Spotlight: Thundercats – Snarf

I hope no one thought I forgot my promise to revisit the Thundercats universe! Since the series was the subject of my final post in 2019, this blogger wanted to put some new material between that article and this one. Hopefully, you will find it was worth the wait, readers.

As JorgePR correctly guessed last year, the focus of today’s post is none other than Snarf. His full name is Snarf Osbert, but because he despises that name he usually goes by his species’ moniker. If the naming convention seems odd, that is because it is. Snarfs are known as such because of the sound/word they always say (which is, of course, “snarf”). Their species name precedes their given name.

The system is reminiscent to how the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans address one another. In the Orient, a person’s last name always comes before the one they were given at birth. Only family members or close friends may use someone’s first name in a familiar manner. Strangers, or those who know each other only casually, must always speak to one another using their last names. To do otherwise is considered quite rude.

Going back to the series, Snarfs are a lizard/cat species somehow related to the humanoid Thunderians. We are never told how, and we do not really need to know. After all, if your protagonists are humanoid cats, then why wouldn’t most of the friendly animals and/or sapient species from their homeworld be cat-themed as well?

Snarfs typically act in the capacity of servants to Thunderians. The only known species to be inherently incapable of committing evil (they only perform wicked acts when under mind control), Snarfs are quite happy to serve. Even if they work for a bad master, once he is removed they will search for a new Thunderian whom they can happily wait on, cook for, or for whom they may babysit. Though they eventually become an independent race, this comes about as a matter of circumstance and is not due to a revolt against their Thunderian rulers.

From this overview you might have an idea of how our Snarf fits into the series. Hired on as Lion-O’s nanny, the young prince’s growth spurt in the stasis pod does nothing to dampen Snarf’s affection for him. Acting as a sort of surrogate mother figure, he is hardly ever away from the new Lord’s side for most of the series’ run. Generally, if you see Lion-O, Snarf is somewhere nearby.

The first to awaken from his stasis pod, Snarf immediately goes in search of Lion-O. On finding him, he opens his stasis pod, and the two reunite – though the young man’s pride makes him a bit brusque with his former nurse. It is through his efforts that Lion-O is able to wake the other Thundercats and save them from an attack by the Mutants. Of course, this little fact seems to go unnoticed by the rest of the gang, leading Snarf to mutter some complaints about how he “did nothing at all. Just found the sword. *snarf, snarf*”

As you may have guessed, this is a running theme in the narrative. Plus, due to his small size and lack of fighting ability, Snarf tends to retreat from violent situations. In fact, some would say that the yellow streak down his back is appropriate because it hints at his cowardly nature. Overlooked by the enemy and taken for granted by the Thundercats from time to time, Snarf didn’t seem to serve much of a function beyond comic relief.

These may be some of the reasons why fans came to hate him so much. (His repetitive “*snarf, snarf*!” didn’t help, either, I think.) In a series full of warrior cat people, Snarf seemed to be storytelling dead weight. He whined and complained, ran from most fights, and had a rather prissy way of talking to the heroes, as though he was older and more mature than the rest of them…..

….Which he may actually have been. If you study Snarf’s face, general design, and listen to him speak, Snarf does appear to be the oldest member of the cast. Only Jaga may have surpassed him in age. Add to this his skill at housekeeping and knowledge of people – specifically Lion-O, his charge – and this reading gives meaning to a lot of Snarf’s behavior. He is not a warrior or even a housekeeper. He is everyone’s mom, uncle, and aunt all rolled into one.

An equivalent character would be Po’s dad, Mr. Ping, the goose from the Kung Fu Panda series. Mr. Ping is not a warrior. He whines and complains about everything, guilt-tripping Po into doing whatever he wants him to do (e.g. spend the Winter Festival with him at the restaurant). Since the entire franchise is comedic, Mr. Ping’s attitude isn’t as annoying to most as it would be if the story were played straight. The reverse applies to Snarf, as his behavior is not meant for comedic effect (most of the time).

One has to look no further than his relationship with Lion-O to see the proof of this. Although he could misread him from time to time, the one member of the group who knew the young Lord best was Snarf. He could usually tell when something was bothering the Prince, why the latter was upset, or when he was worried about something/someone. This was an invaluable skill that came in handy on several occasions. Not being as close to the other Cats, Snarf had to rely on Lion-O to explain why they did certain things or why he was worried about them.

Though he tried his best to help take care of the Thunderkittens as he had Lion-O, the brother-sister act’s notorious nose for mischief usually thwarted him in this area. He never became as close to the twins as he could have, probably because he hadn’t known them long enough. It appears that Snarf knew the future Lord of the Thundercats from the time he could toddle, if not from the time he was born. He only met the twins after or around the time Thundera died, making it harder for him to develop a similarly respectful rapport with them.

While he was not a fighter, Snarf did prove to have mettle. In one episode, he had to face Mumm-Ra alone after the ancient monster had captured the other six Thundercats. Snarf, despite his terror, used his small size and wits to sneak into the Living Mummy’s temple. Once there, he freed his friends to do the fighting he couldn’t.

He also utilized an ability which he apparently developed while living on Third Earth. By whistling various notes, Snarf could communicate with almost any animal on the planet, ranging from unicorns and deer to giant bees and bats. Through these twittering notes he was able to ask these animals for help and secure their strengths to aid him or his friends. Although not a flashy power like Cheetara’s speed or Tygra’s invisibility, it was a skill that came in very handy on more than one occasion.

Additionally, he once used his skill at a game called “kick the bucket” to very good effect. How he and Lion-O developed the game is a mystery, but it proves Snarf’s courage. Though he was not and never would be a warrior, Snarf would stand up for his friends and his young charge when they needed him most. He had to be clever and quick, since his size and physical weakness made it easy for bigger opponents to overpower him. But this ability to distract or surprise the bad guys at the right moment often gave the Cats enough time to get back on their feet and finish the battle.

It also demonstrated that his tendency to be overlooked could be more of a blessing than a curse. Since Mumm-Ra and other antagonists wrote him off as insignificant, they barely paid attention to Snarf. This gave him opportunities to act that none of the other Cats would have gotten. In the end, I think Snarf was more valuable to the team than most fans would believe.

Snarf 2011

Of course, this brings us to the 2011 version of Snarf. As in the original series, Snarf began the story as Lion-O’s nursemaid. Unlike his ‘80s counterpart, however, this new Snarf did not talk. At least, he did not speak in a manner that the audience understood. Lion-O seemed to know what he was saying – or trying to say. Once again, we hardly ever saw the two of them apart. Wherever Lion-O went, Snarf was usually at his heels.

To the best of my hearing, Snarf only said one intelligible word in the entire 2011 reboot. In “The Duelist and the Drifter” he leaned on Lion-O’s leg, shook his head emphatically, and said, “No, no, no, no!” When his king agreed to the Duelist’s terms anyway, Snarf let his ears droop and murmured another, forlorn “No.” And he did so without moving his mouth.

Clearly, this blogger considered the 2011 Snarf to be a disappointment. I understand I am in the minority that actually likes the character, but reducing him to the cute animal sidekick just took something away from the franchise. That is my opinion, anyway.

This concludes the series of Spotlight! posts centering on the main cast of Thundercats. From now on, we will be discussing the secondary or side characters. Until then, readers, I leave you with a hearty “Thunder…Thunder….

Thundercats, HO!”

The Mithril Guardian

MORE Favorite Animated Intro Themes

Here are a few more animated introductory themes for you to enjoy, readers! It has been a while since I saw most of them, but they are still entertaining cartoons. I certainly recommend them for the young ones in your life. 😉

Catch ya later!

The Mithril Guardian

Transformers Prime

 

Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015)

 

Rescue Heroes

 

Speed Buggy

 

Hong Kong Phooey

 

Tom and Jerry

 

The Superfriends

 

The Justice League

 

Young Justice

 

Batman (1990s)

 

Batman (2005)

Thundercats – HO!!

I have been meaning to write a post about this subject for a while.  For those of you who have no idea what in the world I am talking about, no worries.  This blogger does not expect everyone to know everything about the things I enjoy, just as I hope no one expects me to know a thing about rocket science or the life span of a great white shark.  So hold on tight as I try to explain the subject of today’s post.   It might take a while.

Thundercats was a cartoon series which debuted back in the 1980s.  It focused on a species of humanoid cats.  The nobility among this race were called Thundercats, while the common folk were known as Thunderians.

I have always been a sucker for cats.  So when the series reran at odd hours during my childhood, I would scramble to watch the episodes.  To recap the general plot:  Thundera, the home of Thundercats and Thunderians alike, was a planet which somehow died.  Think Superman and Krypton; the core was unstable or something like that, and the planet went ka-blooey as a result.

A number of Thundercats and Thunderians escaped the planet’s destruction.  One such group of Thundercats included Cheetara, a character based on the cheetah; she could run 120 mph on a morning jog – and faster in combat.  There was also Tygra, based on the tiger, whose bolo whip could make him invisible to the naked eye.  He and Cheetara were hinted to be a couple.

Then there was Panthro, the strongest cat of the group; he was based on the panther.  There were the Thunderkittens, Wilykit and Wilykat, fraternal twins, sister and brother.  They were based on wildcats, but you could not be sure which kind from the look of them.

Jaga was the wise, Obi-Wan Kenobi magician/mentor in the group.  No one has any idea what kind of cat inspired his appearance.  And, last but most important, there was the young heir to the royal throne of Thundera – Lion-O, the future Lord of the Thundercats.  Yes, he was based on the lion.

Oh, yeah, and then there was Lion-O’s nanny, Snarf.  No idea what Snarf was based on; he was the only cat who walked on all fours most of the time.  The Thundercats walked like humans do, unless they had to climb or run up a steep mountain as fast as they possibly could.

Anyway, Lion-O and his escort, along with the convoy of ships following them, ended up under attack from a group called the Mutants.  The Mutants were humanoid animals, mainly resembling Lizards, Jackals, Vultures, and apes (these were known as Monkians).

The entire convoy except for Lion-O’s ship was destroyed.  The Mutants boarded their ship in the hope of recovering an ancient Thunderian weapon and the heirloom of Lion-O’s house:  the magic Sword of Omens.

Naturally enough, the Mutants were repelled.  But the ship was heavily damaged in the battle and would never make it to the Thundercats’ planned new world.  The best it could do was the third planet in a small solar system in a dinky galaxy.  (There was, apparently, intergalactic travel in the original Thundercats series.)

The trip was too long for the group to survive outside of suspension capsules.  Because he was the oldest, Jaga did not enter a suspension capsule, which could retard but not stop the aging process.  He piloted the ship to the Cats’ new home but died before the ship crash landed on Third Earth, a wild world with ancient secrets.

Lion-O was the second Thundercat to awaken from suspension, the first being Snarf.  Once he was awake, Lion-O realized he had grown to a full adult during his years of suspension.  The pod seemingly malfunctioned and did not slow his aging as much as it should have, since the Thunderkittens remained the same age as when they entered the pods – they were older than Lion-O.  He looks to be about thirty, if not slightly younger…

But his mind is all twelve year old boy.  Add a big dash of leonine pride to that, and you get the general recipe for the Thundercats series.

Third Earth at first seems hospitable enough.  But on an adventure out of camp, Lion-O runs into an ancient evil that has slept on Third Earth undisturbed for centuries:  Mumm-Ra, the ever-living mummy and self-proclaimed ruler of Third Earth.

Yes, this is kind of corny.  But there is a bonus point about this villain which I always liked.  Mumm-Ra could never stand the sight of his own reflection.  If soundly beaten in a fair fight by the Thundercats, he would retreat with dire warnings about how bad their next encounter would be.  If the Cats were hard-pressed, they would use any reflective surface that they could find to show him his own face.  The sight of how ugly he was would drive Mumm-Ra back to his black pyramid and into his sarcophagus, so he could regenerate and keep being “ever-living” – especially after the fright of seeing the evil etched into his own skeletal face.

Three new Thundercats were later added to the roster.  Lynx-O, a blind Thunderian based on the lynx, became the team’s living voice of wisdom; Ben-Gali, based on the Bengal tiger, became the team’s new weapons expert.  Lastly we had Pumyra, based on the North American puma or cougar.  She and Ben-Gali looked to be about as perfect a couple as Cheetara and Tygra.

To a child, the world of the Thundercats, even if it is odd, is wonderful.  I never needed any explanation for anything when I watched the series re-air as a small viewer.  When I was older and looked up the series, I left the incongruities of the stories alone.  What mattered to me were the characters and the morals they imparted during every episode – because in the eighties, every cartoon series had a moral in each episode.  Or very nearly every series had a moral in every show.  Such contemporaries of the Thundercats as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe or Transformers, for instance, had a moral to each story.

Characters in He-Man would lecture the audience directly at the end of every show, whilst Transformers let the moral lie in the story.  Thundercats followed Transformers in that regard, being only a bit preachier in the way the characters spoke to each other.  ‘Course, they were trying to teach a twelve year old future king who had grown to adulthood in his sleep how to be mature.   They had a pretty good excuse.

Even after Thundercats was canceled, there was still a fan base to appease.  I have no idea how many older children watched and enjoyed the series when it came out first, but there must have been enough.  After a while comic books were made to show the ongoing adventures of the Thundercats.

And, as the saying goes, it all went downhill from there.

I looked up the comics when I was trying to find out more about my favorite childhood series.  What I discovered in this search was utterly appalling.  Thundercats had begun life as an innocent children’s show, and I was not the only one naïve enough to have expected the comics to maintain that tone.  What I and other fans of the show found was that the innocence of the series had been ravaged and destroyed by the comic book writers.

After a few glances through the descriptions, I stopped reading, since I wanted to be able to sleep at night.  So I only know of a few things which I can say against the comics.  But it is enough.  If you are a child or have a child with you, stop reading here and/or send the child away NOW.

The writers for the comics had Cheetara captured at some point in their stories and raped by Mutants.  This was bad enough for me; Cheetara had been my favorite Thundercat growing up.  It got worse, I quickly found:  somehow, the two Thunderkittens had also been captured by Mumm-Ra in the comics.  The Ever-living Mummy then decided to use them as sex slaves – both sister and brother – for his personal amusement.

Reading this the first time, I nearly threw up on the keyboard.  Thanks to the reviewers on Amazon who had not been so fortunate, I knew that I never wanted to pick up a Thundercats comic book in my life.  But the knowledge has never really changed my opinion of these “stories” and the writers who created them.

And the thing is, these awful incidents in the comics were not only disgusting, they were illogical.  Throughout the TV series the Thundercats always made sure to keep tabs on each other.  They always came to the rescue if one of them ended up in trouble.  The idea that Cheetara could be captured, let alone raped, without the Thundercats making sure that the perpetrators suffered the consequences is more than slightly unbelievable.

This also makes the capture and corruption of the Thunderkittens impossible to consider.  The Cats made sure to take care of the Kittens; if ever they went missing, the adults would tear off after them.  That they somehow allowed the Kittens to be captured by Mumm-Ra and never tore the planet apart in at least an attempt to find them is totally out of character.

From left to right: Tygra, Wilykit, Lion-O, Wilykat, Panthro, Snarf, and Cheetara

This was one of the reasons why I became worried about the new series which aired in 2011.  The new Thundercats TV show drew a great deal from the comics.  It added species which had never been in the original series, gladiatorial combat, and made the entire storyline far less sunny and happy-go-lucky.  It also subtracted Mumm-Ra’s vulnerability to his own reflection, replacing it with the vampiric weakness to sunlight.  Previously, Mumm-Ra had never had a problem moving around in the day time.  He is, after all, an ancient mummy, not a vampire!

I did enjoy some of the additions to the new series, readers.  But always in the back of my mind was the worry of just what the writers might pull from the comics for the series.  The darker tone of the show did not ease my fears.

Pumyra 2011

The last straw came at the end of the first and only season of the new series.  This episode saw Pumyra turn on the Thundercats and join with Mumm-Ra, who apparently had taken her as his paramour in the bargain.  The fact that the writers would turn the originally sweet, innocent Pumyra into this was absolutely infuriating.  I was more than glad that the series died quietly after this episode.

Nevertheless, that does not mean that the writers are off the hook for what they did to this character – and that goes double for the comic book authors!  The original Thundercats series, the writers for the new TV show reportedly said, was “too much like a Sunday morning cartoon,” to be appealing to modern day audiences.

Well, duh!  That was the point!!!  That was what it was!!!!  No one in the 1980s had a problem with Sunday morning cartoons.  They especially did not mind if they had kids!!!!!

As for no modern audience being interested in the original series or “Sunday morning cartoons,” what are I and other fans like me – cat food?  We enjoyed the original series just fine the way it was!

And that is just the point.  These new writers did not want to reboot the series from its original foundation.  They wanted to change the premise of the story entirely.  Doubtless, the comic book authors felt the same way when they began crafting the comics for the Thundercats.

This really stuck in my craw, for one reason and one reason only:  the new writers felt the original show was too guileless – too innocent – to attract audiences today.  And I believe they are flat-out wrong in this indictment of the earlier TV series and others like it.  If you follow the in-crowd, you never try anything new.  So how will you know whether audiences today do or do not like and want “Sunday morning cartoons”?

But it is what this attitude highlights that I find most upsetting.  What is it with the urge in our “modern” age to destroy innocence?  From abortion to kindergarten programs which teach children about sex, it is horrifying to see just how far we have fallen in so short a span of time.  The world will rip apart the innocence of childhood and children as they grow up.  Why do we have to help it with comics like the ones about the Thundercats?  Why do we have to have television shows which do the same thing?

The answer is:  we do not need these things.  We really, truly, do not.  The fact that too many of us want to make them in order to be “hip,” “cool,” and to impress the people in the “right circles” is not a need.  It is following the crowd and supporting, ironically enough, the status quo which these mainstream moguls claim they want destroyed.

Marvel, DC, and most other “children’s entertainment” venues are doing this as we speak.  Even Disney is engaged in this disgusting game.  Disney has more than a few live action television shows which degrade boys and girls, making caricatures of the players in the stories and thereby the actors who portray the characters.  They are supposed to be funny, but I can tell you that I have never found even one thing comedic in the advertisements for these shows, let alone the actual episodes.

I do not know about anybody else, but I am absolutely fed up with all of this.  I am tired of the implication that I am backward, out of touch, and a rube because I like innocent pleasures and naïve kids’ shows.  As if any of the writers who have turned the art of professions meant to entertain children into lewd pap has the moral authority to tell me or anyone else that!

This has to end.  It has to stop.  Too many children have already been hurt by this.  They have grown into hurting adults who hurt their own children, either on purpose or in a search to find what they have been told is “ultimate freedom.”  These writers and others like them have sold children into slavery to ideas and misconceptions which have landed them in prison, in poverty, in disease, or in addiction.  And they have sold those children’s children into the same situations.  It has to stop!

How do we stop it?

How was Sauron defeated in The Lord of the Rings?  Aragorn’s army did not stop him.  Frodo’s quest to destroy the Ring, which betrayed itself when Gollum bit off his finger, did the trick.  This demonstrates that, eventually, every tempest of horrors imaginable will end in its own defeat.

And just like Frodo, we can help it along.  We can show our children what innocent shows like the original Thundercats look like.  We can make sure they read good books, see good movies, and hear good music.  We can keep them innocent for as long as possible by making damn sure they are exposed to as little of that other stuff as possible.  The battle started when the Enemy went after our children, readers…

It is past time we fought back the same way.