Some things are very sacred to certain people. Like the 1985 animated children’s series ThunderCats for instance. In some people’s minds, ThunderCats, a cartoon about catlike humanoid aliens with swords, is as sacrosanct as Michelangelo’s painting on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Now, a new ThunderCats series, ThunderCats Roar, is on the way and some people are very, very Mad Online™.

Remember ThunderCats? They’re back, in new series form. The new show is called ThunderCats Roar, and the show adopts a much more cartoonish/comical approach to its animation than the original show. Here’s a teaser.

ThunderCats Road Teaser

To better illustrate how different this looks compared to the style of the original series, here’s the ThunderCats intro and opening credits.

ThunderCats Intro

As someone with absolutely no allegiance to the original ThunderCats, I have zero problems with this update. Is it silly looking? Sure. Does the animation look more akin to the Powerpuff Girls than the original ThunderCats. It sure does. Does any of that really matter? Absolutely not.

But the internet, being the internet, is not happy about this. Many have decried the fact that the new series doesn’t care about the “integrity of the animation”, or that the new series looks like “silly, cutesy pandering.” Someone even wrote (and I wish I were kidding) “Thundercats is a serious show about serious shit.”

Is it?

Blindspotting producer Keith Calder took to twitter to rebuff some of these very angry statements, and the results were pretty damn amusing.

This is hilarious. “In this day and age.” As if the original ThunderCats didn’t have toys released literally the same year it started airing in 1985. https://t.co/xETR84DKbq — Keith Calder (@keithcalder) May 20, 2018

“Thundercats is a serious show about serious shit” https://t.co/2iikbmYrnp pic.twitter.com/Zk1DYpbtYS — Keith Calder (@keithcalder) May 20, 2018

“Thundercats was a serious type of show, and looking at the new one it’s meant for kids.” https://t.co/TRk5N2Ivbv pic.twitter.com/XQUHQSUZXY — Keith Calder (@keithcalder) May 20, 2018

Will someone please think of the children? How can they aspire towards becoming an alien-lion-human hybrid that fights an ancient alien-mummy if they’re also seeing something silly? https://t.co/KtDiq0AsGw — Keith Calder (@keithcalder) May 20, 2018

This is all pretty silly, but it’s also part of a larger pattern. There’s a community of fans who can’t quite grasp that not everything is being made directly for them. And that times change. Just because a new take on an old show doesn’t look exactly like the way you remember it, it doesn’t make the new show null and void. What I’m trying to say here is that it’s okay to let things go sometimes. To leave the past in the past.

Anytime fan outrage like this pops up, I’m reminded of a quote from American author James M. Cain. Cain wrote the book that inspired the film Double Indemnity – a film that made several major changes to his source material. When an interviewer asked Cain if he was bothered by the changes from book to screen, the author replied:

“People tell me, don’t you care what they’ve done to your book? I tell them, they haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf.”

I wish more fans would apply this line of thinking to remakes and reboots. In other words, this new ThunderCats isn’t “ruining” the old ThunderCats. The old ThunderCats still exists. This is just something different. If it doesn’t appeal to you – so what? Let someone else find it and embrace it instead.

ThunderCats Roar will be coming to Cartoon Network in 2019. You don’t have to watch it if you don’t want to.