Dunder... DUNDER... DUNDERHEADS, HOOOOOOOOOO!!!

[athelind]

I've had at least three people on my Friends List whining about the rumors of a new Thundercats series. The phrase "raping my childhood" has come up at least once.

Now, I was 19 when Thundercats originally premiered. I wasn't exactly the target audience. My reaction then, and remains today: "what wonderful animation they've wasted on such terrible, silly writing."

According to the (still-unconfirmed) report, WB animation plans something "along the lines of Teen Titans". The Thundercats will be teenagers, on modern-day Earth, in a rock band.

Lore Sjöberg sums up my first point perfectly: Jeez, what are they thinking? Targeting a kid's show at kids!

As I noted above, I wasn't the target audience for the original series. Wake up, ladies and gents: you're not the target audience for the new one.

My second point: Thunderfans, you should be groveling before your Warner overlords in thanks that they're deigning to give the Teen Titans treatment to your beloved show.

Please note that Teen Titans itself is an adaptation of one of the high points of the comic book superhero genre, the '80s run of The New Teen Titans by Wolfman & Perez. NTT was a sweeping epic that ranged from the grimy streets of New York in one month to distant star-systems a few issues later. It had drama and pathos and tension and profound character development. It was DC importing the classic "Marvel Formula", and doing it even better than Marvel.

As a fan of that series, I was initially taken aback by the cartoon. They'd completely changed the personalities of most of the characters, they were experimenting with a faux-anime style that was initially very distracting, it was campier and sillier than the Adam West Batman...

And then they started adapting storylines from the comic. Broadly, yes, but even more darkly than the originals. Deep, brooding menace -- punctuated by humor, but no less menacing thereby. The faux-anime style was toned down -- not eliminated, but handled more gracefully. The characters were funny, but they weren't jokes.

Teen Titans the cartoon is a very different creature than The New Teen Titans -- but it is in no way inferior.

If the Teen Titans can survive the "Teen Titans Treatment", then I think a property that includes such elements as robotic teddy bears Viagra swords, and Snarf might actually be the better for it.

Comments

[reveille-d.livejournal.com]

Eh, whatever.

[rikoshi.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

But they're still fucking up the Transformers movie.

[toy-dragon.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was never a fan or anti-fan of Thundercats. I was amused though, by how radically they changed it around. It's not about prejuging it to be crap; many of the changes seem so arbtrary from the original premise.

Also, it was downright wacky to insert the bit about them having a band. They're already cats. Now teens. A teen band.

Lion-O and the Pussycats anyone?

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Y'know, if Internet Fandom had been around in the '50s, the Silver Age of Comics never would have happened.

"Have you heard about what they're doing to Green Lantern? They're ditching Alan Scott and replacing him with some test pilot! And instead of a unique magic ring and an ancient lantern, they're making him one of THOUSANDS of space-cops with some kind of technological gizmo! Hell-OOO? National? It's been DONE!"

[trpeal.livejournal.com]

HA!

So very, very true.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

When Thundercats came out I was the target audience, hehe. I am not anymore, not unless Lion-O gets violated the first show and then it a fantasy noir about bloody vengeance or something like that.

Insofar as I could be said to have a want for this, I just want the music not to suck. ;)

[shdragon.livejournal.com]

Well put, sir. Well put.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Stereotypical question;

"So who do you think is doing Cheetara in this new version?"

Stereotypical answer;

"All of 'em, just like in the original show."

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

LION-O: Thundercats, HOOOOOO!
CHEETARA: You called?

[galis.livejournal.com]

A lot of it is people remembering things better than they were. I recently saw an episode in which Lion-O says: "This wind is strange. Wait, that's because there is no wind. The wind is coming from there!"

People tend to remember the fun stuff, like Gi-Joe's characters having their mass destruction battles, and forget all the times Cobra used killer clowns with evil balloons and the like ;)

I have a pretty good memory, so I thought back on my own childhood cartoons. Voltron was the big one, and I remembered laser fights against undead, and of course the big robot battles...

And I also remembered like EVERY OTHER EPISODE had WAY too much time spent on those obnoxious little mice in the castle.

That said, new cartoons DO tend to be a lot more 'content free' than older ones. Older ones tend to use stereotypes and actions people tend to find offensive or 'too much' for kids these days. A lot of them tend to trade villains for 'misunderstood' types. For example, look how Yu-Gi-Oh (relatively new in general) progressed. The first series (Yu Gi Oh) was actually serious. Sure, the whole setting was kinda wierd (card battles to decide the fate of the world) but at least it was the fate of the world, and Yugi had a decently complex personality (he actually WORRIED about the second soul inside him). Then the new version, Duel Academy, replaces fate of the world and mind-games with... elementary school with playing cards =P

Rock band... wierd, but okay. Snarf.... ugh, but if his character is less obnoxious than the original maybe. Teenagers... well, not horrible. What's gonna make me groan is if Mummra's goal becomes high teen fashion design rather than world conquest, which is what a lot of things have tended towards lately =P

Content-Free?

[athelind.livejournal.com]

...new cartoons DO tend to be a lot more 'content free' than older ones.

Sorry, as someone who's watched cartoons for most of the past four decades, I can't agree on this at all. If I wanted a wholly unfair example, I'd put Superfriends up against Justice League Unlimited. That one's too easy, though, and either show could be considered an outlier.

Leaving out the anime imports, right now, we've got stuff like Ben Ten, Danny Phantom, Kim Possible, and Teen Titans on the air. Compare those to the "action" cartoons of the '80s, and it won't be the new stuff that looks "content free".

Let's not even touch the "funny" shows. The stuff that passed for "humor" in the '70s, '80s, and early '90s is just too painful to recall. Give me The Grim Adventures of Billy and Many or even Spongebob Squarepants over The Great Grape Ape or The Get-Along Gang any day.

Yeah, there's a lot of drek on the air today -- Sturgeon's Reveltaion was that "Ninety percent of everything is crud." That's true today, that was true in the '70s and '80s and '90s.

However, I think that in recent years, the quality of the upper 10% has been of ever-increasing quality.

Re: Content-Free?

[stalbon.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with Athelind here. Even some of the odd shows out there are still producing a lot of thought-filled content. Get Ed reminds me a lot of Beast Wars or Reboot in that it was a CG kid's show which nonetheless had a very good plotline to it. There are definitely cartoon shows that are terrible today, but if you look about, you'll notice a lot of them that are better than you'd imagine.

Re: Content-Free?

[galis.livejournal.com]

JLU is cool. It also is failing to compete for time slots against much more vapid things, though. I just turn on and see 6 back to back episodes of Edd Edd and Eddy, and blah.

What I mean is that it really DOES seem like people are getting more and more worried about airing anything potentially offensive; look how fast Zim got killed despite a huge following.

Re: Content-Free?

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Feh. Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy is GLEEFULLY offensive, and as edgy and witty as Zim. And it's successful. And not going anywhere.

[gorn-captain.livejournal.com]

Would be it so hard to, I don't know...make the original premise work today without the silly constraints on violence and sledgehammer-subtle moralizing the old show suffered? Make Mumm-ra totally bad-ass and evil incarnate and Snarf less of a whiner? Have Lion-O actually deal with suddenly being an adult? A darker, more scary, better-written Thundercats reboot ala Battlestar Galactica or Doctor Who could work.
On the surface, this sounds like half-assed cashing on a brand name rather than coming up with something new. Well see I guess...
I only ever really watched the original for scaly mutant bad-boy Slyythe, who never got enough screentime, IMHO. :P

[archteryx.livejournal.com]

Yay, new Thundercats. This is NOT anywhere near the same territory as the incredibly ill-thought-out Loonatics, so it's worth giving a chance.

Besides, it'll give me an excuse to haul S'neifa out of mothballs again, and she how she'd fit into the new storyline. Hell, maybe this time she WON'T almost try and murder Snarf in cold blood the first time they meet.