Growing up in the 80s, as certain members of the younger generation might well be unaware (yes, Lindsay Lohan, I mean you), had a certain way of bringing together those of us who were raised during that particular golden era of human history.  There were in those marvelous days, and still remain to this day, people, things, and events which will forever bind us together whether we want to or not, just as the Planeteers had to keep the Heart kid around if they wanted to summon Captain Planet.  Our shared experiences during the closing days of the Cold War, as well as all the other epic and historic challenges that the 80s represent, are in fact generally not all that memorable, since most of us were seven years old at the time.  As one might imagine, most of us were really none too worried about all the great and important things because the mental world of an 80s child could be accurately described thusly:

            Now, I know we’ve all changed a little since then (I myself rarely dwell long on the deeper meaning of Pop-Tarts anymore), but I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you think about it way too hard late on a Saturday night, Thundercats is a lot like Gilligan’s Island.  But with robo koalas.  No, no, I’m not crazy, hear me out.  You see, if you think about it, you’ll see as well as I have the number of eerie similarities and parallels between Thundercats and Gilligan’s Island.

            For instance, on Thundercats, everybody always wore the exact same clothes, every single day, just like on Gilligan’s Island.  I mean, everyone has always wondered how Gilligan wore that red shirt every day of his life without needing a new one (much less being eaten by a Horta or having all the iron in his body sucked out by an evil cloud monster, not to mention being bitten by a big, white, uni-ape), but has anyone ever asked why Lion-O had a wardrobe composed solely of a single blue unitard of eternal vigilance?  I mean, at least Gilligan didn’t have anything else to make a shirt from except for bamboo and guest stars, but the Thundercats were way more resourceful than that.

            Next, on both Thundercats and Gilligan’s Island, they could build pretty much anything they wanted, as long as it wasn’t a ship to get them off their planet/island.  The Professor could build a radio out of coconuts if he wanted to, and Gilligan could make little cars out of bamboo, along with things like hot tubs, home entertainment centers, electron tunneling microscopes, anything at all.  Panthro, on the other hand (who, much like the professor was the all-knowing technically masterful babe magnet who nevertheless remained mysteriously single) started out with a crashed spaceship and ten minutes later had built a totally sweet thematically unified Thunder Fortress (and yes, I know that’s not what it was really called, but for copyright-related reasons, I am unable to use its proper name, The Sanctuary of Snarf), and then, when Lion-O (whose name I am loathe to type due to the thoroughly unnecessary hyphen it contains) started whinging about how that wasn’t good enough, Panthro went and threw together a tank just to shut him up.

            Just as Lion-O was the chosen one, who alone had the power to defeat Mumm-Ra, likewise was Gilligan the chosen one who looked exactly like the god of the headhunters, thereby enabling him to save is island-dwelling homies from near-certain death.

            And let us not forget that while Gilligan’s band was brought to the island by the Skipper, a big dude in a blue shirts, the Thundercats were brought to Third Earth by Jaga, a dead Obi-Wan Kenobi-looking guy, who was also blue.  Pretty creepy, eh?

            And let’s not forget the striking parallels between the Monkeyans that the Thundercats fought, and the love-crazed chimpanzee that was always hitting on Gilligan (no, not Mrs. Howell, the other one).

            And remember how Mumm-Ra was this gnarly little undead dude who would often go and stand in his big pyramid and be all like, “Spirits of Evil, blobbity blobbity blah, make me all beefy and badass, Mumm-Ra, the EVER-LIVING!!!”  At first this might seem a little out of place, but not to those of us who have seen the rare episode of Gilligan’s Island where Zha Zha Gabor gets stranded on the island and does the exact same thing.  Really, you need to go out and rent it sometime, it happens.

            Clearly, some TV executive somewhere realized early on that while Gilligan’s Island was a great source of important values and moral lessons, it was, in a very real way, just a little too classy and refined for the children of America to grasp.  Therefore, the idea to make a cartoon based upon the same premise and wrought in terms that children and the sort of adults who have to get cliff notes for Danielle Steele novels could understand.  Thus was Thundercats born, for which we are all both richer and wiser.