When her true allegiance to Mumm-Ra is revealed, I felt I should have seen it coming. Introduced in the episode The Pit, she goes on a wild character development arc from raging at Liono abandoning his people, through to loyal Thundercat and Liono’s girlfriend, right back to rage. The final member of the Thundercat team was, of course, Pumyra. Being honest, I never really minded 1980s Snarf (though that fucking nephew of his really got my goat), and it seems a shame to have muzzled this one. I’ll mention Snarf briefly: he’s present in this series, but he can’t talk, nor does he appear to be as intelligent as he was in the 1980s. Still, Wilykit in particular proved rather insightful: it’s her commentary that spurs Liono out of his despondency at the very end of What Lies Above, Part 2. When they did form the episode’s centrepiece, they were little better: both Survival of the Fittest and The Forever Bag seemed like pretty pointless outings. Their search for El Dorra quickly got forgotten, and they were often dropped from stories for no particularly good reason. The other main members of the team, Wilycat and Wilykit, weren’t as compelling for me, but they were miles better than their 1980s counterparts. He’s also the go-to for comic relief – not always effectively his fear of heights in What Lies Above, Part 1 didn’t really work – and could always be relied on for a completely mental one-line personal philosophy: “If you can’t beat ‘em, run ‘em over” will always stand out to me as excellent advice. He’s fixated on military tactics, and has a gruff exterior with a heart of gold, which shines through at unexpected moments, sometimes quite touchingly. He was the best thing about the 1980s series, and he’s one of the best things about this one. Her character never really recovered from this, and she’s by far the least interesting of the core cast. She’s always around, and proves a formidable fighter when necessary, but she very rarely gets anything to do, and quite early on was seemingly reduced to an object over which Liono and Tigra could squabble. Speaking of fading into the background, however, I think Cheetara gets the worst deal in this series. He fades into the background a little with the introduction of Pumyra, but he’s still one of the most interesting characters on the show. Despite a rocky start, with frequent clashes between him and Liono, he proves to be fiercely loyal. No longer the barely functional idiot that he was in the 1980s, he’s remodelled as Liono’s adoptive elder brother, who was expecting to take the throne and is thus jealous of Liono’s position. Tigra is perhaps the character who’s changed the most in the reboot. ![]() He’s a far more sympathetic character than his 1980s namesake, and best of all, his victories feel earned, rather than simply a result of him shouting “Thundercats Ho!” and expecting his sword to do the work. Liono, of course, matures over the series from an impetuous youth into a strong and sensible leader, and he does this by making mistakes, and learning to listen to the advice of his companions. The characters play a large part in this. I imagine it’s harder to make a series like this: each writer has to know where the story’s going, and how their part fits in, but Thundercats 2011 manages to make it work and brings us back every week, wanting to know what happens next. Now, I know that the MYP version of He-Man did this, and to a lesser extent so did the New Adventures, but Thundercats 2011 is the first cartoon I’ve seen where things really change, week-in-week-out, sometimes rather dramatically. Here we have a cartoon where events in one episode massively affect what comes after. But as I watched more of it, I came to conclude that, especially in its first half, this was a really good series. So, what did I think of Thundercats 2011? Well, I started off simply by comparing it to the 1980s incarnation – and I think it’s fairly well known what I think of that – and so, purely by not being that idiotic cartoon, Thundercats 2011 got a pass from me.
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