For those of you who saw people raging about the look of the upcoming Thundercats cartoon, now you know how I felt when I saw the Gatchaman Crowds designs. It’s not easy to accept a show you grew up with becoming a parody of what it used to be.
As for what my stance regarding the show, it’s best to keep in mind the three major groups that judge the show differently. One group is the fans of the older versions, one group is the creators, and one group is the intended audience, which many don’t seem to comprehend. The older fans are not the intended audience, it’s children and early teens who are supposed to like the show and buy the toys. We 30-somethings can complain all we want, but we are not the ones who keep the show going by buying toys. We used to buy them when we were kids ourselves, and some may still do, but the majority of us are not playing with plastic figurines anymore, and thus we are not helping the show to keep going with our wallets.
Like it or not, the producers won’t keep making a show that doesn’t sell well enough. If it’s not worth it, they will cancel it, which is exactly what happened with the 2011 version. The intended audience didn’t like the show that much, it wasn’t buying enough toys to make it profitable enough for the producers to keep going, and thus the show was canceled. As for why the audience didn’t like it, has mostly to do with children of today not being that interested in action series as much as the Generation X used to be. There was a lot of action and adventure in cartoons when I was a kid because back then we had the constant threat of the Cold War lingering over our heads. At any moment, the nukes may fall and then everything will become a post apocalyptic wasteland. With such a fear being constantly fed to you every day, you wanted your entertainment to be about action where you fight radioactive mutants, and spaceships that can take you to different planets before this one gets blown up. That’s exactly what the premise of the original Thundercats was all about. And we loved it.
Fast forward 15 years and they make a new version, which despite making everyone look skinny and changing the story completely, to its core it was still a decent action adventure. And kids didn’t like it that much, because they didn’t have to worry about a post apocalyptic war like the previous generation did. The PC education had kicked in and violence was a bad thing. You shouldn’t be fighting, you shouldn’t be bulling, and you shouldn’t be discriminating on others for being different. Which is everything my generation was doing on a daily basis. We wanted to fight the Germans and the Russians, we were constantly pushing around those weaker than us for feeling powerful, and we were throwing racial slurs around like it was nothing.
But that’s not the case with millennials and their short attention spans, who find it hard to follow an on-going plot because their smartphones have given them an addiction to instant gratification with likes and tweets. What they like in cartoons is comedy, short skits about gags and memes and fart jokes. Most of them already didn’t care about action-adventures in 2011 and the few who did already had lots of Marvel and DC series to like. It’s the age of the superhero movies and what’s trending is the Avengers and the Justice League. The millennials are riding that train for attention, not some obscure cartoon that ended a decade before they were even born and was never heard off again up until recently. That’s why the 2011 Thundercats flopped.
And that’s why the latest version is going to be a silly comedy. Because that’s what’s selling, and us old fans have no power to change it because we are not playing with plastic toys anymore. We are not the intended audience, the goldfish attention span millennials are. Does this mean I excuse the artstyle since it fits the times it was made in? Hell no, it’s looks like shit, I hate it. But I also understand why the creators are doing it. Why make another expensive 2011 Thundercats if you know it’s not going to make you money, instead of another lazily drawn gag comedy that will make you money? So stop blaming the creators, instead of the goldfish attention span millennials and their LOL SO RANDOM culture.
And by the way, Thundercats Roar is not going to make that much money, simply because it’s not related to Marvel or DC. The reason Teen Titans GO is still going despite everyone hating it, is because it’s still related to DC. As long as it is Marvel or DC, it’s going to sell regardless of quality, because millennials spend their money on what’s trending and not necessarily on what they like. Their attention span is too short to give a damn if it’s good or not. Bottom line, it’s not the creators’ fault. It’s the modern society we allowed to become the way it is now.
