Thursday, June 7, 2007

What's New Pussycat?

OK, so I admit it, I am not a huge comic book fan, but a Thundercats movie?! Yeesh, are we not scraping the bottom of the toy franchise barrel here? I've made snarky comments about the rumors of He-Man and my opinion of the Transformers live action film to be released later this summer has been expressed a few times, but Thundercats?

For those unfamiliar with the Thundercats premise, the idea is that there are cat-people and they are having a war, which they are losing since apparently their homeworld blew up. The heroes were the last member of the royal family (Lion-O) and his retainers. They escape the evil mutants of Plun-Darr (clever, eh) and manage to crash land on a strange world where they hope to hide out and re-emerge later and reclaim their rightful position as rulers of the galaxy. Doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, we find out pretty early on that the reason Lion-O's family lost the war is because they were marginally competent idiots who were out-classed by a nominally bright villain. Lion-O is about as clever as a gifted third grader (which can be excused because he IS a gifted third grader in an adult body due to sabotage with his cryogenic pod), and his retainers are not that much smarter. It seems that their only hope of victory is choosing villains who are dumber than they are. Enter Mumm-Ra, supreme super-moron of the planet. He provides an interesting villain (if by interesting I mean completely idiotic) in that he is an Egyptian mummy (clever, eh).

Granted, He-Man and The Transformers franchises both had equally silly concepts, but at least their victors were not predicated upon their enemies being complete and total idiots. Say what you like about Prince Adam/He-Man and, of course, She-Ra, they were smart enough to getthe job done and beat their various and sundry challenges with either brute strength and wits. The ThunderCats are basically super-bullies sticking their noses into other peoples' business because they believe that they have a divine right to interfere. Maybe Lion-O should throw in his hat as a bid for President of the USA, but please gods, not a movie!

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