Tagged: Thundercats
The Most EPIC Saturday Morning Cartoon Intros of ALL Time!
There have been some real excellent classic cartoon intros, especially from the 80s, some of these are quite leap in quality above what we actually see in the cartoon animation. I recently took another good look at what I consider the BEST animated intro of all time-The Thundercats from 1985! I had all the action figures, was a HUGE fan but even as a kid back then I was able to recognize just how special that classic opening was-It blew my damn MIND and STILL does to this today…
It’s likely got a high frame per second rate, attention to shadows/detail and those rad neon colorful light fx that were just too time consuming when animating an entire series! Here’s a reminder of what I’m talking about-clearly this trailer reminds me of something that could’ve appeared in ‘Heavy Metal’. Here’s a new 8k restoration:
But lets not forget the sibling Thundercats cartoon shows from the same animators the Silverhawks opening was pretty much JUST as epic! Check this out once again to be reminded of how amazing the opening from this show was too!
See a similarity? Then there’s The Tigersharks which again is from the same team-this one is almost as great as the aforementioned ‘toons! Tigersharks was one a LOT of people have also forgotten all about-here it is, the intro also made by the same peeps behind Thundercats & Silverhawks:
And let’s NOT forget the epic opening to the Galaxy Rangers from 1986-plus again another totally killer theme song!
As a bonus I added the 1988 X-men pilot, largely forgotten by fans of the 1990s series. This 80s version though is totally top notch too, in fact the full pilot episode’s animation is pretty consistently incredible-all of the into footage is from the ACTUAL episode:
Honorable mention the largely forgotten Mighty Orbots intro!
Also season 2 of The Transformers was pretty epic as well and a step above most of their other intros..
One thing I believe these all have in common are that they were animated by a Japanese production team-I’ll update this one with more info on that-but for now I simply ask, do you think there’s a BETTER animated opening intro sequence than any of these from cartoons largely made for American audiences?! I challenge you!
The Bionic Six?
Hey has anyone ever seen this cartoon before? I guess it’s from 1987 and must have slipped under my radar! Well it’s got a pretty bad ass theme song and the animation reminds me of the Thundercats, Silverhawks and Tigersharks cartoon. The Bionic Six looks like a winner that’s for sure-I gotta do some research on this one!
Silverhawks & Tigersharks rule too!
So my last blog post mentioned two other cartoon series that the Thundercats creators also put out in the 80’s-The Silverhawks & The Tigersharks (are you noticing a trend in the naming of the cartoons yet). So Silverhawks was the space version of Thundercats and the even lesser known Tigersharks was the water version! Neither of them had the success of the Thundercats but they were both equally awesome. The animation was once again top notch and the characters were just as cool(well mostly). I love the hillbilly Siverhawk “Bluegrass” too-he’s play guitar and is just plain rad. The Silverhawks also had a cool toy line and the first season is available on dvd!!
The Tigersharks only lasted one season but you know what? I always thought it was still pretty damn rad! The show took place on the world of Water-O, which was covered completely by water(who would have figured huh?). The planet had a race of fish people called the Waterians(water, water, more water!!) . The TigerSharks arrived there on a research mission but ended up serving as the protectors of the planet against the bastardly T-Ray! They need to release that on dvd soon too- check these intros out from the show!
The Silverhawks!!
THUNDERCATS MOVIE?!!
The Thundercats were probably one of the coolest cartoons of the 1980’s hands down! For one it had amazing animation (especially for being a regular after school cartoon) which seeemed to be a step above the rest. Secondly it also produced some pretty amazing action figures and a Marvel comic book too! The creators of the Thundercats also made a couple other less popular cartoon series that were equally great, The Silver Hawks and The Tiger Sharks(check them both out sometime if you haven’t already).
So I heard a couple years back they were supposed to make a movie of the Thundercats, so naturally I searched on Youtube for any teasers or random info. What I found instead was a pretty impressive fan made trailer! The scenes are obviously strung together from different movies and someone has oviously used some CG to make Brad Pitt, Hugh Jackman and Vin Diesel look exactly like the Thundercats. Hey I just wanted to share this for anyThundercats fans out there-it looks like a live action Thundercats movie could be pretty darn cool. From what I understand however it seems the movie that is currently in production will be an all CG cartoon version slated for release sometime in 2010.
Universal Dork 