How far can a Reboot go?

So I came across this new announcement of a reboot (?) due in 2019 of the nostalgic cartoon Thundercats that most of us grew up with (fine, ok, I'm only dating myself with this).

I have always been partial to Thundercats, but not overly possessive. I didn't mind the new version they made a few years ago that was designed differently but generally kept the feel and the guidelines of the show's main recipe.

But this new one… it really jarred me.

How do you go from this:


To this?



It looks like a parody more than a reboot or new iteration or take on the show to me.

Don't take me wrong, the design and the art is quite good (even though not quite my cup of tea), stylized and fluid and I've no doubt the animation will also be good. But it's… somehow not a style I'd easily associate with an action adveture featuring space cats fighting a giant voodoo practicing egyptian mummy, showing off all the machismo and battle prowess and ferocity of big anthropomorphized cats.

I suppose that a kid that is introduced to thundercats with this new 2019 show won't mind and will totally get into it, if the writing's good and the stories engaging… but it will be a completely different flavour. It won't be the thundercats I grew up with, or even the ones I could recognize and relate to with the other reboot that was done.

And while of course everything is permissible in art, if you're going to change something this much, to the point that it is unrecognizable to its original core fanbase, why don't you go create something completely new, from scratch, and just get inspired from that something instead? Because it's quite likely that the original fanbase will hate your redesign since they won't be able to relate to it (thus you're not likely to be able to cash in much on the nostalgia and old fame and fanbase that comes with the title use) and the new fanbase won't have reference to the old show nor care.

Why not leave the old things well enough alone?