As a fluent speaker of Japanese, I have been searching the Internet lately for any links to Thundercats in Japan, even though it wasn’t aired there, I was sure there had to be some kind of fan base. Seeing most of the Character sheets were in Japanese, I figured I might be able to come across something. I found a few things, one of which is a site for “Monsters in American Toy” which features Hammerhand… I know It’s nothing unreal but still cool to see that Thundercats is at least known in the country that “drew” it. Plus some parts of the article are amusing, as I’ve pointed out below. The link for the site is here:
http://www.vinet.or.jp/~torichi/thundercats.htm
Caption above reads “Sandaa kyatssuu Baasaakaazu” or Thundercats “Berzerkers”.
The article translates as follows:
[Thundercats] is a TV Animation from 1980, which ‘gave birth’ to this Character. Pictured on the left, “Hammerhand” is the mutant leader of a group of sea pirates called the Berzerkers. He seems to be a combat master. Even though this is a 15 year old figure, the molding/modelling is unbelievably good looking. I think the “design motiff” for this figure is Hell’s Angels. The Cap, Jacket, Glove and boots are black and inside this “hard defence”, the Bellbottoms are completely yellow. Sooo cool. The gimmick is the left arm. On the elbow area there is a trigger that seems to cause the hand to grasp things. This means that even if the cheeky Justice Supporters (I’m assuming this means bad guys)
are arrested, (he) can break them free.
Just have to say LMAO about the hell’s angels thing, never would have thought of that.
Anyway hope it was interesting to see the viewpoint of a person from Japan.
