![]() ![]() ![]() Got all that? Clear as mud, right? A bunch of cat people whose society’s power comes from a mystical eye embedded in a magic sword fight against mutants and a mummified sorcerer. They fled their homeworld Thundera and end up on Third Earth, where Lion-O, Cheetara, Panthro, Tygra, WilyKit, WilyKat, Snarf, and ghost Jaga protect the Sword of Omens from evil mutants and defend the inhabitants of Third Earth from the evil Mum-Raa. ThunderCats tells the story of the Thundereans, humanoid anthropomorphic alien cats. Filmation is another once respected studio, although it is best known to 80s kids as the producer of quick and dirty, cheaply animated fare like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra: Princess of Power, Ghostbusters (the one with a gorilla), and the Adventures of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. The other difference is that unlike many of the cartoons on the air at the time ThunderCats wasn’t a Filmation release it was made by Rankin/Bass Productions, the legendary producer of Christmas specials like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, The Little Drummer Boy, and The Year Without A Santa Claus, although by the time Rankin/Bass put out ThunderCats the studio was not long for this world. The LJN toy line was based on the animated series, which while it debuted in 1985 was actually created in 1983. Unlike most of the cartoons produced in that era that served as tie-ins to an already existing toy line, ThunderCats the cartoon technically existed first. More likely I was playing Nintendo and eagerly awaiting whatever new games I’d asked for that year. I don’t remember what I was doing that day, but odds are I may have watched ThunderCats as part of the festivities. The final episode aired on September 29, 1989, my 9th birthday. ThunderCats debuted in 1985 and ran for four years and 130 episodes, plus a TV movie. It’s fun to imagine these guys and the ThunderCats in a shared universe. I’m about to rewatch the pilot episode and while I’m going to get into it shortly first I’ll provide a little background on the show. It showed up on Amazon a couple of years ago, and after I failed to turn my watching experience into a decent stand up bit I remembered it recently and figured that maybe I could turn it into a decent article. The first entry in this series is ThunderCats. I don’t want to tip my hand this early but ThunderCats was the inspiration for the column (and having to capitalize that C every time I write it is not improving my feelings towards the show). With this in mind, today on 80s Baby we will be launching a new column: “Is This Rewatchable?” While this could be applied to anything covered here, in the column we will take an occasional deep dive into something that I (or a guest writer) cared about as a child, to see if it can stand on its own. For this reason, rewatching shows and replaying games that we once loved can be a huge letdown when it turns out that the object of affection is very much of its time, or even worse, was never any good to begin with. A lot of things that we love are meaningful to us because they’re linked to a certain time, place, and memory. That’s the entire reason this website exists. So much of what we remember fondly is colored by nostalgia. ![]()
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