It's finished, Jaga

John Hoare, of Dirty Feed fame, recently posted on Bluesky about the inappropriateness of linking from a trailer for The Diary of Anne Frank into the first episode of Thundercats, as the BBC apparently did (I still have my videotape recorded from BBC1 on January 2nd 1987, but we missed the opening seconds of the titles as well as the preceding continuity announcement - I don't recall now if we watched it live or if we were still outside playing in the snow).

It's a fair point that the transition to a glib "And now, good battles against evil, in Thundercats!" is rather awkward, but something many people don't know or remember is that the opening episode of Thundercats does involve the genocide of the heroes' entire planet's population, sparing only the eight central characters, at the hands of the evil Mutants. I haven't seen the BBC's Anne Frank, but that trailer makes it look really quite a lot more cheerful than the surprisingly grim tones of "Exodus". The mood definitely shifts into darker areas as we move from that trailer to the new cartoon.

I don't know if there's a moral to this story, unless it's that inappropriateness is being kept alive and well in this blog, nearly forty years later, but I thought it was a point worth making.