Thundercats, NO!

Nostalgia is all around us. We can't get away from it. The stuff that you liked as a child is guaranteed to boomerang back into your life when you're in your 20's and work enough to buy all that stuff you always wanted as a child.

Now some properties have been lucky enough to stick around in some form or another for the past 20 years. Transformers have rolled out more times than I care to think, just to find ways to stay relevant to "todays" youth. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have mutated to fit changing social and media climates and still find a way to stay radical and in a post-9/11 world we need GI Joe now more than ever. But the Thundercats... well, I don't know.

Debuting in 1985, the Thundercats were part of the onslaught of anthropomorphic animal crusaders that attacked the latest extraterrestrial threat daily on television but more importantly, they also had their sight set on your parents wallet. Looking back we know these cartoons were designed simply to sell more action figures, but at the time all I knew is that I had a light up Sword Of Omens, just like Lion-O and that was good enough for me.

I'd spend hours running around the backyard dispatching mutants like Monkian, Jackalman and Slythe. If they ever became too much for me all I had to do was light up that signal and the rest of the 'cats would come running (because the Thundercats were on the move, Thundercats are loose, of course).

I wish I still had this.

Tigra was always a favorite with his whip and ability to disappear. Cheetara ran right into my heart and started a crush that lasts to this day. Panthro mystified me with technology and nunchucks that unlike that poser Michelangelo's, HAD MAGIC FUCKING POWERS. Wilykit and Wilykat had awesome spaceboards before Marty McFly travelled to the future (and theirs worked on water). And Snarf was, well... there.

I spent so many hours with Lion-O and his crew from Thundera as a child I always missed them after they disappeared. So imagine my excitement in 1997 when Cartoon Network announced they would be bringing the original episodes of the Thundercats back as part of their Toonami programing block.

Well, that excitement was short lived. When I actually sat down to watch the show, it wasn't half as strong as I remembered it being. The animation was poor and the storylines more-so, even though the characters I loved were still there, the cartoon felt empty. In fact, the only thing from around that time that brought back good feelings about the Thundercats was the Relient K song, "I'm Lion-O".

Also, the four Thundercats comic miniseries that came out from DC/Wildstorm softened the blow a little bit as well. The comics were all very well done and added much more character depth and took the series to a darker and more mature place.

So I don't know whether or not to be excited about the recent leaked concept art for the Thundercats CGI movie that scheduled to come out in 2011. On one hand I'm excited to see Lion-O stick it to Mumm-Ra again, but then I remember that saddness of seeing the Ro-Bear Berbils and trying to remember just what I saw in the show originally. Hopefully things will turn out for the better and whenever this movie comes out it will blow me away and it will be followed by another with Lynx-O, Ben-Gali and the only cat to outfox Cheetara, Pumyra.

And if it sucks, well at least nobody else seems to remember Pirates Of Dark Water.

Yet.