New ‘ThunderCats’ Series On The Way And Some Fans Are Reeeally Not Happy
Some things are very sacred to certain people. Like the 1985 animated children’s seriesThunderCatsfor instance. In some people’s minds,ThunderCats, a cartoon about catlike humanoid aliens with swords, is as sacrosanct as Michelangelo’s painting on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Now, a newThunderCatsseries,ThunderCats Roar, is on the way and some people are very, very Mad Online™.
RememberThunderCats? They’re back, in new series form. The new show is calledThunderCats Roar, and the show adopts a much more cartoonish/comical approach to its animation than the original show. Here’s a teaser.
ThunderCats Road Teaser
To better illustrate how different this looks compared to the style of the original series, here’s theThunderCatsintro and opening credits.
ThunderCats Intro
As someone with absolutely no allegiance to the originalThunderCats, I have zero problems with this update. Is it silly looking? Sure. Does the animation look more akin to thePowerpuff Girlsthan the originalThunderCats. It sure does. Does any of that really matter? Absolutely not.
But the internet, being the internet, isnothappy about this. Many have decried the fact that the new series doesn’t care about the “integrity of the animation”, or that the new series looks like “silly, cutesy pandering.” Someone even wrote (and I wish I were kidding) “Thundercats is a serious show about serious shit.”
Blindspottingproducer Keith Calder took to twitter to rebuff some of these very angry statements, and the results were pretty damn amusing.
This is all pretty silly, but it’s also part of a larger pattern. There’s a community of fans who can’t quite grasp that not everything is being made directly for them. And that times change. Just because a new take on an old show doesn’t lookexactlylike the way you remember it, it doesn’t make the new show null and void. What I’m trying to say here is that it’s okay to let things go sometimes. To leave the past in the past.
Anytime fan outrage like this pops up, I’m reminded of a quote from American author James M. Cain. Cain wrote the book that inspired the filmDouble Indemnity– a film that made several major changes to his source material. When an interviewer asked Cain if he was bothered by the changes from book to screen, the author replied:
“People tell me, don’t you care what they’ve done to your book? I tell them, they haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf.”
I wish more fans would apply this line of thinking to remakes and reboots. In other words, this newThunderCatsisn’t “ruining” the oldThunderCats. The oldThunderCatsstill exists. This is just something different. If it doesn’t appeal to you – so what? Let someone else find it and embrace it instead.
ThunderCats Roarwill be coming to Cartoon Network in2019. You don’t have to watch it if you don’t want to.
