ThunderCats - Release on DVD

THUNDERCATS was a Saturday-morning cartoon that ran from 1986 to 1988, and, in its time, made as much money in merchandising as shows such as Transformers and He-Man.

Now those fans are in their 20s and 30s, and most own either a DVD player or a computer with DVD playback. It is a great thing that Transformers is being released on DVD, but we believe that there is a strong demand for ThunderCats to be released on DVD as well. Except for a few cartoon channels that play random ThunderCats episodes now and then, the show has basically disappeared. A new comic has recently emerged, showing that the demand for the series is coming back.

As it stands now, the only way to really see ThunderCats is by downloading the episodes from a file sharing network such as KaZaA or Grokster. All of the episodes are available, and many fans with high speed Internet collections have obtained the series on their computer hard drives. Now DVD recorders are becoming mainstream (they should go under $300 this year) and by my calculations, if 1 DVD-R disc will hold approximately 6 episodes and costs about $3, the entire 130-episode run would cost about $66 to burn to DVD video for home viewing.

That's not a lot of money. As fans, we realize that piracy hurts everyone. We want the creators of the series to reap the benefits of a new wave of ThunderCats fans in the new millenium. We have the means to do this ourselves. But not only do we want to watch the episodes on TV, we want collectors cases, picture discs, full color booklets, and best of all, special features. We understand this will likely cost more than the $66 it would cost us to do the job ourselves. However not all of us have $1000 or more to spend, as expected by the producers of Star Trek: The Next Generation, an example of a series that is impossible to own by most of the population. We know how inexpensive it is for studios to stamp and mass produce DVDs. Once the initial production costs (of any extras, and the packaging) are out of the way, a price tag of $100 - $130 will be affordable by most fans.

By signing this petition, we state our intent for the owners of the ThunderCats trademark to release the series on DVD for purchase