The holy trinity of 80s cartoon properties is G.I. Joe, Transformers, and He-Man. Since all of those are already snatched up for movie development, Hollywood is moving on to the second tier of 80s childhood nostalgia trips. First up from that group for movie adaptation is ThunderCats. Voltron and Smurfs can’t be far off.
ThunderCats will happen at Warner Brothers as a live action feature. How fast it gets from their executive boardroom to a theater near you I suspect depends in large part on how much Transformers makes in a couple of weekends. Since that looks well on it’s way to opening at well over $100 million, expect the fast track.
I grew up in the 80s and went nuts for Transformers and He-Man, but ThunderCats always seemed sort of… dumb? I know, cars that turn into robots cool, cat-men dumb. In retrospect, my viewpoint may not have made much sense. For those of you who weren’t watching cartoons in the 80s or like me, though ThunderCats looked dumb and so avoided them, here’s what the whole ThunderCats thing is about: The cartoon was a mix of sci-fi and fantasy elements. It’s about a group of alien man-cats who escape their planet’s destruction and land on a new planet they call Third-Earth. There they fight an evil sourcorer with the help of their short, but memorable catcphrase, “ThunderCats Ho!”
