The Bitter Roar

So…when I was a kid, there was this show called Thundercats.

It was a show about humanoid alien cats who fought a bad guy named Mumm-Ra and his toadies.  Now, in the 80’s, cartoons often were not just shows…they were half hour advertisements for…

That is the real truth.  Anyways…the cartoon has some real hard fans.  I remember enjoying the show, and I am sure the people actually writing and performing and animating it set out to make a good cartoon. In 2011, Cartoon Network rebooted Thundercats in a kind of Anime style.

It lasted a season, much to the disappointment of it’s small group of fans.

This weekend, Cartoon Network announced an all new Thundercats cartoon called Thundercats Roar! And the art looks like this…

And the internet lost it’s shit.  I don’t mean people expressed dismay about the art.  I mean, they did. But there were people who saw this as an attack on their beloved childhood cartoon. Don’t believe me?

Um, the last one there rambles for seventeen minutes and never successfully connects Thundercats Roar to the topic of “toxic Anti-Masculinity’. And the one above that one is just embarrassing awful. He accuses the creators of tracing another image, only to discover that this is not true, and what he thought was the original image was a parody of the Thundercats Roar image. He spends the last three or four minutes on a rambling and awkward song about how much he hates the producer.  He also seems certain the show is being made out of hate for the original cartoon.

And so, I just found it kind of tiring and tweeted:

Now, normally I expect to get maybe a couple retweets. I have around 400 followers, a fair number I assume are bots. But apparently after I made a joke response to a conversation Kurt Busiek was having with a person complaining about blatant representation of gays in comics, Kurt looked at my timeline and retweeted this tweet. And uh…well, lets just say I have not had a tweet get that many likes or retweets before.  Now, largely, the response has been of a positive nature.

But the critics have mainly focused on “instead seem to have opted at an attempt to entertain kids”. They hit me with “there will be merchandise for this version!” So, I wrote this follow up tweet:

The actual point of the tweet was that not every cartoon is aimed at me. You see, I don’t like the art for Roar either. It just does not appeal to me. It is unlikely I will be watching it. But that means this cartoon is not meant for me. I am not it’s target audience. And that is okay.

Maybe this version will be awful.  That is certainly possible. But nobody knows that it will for sure. You don’t care for it.  That is okay.  You can even express your concerns about the direction the creators took. But how you go about this matters.  And a lot of these responses suck way harder than Thundercats Roar.

Oh, by the way.  A young lady on Twitter politely interjected:

So, my original post may, in fact, be entirely accurate.  And you know, I highly doubt the creators set out to destroy childhoods or hate the original cartoon.  I doubt they have set out to make a terrible show.

It is okay to complain. It is ridiculous to go on extended rants filled with hate towards the Cartoon Network and the show’s creative staff.