s, replaced instead by drab Manga that is only 5 tentacles shy of a sticky high-five from Toshio Maeda.
Every character whines and complains their way through their lines like spokesmen for Clotrimazole and the show has more long steely gazes between man-cats that an entire 120 minutes of Roadhouse. While the original was all action and business-ends of a Thundertank, 'New Thundercats' has all the intensity of 2 cast members from the Broadway musical Cats breaking up.
Perhaps I unfairly romanticized the original show and, in reality, it wasn't actually all that good in the first place... Or perhaps while searching for the new one my computer just confused the words 'Thunder' and 'Cats' with 'Ass' and 'Disaster', which would explain why the new Belladonna video I downloaded seems to be 2 hours of some dude in a fur suit punching a mummy.
Comments (4)
Add a comment »Well it is not meant for those of us who remember the 80s. IT's a show for kids today and is designed to appeal to them. Really the 80s cartoons weren't good. At all. And I'm sure when kids today look back they'll realize their fave shows tend to be crap, too.
But "Re-imagined for an audience less 80s than 2011" is what it SHOULD be. The old show was based off the standard model for what worked then - He-Man, etc. This new one is the same. This is what works now. But it isn't meant fo rus, and shouldn't ever be judged by that, but only by it's own merits.
At least they have a decent voice cast and the plot is actually far more... sane than the original. Not that that's hard.
Posted by | Wednesday August 2011 @ 15:14
Approved by moderatorReported to moderatorIf they still made shows for people who remember the 80's, We'd all be watching nearly 24 hours of dogs-solving-crimes and Andrew McCarthy fucking a store Mannequin. The radio would be filled with Mili Vanili and 'Blaming the Rain' would become a legitimate political stance.
I don't totally hate the new Thundercats.
I'm just saying that I prefer to watch it from behind and that while I'm with it, I'm secretly fantasizing about other shows.
Any cartoon based on men dressed as kitty-cats is going to have an uphill struggle trying to sell itself to kids as bad-ass.
It's hard to imagine that a generation of 'Ben 10' fans are going to be fist-bumping each other over a series that involves Rum-Tum-Tugger, a sword and no pants.They try their best. They gave 'Tigra' (The Thundercat whose main power is 'Razzamatazz') A ray-gun, which is, in terms of bad-assery, the same as giving Richard Simmons a cowboy hat.
The Thundertank turns up at the end of episode 4 - bringing with it 80-cat-filled-tons of awesome.
Sadly, it only appears in the last 3 minutes of an otherwise terrible 22, leaving you with the feeling that you just watched an entire Siegfried & Roy magic show just to see the Tiger escape in a Monster Truck.Posted by | Wednesday August 2011 @ 15:42
Report to moderatorAdam - I'm sure they would not have left us 80's children out of their thoughts when creating...there are allot of us after all.
Fred - Is there potential for dressing up inspired by this new epic or will we all want to stick to the old school? I have a memory of a coloured horse with an awesome mane...or was that a cola bottle induced hallucination/obsession??
Posted by | Wednesday August 2011 @ 21:12
Report to moderatorAnother problem I have with the show is their new cover version of the theme-song.
The original was officially recognized as one of the greatest 80's tunes to sex to (next to 'the action theme from 'Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous' and/or any song from the Iron Eagle soundtrack)
The only time I would consider using the new song in any crotch-based setting, was if if my idea of a sexually intense evening happened to be 20 seconds of crying and apologies.
Posted by | Friday October 2011 @ 10:51
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