What is that old saying about everything old becoming new again? Apparently Hollywood is living by this motto.

Apparently 25th anniversaries are the time to dig up properties from the past and try to “modernize” them, usually to great failure. Being a child of the 1980′s cartoon boom, I am now getting to atch my childhood get massacred by people who think they can improve the properties.  The Transformers movies are a prime example of things going wrong, and don’t even get me started on that train wreck that was the G.I. Joe movie.

Now we’re up to the anniversaries of Voltron and ThunderCats, and, yep, here we go again.

I wasn’t a huge ThunderCats fanatic, so I skipped mentioning the news last week of a new “Anime style” series coming to Cartoon Network.  I rolled my eyes and moved along.  Now, according to Variety, Nicktoons has struck a deal for a new 26-episode run of half-hour cartoons called Voltron Force that will “revolve around an edgier, modernized robot”.

Don’t mind em … I’m just going to be crying in the corner for a minute.

The whole reason this is happening is that a live-action feature film stalled out multiple times, and so now the current rights holders, World Event Prods and Classic Media, have decided to relaunch the property as an animated series, and then make another run at doing a film.  Do a new series all you want, but why change the classic robot?  It still isn’t a bad looking design!

The only good news to come out of this is Mattel has been awarded the toy license, and in addition to doing items based on the new series, they will also release some items based on the classic property.  Okay, cool, I can get behind getting an all new shiny CLASSIC Voltron, but why or why do they have to modernize this thing?

Oh well, what ya gonna do?  At least I have classic episodes to watch should the mood hit me, and I can skip this new abomination.