My friend at school had all the Thundercats. He would bring them to school every day in his beat up old backpack (a backpack he also occasionally brought his dad’s old Marvel comics from the ’60s). That backpack would end up getting shoved under his desk, easily accessible. And every single day I would quickly finish up whatever writing assignment we had, sneak over to his desk and pull them out of his backpack. I’d have Lion-O wave the Sword of Omens around. I’d have Panthro swing his claw-ended nunchucks. I’d resist the urge to make punching noises while the other students were still hastily scratching out answers with their number 2 pencils. The teacher never noticed that I was all the way on the other side of the room, sitting on the floor, playing with toys. Finally, school was fun.
The sad thing is that this was the 12th grade.
OK, no, it wasn’t.
But I was super jealous of him because he had ALL THE THUNDERCATS and he had them first. He even had the full-size Sword of Omens with the battery powered light-up symbol.
Bastard!
Sadly, I never got all the Thundercats. I don’t know what happened. One minute they were in stores, and the next, they were nowhere to be found. There was a chunk of time there where this just kept happening. The toy aisles stopped being bright and friendly things and they started to become ruthless mass-murderers, killing toy line after toy line, not letting them get past two waves before mercilessly headshotting them. Thundercats, Silverhawks, COPS, MASK… frickin’ plastic graveyard, man.
I only managed to get Lion-O, Tygra, and Hachiman. Remember Hachiman? Cool samurai dude? Well, cool in hindsight. I wasn’t too enthused to get him at the time, but he was the only one my mom saw and the first one she bought when she knew I wanted Thundercats, so it wasn’t her fault. But those were the only Thundercats I ever managed to get before the line died and I moved on to something else.
So when it was announced that a brand new take on the classic figures would be restarting, albeit in a weird 8-inch scale, I was eager to scoop up brand new, fully articulated toys. Because the stiff-armed/stiff-legged figures of old weren’t the most flexible of kitties.
Now, obviously, the 8-inch scale was an odd choice for the line. And I would have liked for them to have been in a scale that worked well with other scales, so I could have Lion-O fight He-Man or something, but none of my toys are strictly “right” with each other (MOTUC is too big for DCUC and ML, DCUC is too big for ML, the various Turtles are in a strange gray area, so on and so on), and I don’t really care about having them fight each other as long as I get a good toy, so that didn’t matter. I just wanted cool-ass Thundercats toys, and I wanted more than just Lion-O and Tygra that I had as a kid.
So the 8-inchers came out. First wave: Lion-O and Tygra. Kind of cool, starting with the only two I had before. I could dig it.
And then they stopped.
What. The. Cuss.
I assumed this was some practical joke that Bandai was playing on me. I seemed doomed to only have Lion-O and Tygra from the line.
Then they announced that they would be shifting to a smaller scale, abandoning the 8-inch line.
Deep breath.
OK, fine. Let’s work on getting more than two figures out this time, eh?
So they released the first wave in their brand new, fan-demanded scale. And they also were really great figures. Who were they?
Lion-O and Mumm-Ra. OK, another Lion-O, but at least he has someone to fight this time.
And then that was it.
At least it wasn’t another Tygra this time, but still… what the cuss?
I’m just… I don’t even know what to say. I have two figures — two really great figures — at 8 inches, and then two at 6, and… that’s it?
Nobody likes a quitter, Bandai.
After two aborted attempts, I’m left with four really good figures of three characters, in two scales, and all hopes of a completed line in either scale are deader than Maude Flanders.
Toys, you know?
Toys.
The 8-inch Tygra is still available at Big Bad toy Store
The 8-inch Lion-O is still available at Big Bad toy store
The 6-inch Lion-O is available at Amazon