On Friday night, Cartoon Network fires up “ThunderCats,” its satisfying update of the 1985-’90 animated classic about feline humanoids fighting to survive on a desolate planet against incredible odds – and against an aggressively hammy performance by the evil sorcerer Mumm-Ra.
As beloved as the original’s awesomely implausible plot and iconic Rankin/Bass animation were, the show may be most remembered for birthing one of the most ridiculous and irritating cartoon characters television has ever known: Snarf.
In stark contrast to his young charge, Lion-O, the unflappable and bipedal alpha ThunderCat, this vexing nursemaid sidekick was merely a whiny fur-blob who padded around on all fours and dished out no end of shout-outs to himself. “Snarf!” he would say, all too frequently. “Snarf! Snarf!”
Interestingly, in Cartoon Network’s faithful adaptation of “ThunderCats,” Snarf is more often seen than heard. When he does utter his dubious catchphrase, it’s not nearly as intrusive as you’d expect, and he otherwise uses no verbal language. Curious about what prompted the show’s producers to alter a character that fans love to hate, we phoned up showrunner Michael Jelenic and visuals producer Ethan Spaulding to explain themselves.
Can you walk us through your Snarf strategy?
Michael Jelenic: Our Snarf strategy actually shifted a couple of times during the course of development. Early on, there were a lot of people who did not want Snarf to appear. Snarf came very close to getting the axe. And then he was reimagined as a sort of tough battle cat. Like, a Doberman pinscher version of Snarf -- but a cat. And that development sort of made sense. But at the same time, that isn’t really true to what his appeal was. So, after that, it went back to, “Let’s cut him out.”
Blasphemy!
Jelenic: Yeah. I was always an advocate for keeping him in because out of all the characters from the original show, I remembered Snarf. In the 1980s, my favorite characters always tended to be the annoying ones that everyone hated. Like, Murdoch was my favorite character on “The A-Team,” and Screech on “Saved by the Bell.” So I think the compromise was, “Let’s keep him in the show and let him be comic relief as he was always intended, but let’s, you know, keep him from talking.”
Hilarious. What ultimately made you to decide to put him back in?
Jelenic: During the course of development, the first thing anybody would ask about when we were pitching it was, “What are you guys doing with Snarf?” Because he wasn’t really included in the pitch one way or the other. We hadn’t made a decision. So it was like, okay, if they’re asking that in the room, they’re going to be asking everywhere else. He had to be in there.
But before Ethan Spaulding [came on board], there was another producer who was going to be working on the project and he wanted things to be more serious and realistic.
