The Final Episode #66: Thundercats (1985 - 1989)

 

Alright! It's the big 200! That's right I've done 200 posts on this blog. It's time to discuss some history of my time talking about stuff on the internet via websites. I had a website about the NES. I won't type the name because it's honestly really stupid. It no longer exists because I deleted it. It was bad. I worked with another person who now hates me on a website called KRAP. It got hacked. We tried to bring it back a few times and none of them really worked. I had another blog where I reviewed NES games. I won't link to that because I don't like the work I've done on it. Yeah, believe it or not the closest I've come to actually enjoying the work I put into talking about all this silly shit is this blog. So you can just only imagine how bad those other sites were. Actually they were worse for other reasons. I didn't have my own voice it was just stolen from B from Whatever-Dude.com and done poorly. I can't be salty and silly and sarcastic towards this goofy shit because I genuinely love this stuff. I'm glad I found my voice which is slightly poking fun at this stuff but not being so negative at it. I just wish it didn't take so long.

Enough discussion of my old websites and blogs that you shouldn't care about because they were really bad. It's time to discuss something important and cool because it's the 200th post so it should be something important and cool. So I just had to discuss Thundercats. One of the biggest 80s cartoons. I've already done Transformers and G.I. Joe. I've also done Jem for the girls. I only had 3 "big" 80s cartoons left to talk about. I mean I liked Denver the Last Dinosaur but it sure as hell wasn't a super popular can't get away from it no matter how hard you try cartoon show. The other two are She Ra and He-Man. Oh also Ghostbusters but I can't talk about that for a few months. Gotta save some stuff for Halloween. So I chose Thundercats because I have easy access to the Final Episode. I actually don't have He-Man at the moment and I'd rather talk about that series before I did She-Ra. Why am I telling you this boring shit? Honestly. I don't know.

Thundercats for those not in the known was a tv cartoon made by Rankin-Bass, characters created by Tobin "Ted" Wolf. I think that's the coolest name I've ever heard. That's right the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus is Coming to Town people. That's right! They made actual cartoons in the 1970s and 1980s. I think their first was some Lord of the Rings hogwash that I don't care about. Hobbits are stupid and I would only read a story where Conan the Barbarian wrecks the shit outta their little assholes. Fuck Hobbits. Thundercats is the story of a bunch of buff steroid using cat-human people that escape their dying planet to Third Earth. On Third Earth they have to fight a Mummy named Mumm-Ra (he just might be the best 1980s cartoon villain and I don't care what you have to say.) and his henchmen. Sometime later they find a New Thundera which is well the New version of their old planet, duh. Mumm-Ra still bothers them on New Thundera because it's really hard to get rid of a Mummy.

To the best of my memory I did not watch Thundercats but I do believe YTV put it on so I might have watched it. I would hope that I watched it because I'd hate to think that I have better taste in cartoons at age 36 than at age 6.  I did watch some episodes during my downloading shows off KaZza (remember that?) and I thought they were just spiffy. Spiffy is a word that should be used more. Anyway I've seen a bunch of Thundercats, enough to say that I like the Thundercats and think they are cool. The Final Episode was called "The Book of Omens" and was put out on September 29th, 1989. It starts off with Lion-O and Panthro talking about how the fucking planet is going to explode. That's one way to start off a Final Episode.

They then go to where the Book of Omens is and Panthro talks about how there's two ways to open it. One with the Sword of Omens and two with a fancy key. He opens up the key and the Book tells them to put several items back to where they originally were (an oar goes to a lake, a tile goes to the caverns of cold which used to be a nice lush garden, etc) and to present the key to the guardian that lives within the Book of Omens at the 24th hour will save the planet. I don't know what kinda drugs they were on when they wrote that but I want some. I bet it's some potent shit. Lion-O and the gang take no time to go off to their places while Lion-O stays home to meet the Guardian. However what Lion-O doesn't know is that Mumm-Ra had turned himself into a damn bug and stole the key.

Lion-O found out about Mumm-Ra's misdeeds and runs off to his evil base that somehow moved to New Thundera. Mumm-Ra is being bitched out by those cool looking statues that he would talk too and saying that he shouldn't mess with the Book of Omens but he's like "eat my shit you saggy fucks I'll do what I want" and he does. Using the key to escape just as Lion-O gets there. Lion-O has to fight the statues and use the Sword to get into the book. Meanwhile the other Thundercats, Panthro, that piece of shit Snarf, that bigger piece of shit Snarfer, and those shitty kids, Cheetra, some blind guy and some tiger dude are all trying to put their items where they should be. However something is keeping each one of them from doing that. Cheetra and the blind guy were stuck in a cave. Panthro and Snarf were having trouble getting up the weird ass mountain, Wilykit and Wilykat were being attacked by fucking steel pinecones and Snarfer and the Lion (??) Guy have to fight a giant ass motherfucking turtle. All kinds of crazy shit happening to the Thundercats.

Lion-O meets up with the Guardian who well freezes all of the other Thundercats in time. There's a cool effect where everything turns kinda gray-ish to show everyones frozen. It's like one of those old timey sepia photographs. I like those photographs. Mumm-Ra and Lion-O fight and then the Guardian tells them that they are at a stalemate because the key will not destroy the Sword of Omens and vice versa. It would have been nice to mention that before hand you big dickhead. Anyway they decide to settle this the way everyone should settle a problem, by wrestling. They wrestle until it seems Mumm-Ra has been defeated but seeing as he's an evil asshole he calls for the statues to send him some power which they do in the guise of a weird barbarian. He's got like a knights head thing on and a some He-Man like shorts but Lion-O decides to just say fuck it and fight fire with fire and cause these two snake heads to start burning the Knight Barbarian. This show is wild as fuck and I love it. Lion-O of course shows the key to the Guardian at the exact moment and the planet is saved.

Lion-O and the other Thundercats talk about how they can help care for this planet and it's a totally subtle way of telling you how you should care for our planet. We didn't listen though. This planet is gonna be wrecked just like the original Thundera. Pretty sad. Anyway they all talk about how they need to be vigilant against evil and the episode ends.

FINAL VERDICT: BOY HOWDY was this something! I expected this to be a fun episode but holy shit this is a top 10 Final Episodes for sure. Totally better than both the Final Episodes of GI Joe OR Transformers. I didn't expect Thundercats to take that spot but they did. I'm sure I will end up talking about the other animated series Rankin-Bass did in the 1980s called The Comic Strip but that won't be for some time. Anyway watch this episode because it fucking rules.