I watched the original Thundercats series as it first aired, and it was a major part of my childhood—or at least the first season (65 episodes) and the “Thundercats Ho” movie/episodes (introducing Pumyra, Lynx-O, and Bengali) were, because while I watched and rewatched and rewatched those, the episodes that came after kind of fell by the wayside for me, unseen except in fragments. I think what happened is that the first season was in reruns for a long time, and before the new episodes began airing, the show had moved to a time slot earlier than I got home from school and I didn’t bother setting the VCR to record them—and might not have realized there were new episodes until I’d already missed a lot.

I didn’t see the second half of the series until it was released (slowly) on DVD. I recently watched everything again with a complete-series box set of DVDs, making absurdly elaborate commentary notes on nearly every episode.

Here I’m offering my general overview, an examination of the pilot (“Exodus” and “Unholy Alliance”), and in a separate post my own personal recommended episode order for viewing the series. Maybe someday I will also post those episode commentaries, but for now I’ll avoid the temptation.

(I’ve never seen any of the 2011 version of Thundercats, but I just possibly might have bought one or two of the toys when they appeared.)

Idiosyncrasies

Officially, according to the show, people from Thundera are Thunderians. I say and write Thunderan because there’s really no reason at all for that extra i.

I call Willa’s domain the Treetop Queendom, not Kingdom. There are emphatically no men there, that’s rather a defining feature, and Willa is never called a king.

I accept the spelling S-S-Slithe as official based on the packaging of the LJN toys, and yet the toy line also said Ben Gali (two words) and I treat it as a single word, Bengali.

In my comments I don’t italicize the names Feliner or Ratstar out of laziness, even though these are ships and the names really should be in italics.

An Overview

The opening sequence is simply gorgeous animation. This is some of the best animation you could see on U.S. television in the 1980s. It still looks amazing today, jaded as we might be.

Watching the series at other times it bothered me that various Thunderans would not immediately recognize the Sword of Omens and understand Lion-O’s authority because of it; but in fact it is built into the very first episode that the Eye of Thundera is largely a secret, perhaps thought of as a myth, and even the nobles don’t know about it. Jaga has carried the Sword openly in the past, we learn, but apparently without people understanding what it was. The Sword is not a symbol of the ruler of the Thundercats; it is not being passed down to Lion-O from his father. It may be quite rare, or even unique, for the lord of the Thundercats to have it, something called for only by the extreme circumstances they find themselves in.

In many episodes it helps to assume that the Sword not only warns Lion-O when a Thundercat is in trouble but also mystically persuades him of which direction to go, whether he recognizes the location in the vision or not.

The setting is called Third Earth. I have always understood this as meaning a future epoch of the earth’s history—this is the third major stage of the earth’s life. Whether we ourselves are First Earth or Second Earth is unclear. Perhaps the age ending with the extinction of the dinosaurs marked the end of First Earth and we are in Second Earth. If so, the change from Second to Third is not as total or traumatic as the move from First to Second. There has been some continuity from our age to the future time of the Thundercats, such as human beings in Willa’s Treetop Queendom or the Berserkers, along with Mumm-Ra’s pyramid and some other ruins and relics.

It’s possible, though, that “Third” might have nothing to do with time periods or stages; maybe it’s just attached to the name because Earth is the third planet from the sun.

We know the Berbils came from another planet. We assume the Wollos, Bulkans, Trollogs, and other species are native to Third Earth, though it’s not necessarily the case.

It may help to assume that when we see English printed on the screen, this is just a concession of the animation for us the viewers, and the real text is actually some kind of galactic common script, spread far and wide including Thundera, Second Earth, the galactic police force, and any of old earth’s former colonies. The spoken language, too, must be some kind of common speech that even Warrior Maidens and Berbils use (although the Berbils may’ve been on earth long enough to take up the local language).

A few episodes feature nameless hench-Mutants, “extras” doing gruntwork in Castle Plun-Darr or guarding (and inevitably chasing) prisoners. However, it’s fairly clear overall that the intended situation is for S-S-Slithe, Jackalman, and Monkian—at some point joined, inexplicably, by Vultureman and a couple of times bullied by a visiting Ratar-O—to be the only Mutants left active on Third Earth. (My own attempts to explain this discrepancy away are in my comments below on “Unholy Alliance” and “Spaceship Beneath the Sands.”) The beautiful opening at the beginning of every episode shows numerous Mutant foot soldiers, but this represents a scene from the very first episode, before the Mutants’ ship got buried in the sand. Viewers could be misled by this into thinking hench-Mutants were still around, and I strongly suspect that some of the show’s writers were also fooled.

One of the statues in Mumm-Ra’s crypt represents something like a vulture. But whoever drew the main shot of this statue, the image that gets repeated over and over throughout the series, got the foreshortening wrong. Instead of a bird with a beak, it looks like this is some fantasy creature with no mouth and no chin, just a wrinkled neck between eyes and collarbones, and it irks me every time I see it.

In the early episodes Lion-O is sometimes overbearing and pompous and too proud and caught up in the image he thinks “the Lord of the Thundercats” ought to convey—all of which is exactly, precisely how a child in an adult body who’s suddenly been tossed into royal leadership with little preparation and everyone depending on him, plus receiving a set of completely new, unexpected super-Thunderan powers, would behave.

Mumm-Ra is honestly quite scary. Whether mummified or powered up, he is not a tame or amusing character, and the people making the show did not soften him up to make him nonthreatening. (Or if this is the softer version, the original must have been horrifying.)

Exodus

The first two episodes aired originally in a one-hour block; in reruns, this block was split into “Exodus” and “Unholy Alliance.” Together these episodes deliver a lot of the setup of the series (although you need to add on “Berbils” [ep. 3] and “Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr” [ep. 4] to get most of the main pieces in place).

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There’s a great deal the first episode doesn’t tell us.

Why does Thundera explode? Was it a geological catastrophe? An accident of Thunderan technology? A deliberate attack by enemies? (Way, way, way down the line the series will address this.)

We don’t know exactly what is going on between the groups, but it’s clear the Thunderans are familiar with the Mutants as a threat, and a frequent one (Panthro: “Always those blasted Mutants!”), although here the Mutants might be no more than opportunistic space pirates. Later in the series we see there must have been some sort of ongoing conflict, because otherwise the Thunderans would not be stealing plans for Plun-Darrian war machines. But how severe is this conflict? (Later events will suggest that the moons of Plun-Darr are within orbital range of Thundera, at least entering that area after the planet’s end. So the Mutants may come from a place fairly close by.)

We also don’t get much explicit information about the group surrounding Lion-O. We get the idea that “Thundercats” are a specialized, elite group among the Thunderan population, and these few on the flagship are called nobles. But we aren’t told more than that.

It’s possible Cheetara, Panthro, and Tygra are the heads of their clans, the highest of the nobility aside from the lord himself. But one would expect the heads of the clans to be older and married and have children—although it’s possible they do have families, placed on other ships to maximize the chance that someone will escape to rebuild. And it may also be that the older, more mature heads have already been killed in a conflict with the Mutants, and these relatively young adults have taken over the leadership of the clans earlier than they normally would, much the way Lion-O does when the planet explodes (with his father apparently on it, as we see later in the series).

But I happen to think that as the episode opens there are living clan heads on other ships, in other places, and this group of Thundercats was selected because they are in their prime and Lion-O will need fit, active, physically strong protectors in the hostile galaxy. It may well be that one, two, or all three are in line to be clan heads in the future, and it was decided to get this group of nobles bonded with Lion-O now in preparation for that future, even if the elders should survive.

That leaves Wilykit and Wilykat, brother and sister, twins. Why choose two children instead of a strapping adult at the peak of her or his physical abilities?

For one thing, they represent a different kind of ability than speed and strength; it is not for nothing that in the future Anointment Trials theirs will be a test of cunning. That too will be needed in the dangerous refugee future. But I rather think this emphasis on cunning and wit and stealth and tricks is found throughout their clan; lacking the speed of cheetah-types or the strength of panther- and tiger-types, their branch of Thunderan people will traditionally rely on less bodily means for defense and offense. (I’m supposing that each clan is made up of Thunderans of a particular cat-type, which is purely speculation.)

Kit and Kat are quite competent and capable, as they prove repeatedly, but they’re not entirely responsible and their judgment is sometimes weak, as they prove repeatedly. Maybe in this case there really is no one else from their clan to send. There may be a head of the clan, however, either too aged to take part in guarding Lion-O or too busy scrambling to meet clan responsibilities shouldered too soon because the previous head was killed. But it shouldn’t be overlooked that they are the same age (so far) as young Lion-O, and a desire to give him someone his own age to relate to might have been a factor.

Both Wilykit and Wilykat are sent, instead of simply one clan member, for several reasons:

1. They work best as a team.
2. They are young, and the leaders were concerned one might not be enough, although the pair might do the job of one adult.
3. They’re facing devastation and extreme loss, and more than any of the adults they are going to need someone close and familiar and offering connection to their old life in order to deal with the emotional toll of what’s ahead. (It also seems that Panthro, Cheetara, and Tygra are already friends and comrades before this mission, which is less likely to be true of the two young Thundercats.)

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When the Mutant attack begins, the framing is such that we the audience may not realize the ship being hit is a different one than the main characters are on. I expect this was deliberate.

There is no explanation given for why the Mutants don’t attack the ship again while the Thundercats are in stasis. The reason for S-S-Slithe’s retreat from the Sword chamber is shaky enough that it’s hard to believe they flew away without any effort to track where the Thunderan ship went. It’s true they must have been out of immediate range, or else the Thundercats would not have dared go into stasis. But it’s hard to believe that the Mutants totally lost the ship and it took them that long to find it—unless the Thunderan flagship had some kind or electronic cloaking/stealth/scrambling technology (and they hadn’t employed it in the first place because the lesser convoy ships lacked that technology, so what was the point; or the technology can’t be activated close to a planet; or, since the planet was exploding the Mutants knew the flagship would be leaving and were waiting to spot them visually without sensors).

One explanation is that something hugely important and significant was going on that claimed the Mutants’ attention—something that could not wait. They had a sense of where the Thunderan ship was heading, estimated that the Thundercats would have to go into suspension, and decided they could come back for the Sword later after this huge situation had been dealt with. It didn’t take the Mutants years to find the Thunderan flagship, it took them that long to deal with their own near-hand crisis, then put themselves in stasis and fly out to follow the ship.

The initial episode implies that Lion-O grew to physical adulthood because the suspension capsules allow some aging—which naturally leads to the question of why Wilykit and Wilykat didn’t grow the same way. The traditional answer is that although Lion-O explains it as the natural functioning of suspension capsules, he’s jumping to conclusions and in fact his capsule was malfunctioning slightly due to damage inflicted during the Mutants’ attack on the ship. His capsule allowed a little more aging than it should have, but the other Thundercats’ capsules were apparently in regular working order.

The Unholy Alliance and Spaceship Beneath the Sands

When Mumm-Ra sinks the Mutants’ ship in the sands, we know there were other Mutants on board. Because it’s a spaceship, it’s airtight and has its own oxygen supply, so the burial itself would not have killed anyone. The ship may have had working suspension capsules, but otherwise the crew members would have spent a good bit of time alive down there squabbling over food reserves until either they ran out of water; they killed each other off in fights; or whatever ruined the ship let the sand pour in.

The Mutants’ spaceship was whole when Mumm-Ra sank it. Had it been on the surface, erosion could easily have eaten away the hull, but it was buried and should have been protected. Yet when it reappears in “Spaceship Beneath the Sands” it isn’t whole. Are we to assume the sands shift enough to wear giant holes in the buried ship, or is there some sort of creature down there that eats metal?

Possibly some Mutants actually survived the entire time of the ship’s burial but were too weak to come out when the ship resurfaced. S-S-Slithe and the others—eager to fly out and fight with their newly reclaimed vehicles—just left them there for later and dragged them to Castle Plun-Darr between episodes.

OR

When the ship was buried the Mutant crew decided to go into suspension instead of starving slowly, and when S-S-Slithe, Monkian, and Jackalman entered the wreckage they did see the sleeping Mutants but ignored them for the present. The trio went for a test ride of the vehicles before coming back, waking everyone up, and ordering the newly awakened henchmen to haul all the salvageable equipment to Castle Plun-Darr.

OR

The Mutant troops were in stasis, and the main trio did wake them up right away, then (between onscreen scenes) gave them directions to Castle Plun-Darr and ordered them to move all the usable equipment while they (the three leaders) took off on the vehicles to go attack the Thundercats right away. (This would, if nothing else, keep the Cats busy while all the equipment was being taken to the castle.)

One of these scenarios would account for the presence of Mutant extras in other episodes. And yet different episodes also make clear that the Mutant leaders are alone. So what happened to the nameless troops? Why do they disappear and reappear?

Maybe S-S-Slithe liked to put them in stasis when they weren’t needed, so he wouldn’t have to feed them, but at some point something went wrong and they expired without being woken up.

Maybe some of them were made to serve as crew on the Ratstar and more were killed off each of the many times it crashed. (The ship couldn’t be kept in operation entirely by two or three people on the bridge, right?)

Maybe the show is too kind to show us that any time a hench-Mutant got caught spying on Willa’s Treetop Queendom, the Warrior Maidens did away with him and their numbers gradually dwindled.

Maybe the Mutant trio used the hench-Mutants as messengers to Mumm-Ra when they had something unpleasant to say, and such messengers didn’t come back.

Certainly any dangerous job would be assigned to an underling, and that may have steadily eroded the supply of underlings, who couldn’t be replaced by reinforcements.