The Full Story of ThunderCats

The company that made Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and a decade of stop-motion Christmas specials turned around in the mid-1980s and made one of the slickest action cartoons on television. It was drawn in Japan by the same studio that, the very same year, changed its name to Studio Ghibli. Its head writer was a veteran newspaper comic-strip artist, its first season reportedly cost fifteen million dollars, and it was overseen by the man who had dreamed up G.I. Joe. For a show about laser-swinging cat people, ThunderCats was made by a startling collection of talent.

ThunderCats was an animated series produced by Rankin/Bass, the studio famous for stop-motion holiday specials, and it premiered in syndication on January 23, 1985. Built from characters created by Tobin "Ted" Wolf and developed through Stan Weston's Leisure Concepts, the same licensing figure behind G.I. Joe, it was animated in Japan by Topcraft and then Pacific Animation Corporation, studios tied directly to the founding of Studio Ghibli. Head writer Leonard Starr, a decorated newspaper cartoonist, gave it unusual literary weight. It ran 130 episodes through 1989.

A Christmas-special studio makes an action cartoon

To understand why ThunderCats looks and sounds different from its toy-cartoon peers, start with the company that made it. Rankin/Bass, founded by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, had spent the 1960s and 1970s as the kings of the animated holiday special, Rudolph, Frosty, Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, most of them stop-motion. The studio ran on a model almost no American animation house used. As animation historian Ben Ohmart documents at Cartoon Research, drawing on interviews with the men who ran it, Rankin/Bass "never really employed full-time crew members," in the words of early associate producer Basil Cox. It was Rankin, Bass, a composer, and freelance designers brought in as needed, because the actual animation was done overseas.

That overseas model was deliberate, and old. Rankin had wanted out of the commercial business from the start. "Frankly we wanted to get out of commercials because you're just doing what somebody else wants you to do," he said in a 2005 interview with Jim Colucci, quoted by Cartoon Research. When a Japanese trade representative, hunting for American animation producers, was pointed to Rankin, Rankin toured the Japanese studios, was impressed, and built his entire company on producing shows in Japan. By the time ThunderCats came along, Rankin/Bass had been making cel and stop-motion work in Japan for twenty years. An action series was new for them; the pipeline to Japan was not.

Drawn by the people who would become Studio Ghibli

The most remarkable thing about ThunderCats is who held the pencils. The first season was animated primarily by Topcraft, a Tokyo studio that Rankin/Bass had leaned on for its most ambitious projects, including the five-year, three-million-dollar production of The Hobbit. In the early 1980s Topcraft took a job that would change animation history: Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata chose the studio to produce Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. That film was a hit, and, as Cartoon Research puts it, "Topcraft officially dissolved in 1985 when the name was changed to Studio Ghibli."

ThunderCats sat right on that fault line. Much of the series was animated by Pacific Animation Corporation, staffed by the same Japanese talent, a studio that was itself acquired in 1989 to become Walt Disney Animation Japan. The show's celebrated opening title sequence was key-animated by an artist credited only as Masayuki, later known for his work at Gainax. The pedigree left a mark on the screen: ThunderCats moved with a fluidity that most syndicated cartoons of 1985 could not touch. It also left a lasting confusion, one the fandom still argues over, about exactly which Japanese studio drew which episodes, because the same animators moved between Topcraft, Pacific Animation Corporation, and the Rankin/Bass fantasy films that surrounded them.

A newspaper cartoonist writes a cat show

The characters came from Tobin Wolf, usually credited as Ted Wolf, and the property was developed and licensed through Leisure Concepts, run by Stanley Weston, the same man who had conceived G.I. Joe in the 1960s. But the voice of the writing belonged to Leonard Starr. Starr was not a cartoon-factory hire; he was an award-winning newspaper strip artist, the creator of Mary Perkins On Stage and the reviver of Little Orphan Annie, and as head writer and developer he gave ThunderCats a seriousness of plot that stood out in the daypart. His five-part "Lion-O's Anointment," in which the young lord must defeat each of his fellow ThunderCats unarmed to earn his title, is the kind of structured arc most toy cartoons never attempted.

Underneath Starr, the writers' room ran on a real process, as second-season writer and character designer Dennis Woodyard described in a 2005 interview with ThunderCatsFans.org. A writer submitted a short premise, then a beat outline, then a full draft, then revisions, and "usually, the script would still be edited down again after the final voice recording was done." Woodyard, who had come off the series Galaxy Rangers, remembered producer Peter Lawrence teaching him to cut. His first script, "Shadowmaster," was badly overwritten: "It being my first script, I really over wrote it. There was way too much stuff to fit in a half show. Thankfully, Peter Lawrence guided me through the process of editing it down to the best parts." Woodyard also confirmed the show carried "a definite overall story arc," policed by the story editor, a rarity for syndicated animation of the era.

Casting cats that sound like people

The ThunderCats did not sound like cartoons, and that was a decision. Larry Kenney, a New York radio and commercial voice who became Lion-O, has told the story of his audition many times, including a 2011 on-camera interview with Cinemassacre's James Rolfe. He got the part the ordinary way, through his agent: "My agent called me one day and he said on Monday at 2 o'clock you'll go to such and such an advertising agency. And you'll audition for this new animated series called ThunderCats." He read for and won two roles, Lion-O and the villain Jackalman.

The direction in the booth is what shaped the show's tone. "They didn't want us to sound cartoony," Kenney said. "They wanted us to sound like people who happen to be half-cats. So, Lion-O's voice is basically my voice." The cast recorded together in New York in the mid-1980s, and the loose, joke-filled sessions produced a legendary reel of bloopers. Kenney remembers one running gag about a word nobody could define, "samovar," and the crew joking "that'll be on the engineer's Christmas party reel," never imagining that decades later, as he put it, those private outtakes would be "all over the internet." In the same New York voice world he was also Count Chocula, the Cocoa Puffs bird, and the voice on countless toy and game commercials, including G.I. Joe figures.

How the telling has grown over the decades

• 2005, Cartoon Research and ThunderCatsFans.org. Two strands of the story land the same year. Arthur Rankin Jr.'s 2005 interview with Jim Colucci, later cited by animation historian Ben Ohmart, documents the Rankin/Bass overseas-animation model that made the show possible. A detailed email interview with writer-designer Dennis Woodyard puts the day-to-day of the writers' room on the record.
• 2010s, convention-era interviews. Larry Kenney, endlessly interviewed at conventions and on shows like Cinemassacre, tells and retells the audition, the direction to sound like people who happen to be half-cats rather than cartoons, and the story of the recording-booth bloopers escaping onto the internet.
• DVD-era featurettes. Home-video releases carried a making-of segment, "ThunderCats Ho! The Making of a Pop Culture Phenomenon," in which executive producer Arthur Rankin Jr. spoke directly about the show's creation.
• Ongoing, the animation histories. As the Studio Ghibli connection became widely understood, animation historians traced the Topcraft and Pacific Animation Corporation lineage in detail, reframing ThunderCats as an unlikely cousin of Nausicaa.

The main drift in the ThunderCats story is not about people but about pencils: which Japanese studio actually animated which parts. The record credits Topcraft with the early work and Pacific Animation Corporation with the bulk of the run, but because the same artists moved between those studios and the Rankin/Bass fantasy films, and because animation quality visibly varies across the first season, even careful fans disagree on the details. The dates, the head writer, and the Ghibli-lineage connection are firm. The exact division of the drawing is not.

The honest bottom line

ThunderCats was a licensed franchise with a toy line and a mandate to sell it, and plenty of its 130 episodes are exactly the disposable adventure television that label suggests. What lifts it out of the pile is the accident of who made it: a holiday-special studio stretching into action, a newspaper cartoonist insisting on real story arcs, voice actors told to sound human, and Japanese animators who were, at that exact moment, inventing Studio Ghibli a few desks over. None of that was planned as art. It was a business arrangement that happened to route a cat cartoon through some of the best hands in the industry, and it shows.

Sources

• Cartoon Research, "The Japanese Studios of Rankin/Bass," Ben Ohmart (including a 2005 Arthur Rankin Jr. interview by Jim Colucci and comments from associate producer Basil Cox).
• ThunderCatsFans.org, "Dennis Woodyard Interview," December 2005.
• Cinemassacre, "Larry Kenney 'Lion-O' from ThunderCats interview with James Rolfe and Mike Matei," 2011 (video, transcribed).
• Wikipedia, "ThunderCats (1985 TV series)" (premiere date, episode counts, first-season cost, animation studios, creator and head writer, cross-checked).

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of Voltron and the full story of He-Man.

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