THUNDERCATS:
-In the annals of '80s cartoons, ThunderCats likely has the most iconic catchphrases- your "Yo, Joe!"s and "More Than Meets the Eye"s had to bow down and accept the reality that "Thunder! Thunder! Thunder! ThunderCats... HOOOOOOOOOOOO!" was the biggest and best of them all. Even "Truly Outrageous!" fell before it. It's so iconic that when my family & I went to Las Vegas and saw Wayne Brady's Making Shit Up improv show, we witnessed him asking the crowd if they'd grown up in the eighties, and to make sure, he blurted out "Thunderthunderthundercats" and held out the mic- sure enough, a rousing chorus of "HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" burst out of the crowd. We damn near ALL knew it!
The show also stands as having the greatest, most well-animated Theme Song of the era- no small success when there were literally a hundred shows all aiming for the dollars of whiny kids' parents.
The show was created in 1985 by Rankin-Bass Productions (most famous for their stop-motion Christmas stuff, like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer), mainly to jump into the already-crowded ranks of TV cartoons meant to advertise toy lines. And the show became so successful that it ultimately managed to be #4 in the list- behind G.I. Joe, Transformers and He-Man. However, it had the shortest run of the group, and the weakest legacy as well. I remember being OBSESSED with it as a kid- problematic, because I was born in 1981, which meant I was way too young to have watched most of the first-runs. The show petered out by 1988, and I was the oldest kid in my family, which meant that I didn't really have mastery of the TV remote until later, I guess, because I BARELY remember watching it. In fact, I was too young for almost ALL of those shows- only G.I. Joe's later season was readily-available- when I came of age, Jem and She-Ra repeats were the '80s cartoons of choice until Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out near the turn of the decade and rewrote the book on what it meant to be a phenomenon as a toy line.
Because of this timing issue, I only had a handful of the figures, and mostly little ones with no articulation. Transformers: Generation 2 meant I had more of those, and Dino-Riders was my jam. TMNT we had by the bucketful. Even He-Man was still being produced. G.I. Joe kept going for a good while after it faded in popularity, too, so I had those (mostly "Ninja Force"-era guys). But ThunderCats was REALLY hard to find out there. The issue was, the short three-year run may have produced 136 episodes, but it didn't get repeated as often, and the toyline faded too quickly, and the world had moved on. So while I loved the idea enough that my mom, to this day, talks about how much I dug it... I probably never watched more than four episodes in my entire childhood. My only real memories of it are from watching as an adult, and even then, only from rentals, because Canada didn't get the regular repeats of most of these shows until much later, and I didn't have a PVR until after they'd stopped airing.
And MAN this show was really silly and bad in retrospect. There are things you can appreciate in the other shows- as I've mentioned, Jem was a great show with a lot of fairly-deep and interesting characters, and is the most wildly, boldly '80s of the era. Transformers was stupid as hell, but had the best character designs, voices and fights. G.I. Joe was legitimately well-written at times, and had some great comedy and adventure elements. But ThunderCats was mostly just BAD. The animation was static and poor, the voice-acting either dull or ridiculous (the same six people do EVERY VOICE in the first season), and more. The dialogue was nearly always handed out in a dry, dull manner, or with the goofiest cartoon voices (Monkian rendered some episodes unwatchable to me as an adult). Snarf was one of the most annoying "Kid Focus Comedy Relief" characters of the era, too. The AMAZING opening theme, complete with state-of-the-art animation that impresses even TODAY... just set you up for failure. The show is just plain bad.
THE STORY:
-ThunderCats is the story of a race of catlike beings from Thundera (pronounced Thun-DER-a- the Marvel Comics even spelled in THUNDERA in writing), who were attacked by the evil "Mutants", also animal people. The Mutants destroyed Thundera, but the main cast managed to escape in a ship- chased to a planet called "Third Earth". Third Earth is a more "Anything Goes" kind of fantasy/sci-fi setting, with technology mixed with sorcery.
The sole survivors of the Thunderan race are Lion-O (a twelve-year old boy artificially aged into an adult form, who takes leadership because he's the Prince), Tygra (a stoic guy), Panthro (a strong tech-genius), Cheetarah (The Chick with super-speed), and twins Wilykat & Wilykit, who represent the "Annoying Kid Focus" characters. Their sidekick is Snarf, who can also speak, but is a more odd-looking "Mascot" creature, more ugly than cute. The shows of the era featured a LOT of these characters, with The Real Ghostbusters's Slimer being the most iconic. The ghostly spectre of Jaga would also appear to Lion-O, giving him sagely advice. The notion of "Cats-As-People" is never really explored- can the cat people breed with other types? What happens when all the tiger-themed names are taken and the tiger-people have to pick new names? Are Panthro's people targetted by the police more than Bengali's? You never know!
Their enemies were the Mutants- Slythe (lizard), Monkian (ape), Vultureman & Jackalman... who crash-landed along with their minions into the real of the ancient mummy wizard Mumm-Ra, who took command of the entire operation.
The episodes would involve a lot of "lessons" (parents of the time were complaining about the violence in children's TV), as the young, naive Lion-O would need to be taught by the other characters. His strength and powers were great, but he was easily-fooled. The bumbling enemies would be beaten easily enough, but Mumm-Ra had a lot more menace than most of the retreat-ordering cowards of the day.
A season or two in, a new cast of characters would be added- Pumyra, Bengali, and Lynx-O. As a kid, I was so far out of the ThunderCats thing that I had no idea these characters existed until I was an adult, so these people are complete unknowns to me. In the final season, Mumm-Ra would reconstruct "New Thundera" in order to find the Sword of Plun-Darr and the Book of Omens- magical items of great power.
REVIVALS:
-Revivals of the franchise have met with complete and utter failure, unlike some of its contemporaries, who successfully revived at different points. While there has been a Transformers series in production for like twenty years at this point, ThunderCats has managed only one failed revival, and it had to wait all the way until 2011 to get it. This series, drawn in a very anime-inspired style, like somewhere between Avatar: The Last Airbender and Young Justice, was a little too serious (ie. boring) for young audiences, and not nostalgia-related enough for old ones. Having watched ten-ish episodes, I can ABSOLUTELY see why it was cancelled- "Slow Build" TV shows are basically another word for "Boring As Balls", and so the thing completely failed to maintain my interest. There were SOME good ideas (Pamela Adlon as Pumyra was great- her voice is sooooooooo sexy), but it felt like it was all build, and no pay-off. The fights were very sub-par, the animation was often VERY static (great, complicated designs meant that the had to cheap out on actual MOVEMENT), and overall it never built any sort of momentum, unlike Avatar, which also started a bit slow.
Ultimately, the show failed to maintain any sort of an audience, and completely bombed- it was cancelled halfway through a planned 52-episode production, and thus never got a proper ending. A new revival, called ThunderCats ROAR!, is a completely bizarre, 100% comedic, goofily-drawn comedy show that more or less takes the characters and setting and makes a comedy out of them. As you might imagine, '80s Kids are famously accepting of all changes to beloved old cartoons, so they just ADORED this.
