That thrusts him into adult responsibilities pretty quickly, but Lion-O is eager to take up the task. Lion-O’s journey gets sped up in a big way because on the way to Third Earth, the capsule holding him in suspended animation malfunctions and he ages to adulthood by the time the Thundercats crash on the planet. The three adults, Tygra, Cheetara, and Panthro, are all Thunderian nobles who have to shepherd Lion-O into his role as the Lord of the Thundercats. The fact that they are a handful of survivors, cut off from other known Thunderians, also added pathos to their situation.
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They all have a commitment to noble ideals (embodied by the Code of Thundera) without being insufferable or pretentious.
The Thundercats themselves are like a band of superheroes, with each possessing a weapon (like Cheetara’s staff, Panthro’s nunchucks, or Tygra’s bolo whip) or a special power, like Cheetara’s super speed.Īlso, the Thundercats are enjoyable characters. For example, one of the writers, Bob Haney, actually co-created the Teen Titans for DC. The writers also developed a mythology that made the Tcats universe deeper and more fun to explore, likely helped that Thundercats featured writers with backgrounds in comic books or comic strips, not just writers who worked solely in animation.
The character design, primarily for the cats, and the backgrounds also has an anime resemblance, helped by the fact that it was animated in Japan. To start with, the artwork and designs of everything from the characters to the landscapes to the backgrounds is great, weaving together a universe that is part fantasy, part sci-fi. With 130 episodes brought to us by Rankin-Bass (yep, the same folks that gave us Rudolph and all those stop-motion Christmas specials), Thundercats had to have something going for it to last so long. Finally, the last season saw the cats moving to a reformed version of Thundera, but Mumm-Ra follows to once again cause trouble. The third season was mostly a chase between Mumm-Ra and the Thundercats to reclaim pieces of the Treasure of Thundera. In the subsequent five-parter “Mumm-Ra Lives!” an ailing Mumm-Ra assembles a new group of villains called the Lunatacs to take on the Thundercats. The second season debuted with a five-parter in which three new Thundercats, Lynx-O, Bengali, and Pumyra, are discovered hiding on Third Earth. From there, the bulk of the first season usually featured stand-alone episodes in which Mumm-Ra and/or the mutants hatch a new plan to get rid of the cats, or the Thundercats will run into some new problem or meet a new ally. The first few episodes have the Thundercats establishing themselves on Third Earth.
To top it off, a mummified sorcerer named Mumm-Ra covets the Sword of Omens and frequently attacks the Thundercats to get the magical item, although after a while he’s pretty much obsessed with destroying the cats altogether. But the Thundarians have been pursued to Third Earth by the evil mutants of Plun-darr, led by the lizard S-s-slithe. Our main cast includes Lion-O, the main hero and wielder of the magical Sword of Omens, his Obi-Wan-like mentor Jaga who dies en route to Third Earth but appears in a ghostly form, Lion-O’s mentors and friends Tygra, Cheetara and Panthro, Lion-O’s old nursemaid Snarf, and the mischievous thunderkittens Wilykit and Wilykat. The backstory of Thundercats: a small group of survivors flee their disintegrating world Thundera and crash on a planet called Third Earth, where subsequent episodes take up their adventures trying to adapt to their new home while fighting baddies. And you got to love that battle cry, “Thunder…Thunder…Thunder…Thundercats…HOOOO!” Say, did I mention this show also has robot bears?
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This series was all too happy to throw in, well, just about anything, from a mummified sorcerer who lives in a pyramid, a group of mutant animals from another planet, and oh yes, alien humanoid cats whose leader wields a sword that flashes a cat symbol in the sky much like the Bat-signal. Thundercats is a cheerful mishmash of adventure, science fiction and fantasy tropes with a big dose of 1980s cheese.