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.