Concept art for Thundercats

Ideally this is not a hot take 🔥

But if Snarf isn’t an actual character that matters to the story in a ThunderCats adaptation it’s got some kind of curse on it. Not kidding!

That is a HUGE red flag to me and I’m prepared for it to fail/not be good.

I read the 2007 never-made screenplay: No Snarf at all, BAD 🚫

I watched the 2011 show: Snarf is just an animal, good things in it, but mostly a frustrating adaptation overall imo 🚫

Straight up if Snarf isn’t in the new movie I’m going to be EVEN MORE WORRIED than I already am considering the writer/director combo attached have never done animation before.

If you think that Snarf is such an annoying an inconsequential character as to erase him instead of tweak his characterization, you have fundamentally misunderstood some of the basic (GOOD) elements of the OG ThunderCats.

Not having Snarf is like only watching Lord of the Rings for Aragorn and writing the hobbits out of it. Where is the meat?! The kindness and the humility, the underdog perspective, and occasionally lighthearted slapstick that lets the audience breathe?

It’s like taking Greg Universe or Uncle Iroh out of SU and ATLA. Sure they’re chronically underestimated comic relief, but they serve a fundamental and incredibly important role to the child characters around them! Snarf is the Greg to Lion-O’s Steven, the Iroh to his Zuko, he’s Pa Kent, he’s Alfred! He’s an important and long well established character archetype disguised as a marketable plushie!

Snarf’s primary feature in the original show, when written well, is to give Lion-O one person who can and does see him as a child. Someone who loves him unconditionally and doesn’t have insanely high expectations of him. He NEEDS Snarf in order to stay grounded and to remind himself, the other characters AND the audience that he’s still a kid!

By extension, as a non-Thunderian without a horse in the race and for all intents and purposes Lion-O’s “earthly father” (think Pa Kent vs Jor-El) he grounds the rest of the ThunderCats too. He’s literally doing domestic maintenance while the others are too busy doing superhero stuff. He sticks up for his fellow little guys, and exploits the fact people don’t understand him to the benefit of others. He reminds the ThunderCats to have a bit more humility whenever they’re being a bit sanctimonious or tough on vulnerable characters like the Thunderkittens.

Without Snarf, Lion-O has no one to help him on the matter of his conflicting states of maturity because even as the adult Thunderians try to mentor him, they see him more as Lord of The ThunderCats than a twelve year old boy. Lion-O loses that charming juvenile spark and the ThunderCats have no one to check their egos. Without Snarf, Lion-O as an individual gets crushed by expectations into Generic Dark Fantasy Hero shape. The ThunderCats way of thinking goes unchallenged and unnuanced by someone who is still in their corner. Which I have seen with my own two eyes have a ripple effect that throws the vibe of the characters and the message of the show into a darker and more cynical turn that I viscerally do not enjoy. It is not what I go to ThunderCats for and it never will be.

Still so sad it was cancelled.