The show follows the same story as the original ThunderCats series, with Lion-O and the ThunderCats - Tygra, Panthro, Cheetara, Wilykit and Wilykat - escaping the destruction of their home world, Thundera, and crashing on the mysterious and exotic planet of Third Earth. This could easily have not been a ThunderCats show and something completely new. They’ve taken everything good about its source material and made it unlikeable. This is not the case for ThunderCats Roar. While it is frustrating and has been the subject of online conversation for years, many of the people disgruntled by TTG! have grown to like the show despite it’s different style and tone because it is genuinely funny – even making nods to the original show’s style in tongue-in-cheek fashion.
I figured it would maybe be like Teen Titans Go!, Cartoon Network’s current golden child and unfortunately the reason the original, more mature Teen Titans animated series got cancelled. I had a little glimmer of hope in me for this show to actually be good and prove the naysayers wrong. So after all the hate, the controversy… just how is ThunderCats Roar? Is it really as bad as people thought it would be? Sadly, yes. The rest of the series will be launching in February this year. Having missed its 2019 release window, it was unclear when (if ever) the show would premiere, but Cartoon Network surprised their app users by uploading the first couple of episodes two weeks into January. The series was set to debut in 2019 but there were no updates on the show, leading many to believe it had already been cancelled in response to the backlash. The initial reaction was so bad that it currently stands at 8.2k upvotes against 115k downvotes on the original announcement video. The trailer threw everyone off, with it’s explicitly cartoony style of animation and a shift to comedy.
It feels like only yesterday the first-look trailer for ThunderCats Roar debuted online, sending seemingly everyone into a rage.