One of the most anticipated animated titles of the year makes its world premiere!
It wasn't just the big film and sexy vampire show panels that had crazy long Lines at San Diego Comic-Con 2011, as the crowd of hopeful attendees of the ThunderCats panel in Room 6A. So how was it?
Well, while I can't provide a full review here, I can give you some impressions about the series:
First, it's clear that the creators of the series have deliberately set out to create and build a new mythology for the revamped version of the venerable 80's series. The new incarnation of the show establishes mysteries about Thundera, interesting social strife between the races, and murky morality involving the relationships between the various species of the planet. There are threads of season-long arcs set up here that could potentially bear interesting fruit down the line.
The structure of the premiere feels very much like that of the original, in terms of putting Lion-O in a situation where he'll have to grow up very fast.
Another evolution beyond the original is that the characters are all coherently connected. Before, Lion-O was surrounded by a bunch of characters who we basically just around to help him out when it got real--he had a posses but no real family, if that makes any sense. Here, there's friction between the Cats surrounding Lion-O, with a real need for these characters to overcome a lot of differences if they want to survive.
To this last point, there are definitely echoes of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the configuration of characters and how they might possibly relate. This is not a bad place to start for inspiration.
The show runners for ThunderCats were not paying lip service to visual inspirations for Miyazaki. The world seems alive and verdant in parts with visually-rich architecture featuring all sorts of cool functionality. It includes a decent amount of CG enhancement which don't really distract. However, the color palette is pretty dark, with lots of warm colors like browns and oranges. It's appropriate for the themes of the premiere, but I look forward to the color palette being opened up a bit in future episodes.
Finally: save Panthro!
ThunderCats premieres in a special one-hour episode on Friday, July 29 at 8/7c on Cartoon Network...check out these special clips and the trailer below!
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