A Non-Thundercats Fan Trashes Thundercats Roar

When those of us who grew up with the original Thundercats put down Thundercats Roar the show’s defenders will pop up and make all kinds of claims against them, about how they’re too attached to the original and blinded by nostalgia and don’t like change. This is in spite of the fact that many of us old fans liked the 2011 remake. It made a few translation errors but for the most part the spirit was still there while it did its own thing. It’s not one of my best examples of reboots done right but I’ll add it to the list. Thundercats Roar on the other hand feels like another example of mockstalgia, and of course pushed back against its critics using Teen Titans Go!, a show famous for wasting whole episodes to spit in the face of fans of the previous series who hate the direction the parody has taken. (I think the creator of Roar worked on Go! but I could be wrong.) They even got Larry Kenney, voice of the original Lion-O, to chime in.

Yep, that’s a dead Panthro in the corner, more picking on original Snarf, and saying that any criticism against the new version are made by bad people, and not fans who hate that their action show was turned into bad comedy. My own review found the first episode to be merely meh and only annoying because of what it did to beloved characters. But you don’t want to hear us old fans defend what we love against something that mocks it? Fine, here’s the Mysterious Mr. Enter, who never really saw the original, telling you other reasons the show is bad. Swearing ahead.

Catch more Animated Atrocities and other cartoon discussions on his YouTube channel.

I want to emphasize the point he made at the end. If you don’t like a property, don’t work on that property. Don’t take something you don’t like and turn it into something you do like, then fire back at fans of the original that “this wasn’t made for you”. The property WAS made for them. The problem is you didn’t like that it wasn’t made for YOU so rather than make your own version you took what wasn’t made for you and made it for you. Yet if someone took something you liked and did the same thing you’d probably complain that they ruined it, and probably throw in “they’re horrible people” in there somehow because that’s how we work these days. They could have taken the concept of Thundercats, made original characters, called it something else, and had no restrictions from the original or bother fans of the franchise. That’s too much like work. Better to promote it using an already famous property and maybe even use the backlash as a way to promote it. I still cannot understand the “even bad press is good press because it’s still press” mentality. It’s an excuse to create garbage or at least not put any effort into promoting something you want to make off of something you don’t care about, fans of the property be damned.

One thing I’ll correct Mr. Enter on though is that Thundercats wasn’t created to sell toys. Yes, toys were made in the hopes of paying for the show, but it was a show-first creation, like Centurions and Bravestarr more than Transformers or He-Man/She-Ra. I know he doesn’t care for 80s shows but at least get the facts straight. It seemed all his time was put to debunking the “Cal Arts Style” term, which is fine and necessary, but you don’t have to like the cartoons of the 1980s to understand them. Besides, if the show is good, who cares? I wasn’t even interested in the Centurions or Bravestarr figures and I enjoy both shows. Good TV is what counts, not what it’s trying to push.