Thunder Thursdays: Explore ThunderCats' New Third Earth!

Welcome back to Thunder Thursdays here at IGN! The weekly hub for all your ThunderCats wants and needs. Last week we spoke with writer/producer Michael Jelenic about his new ideas for the Cartoon Network series and the reboot of the ThunderCats characters themselves in a piece called "Know Your ThunderCats!"

This week we had the privilege of talking to Dan Norton, the art director, about his new take on Third Earth and all the new places and species we'll see on the series when it premieres this summer. It's time to Explore the New Third Earth!

As it turns out, Norton's love and obsession for ThunderCats began when he was 11 years old and first saw the opening sequence of the original 80's series. "To be honest, it's the first show that from that time that when I watched the intro, I cried," Norton told us. "Because it was so amazing. I was like 'what is this? It's incredible.' I hadn't seen Voltron or any of that other stuff yet. I guess I kind of grew up a little at that time. I lived in the country. I had this one little broken TV and the KTZZ channel, which was channel 22 at the time. So it was my first introduction to anything from overseas."

I'm pretty sure there are many of us who got hooked on ThunderCats because of this amazing intro…

"I always felt, ever since I saw that intro, that it was the forge I kind of bent my creative stick on," Norton revealed. "Everything that I ever did after, I always held it up to that intro. Like, 'can I draw something as cool as that?' So in some ways I've carried the show with me since I was 11"

So what kind of creatures and denizens will we run into on this new, revamped version of Third Earth? The old series made the place seem fairly bare, population-wise, but Norton assures us that this new world, while vast, will crackle with exciting inhabitants. "There's one place that we do explore in this new version where Lion-O comes into contact with new races and you'll see that there are a lot of inhabitants of Third Earth," Norton said. "And there are lot of different races that go a little outside of the animal box." Now Norton didn't want to spoil too much for us, but we have an exclusive image here that shows you some of the creatures that Lion-O will cross paths with on his journey. And, as you can see, the Berbils are well represented.

"Some of the creature and monsters you'll see might be a little more humanoid in different aspects," Norton said. "We definitely do see several more animal types. Not to spoil anything, but there is a lot more of the animal kingdom represented. From the old show, as far as mutants were concerned, you had the jackals and the monkeys and the lizard men, but we made sure in this go-around to design a herd. With different monkey men and jackals. You're going to see a population of these guys and they're not going to be the stock characters. It won't look like they hit the cloning device."

One of the things that most fans are hotly anticipating is Mumm-Ra's transformation, which was quite epic on the old show. "That scene is definitely a staple," Norton told us. "I guess we always were looking forward to doing those transformation scenes and we're going to get that on the show, but we didn't feel like we needed to force feed it to people every episode. We let it breathe and I think in doing that it becomes more potent. Because you are anticipating it a little bit."

"This show really moves around a lot," Norton continued. "So these scenes aren't going to always happen in the same backdrop. As far as background goes though, we really tore that thing up and it's going to blow a lot of people away. Mumm-Ra's pyramid is really going to surprise people. We're going to explore a lot more. The old show really had Mumm-Ra be an ancient mummy and it never really got into his motivations or his character. Or what drives him. And they never explored the deeper side of the pyramid in that show. And on this new show, we take that opportunity. And there are treasures to be found there. It's kind of where he reaches into his bag of tricks."

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Want to see some more of the majestic scenery of Third Earth? Head over to page 2…