Dennis J. Woodyard

In the ThunderCats end-credit crawl for the show’s later seasons, Dennis J. Woodyard is listed under Production Staff, a catch-all group of folks working full-time for Rankin/Bass, all wearing many hats. Above that, the listing of Secondary Character Designs carries other names: the artists who held the job before Dennis, or who were more focused on The Comic Strip at the time. Industry credit aggregators like IMDb also omit his artistic contributions, only catching his two writing credits.

So, sadly, the artist who designed the secondary characters for the last 35 episodes of ThunderCats is not credited as such. Were it not for his meticulous record-keeping and willingness to share old sketches and other materials on his blog and YouTube channel, we might never have known the extent of his contributions. And yet he has never made a fuss about the lack of credit. Asked in 2005 what his experience on ThunderCats meant to him, he took a wider view.

Twenty-one years later, on the Beyond Thundera podcast, Dennis reflected on the ups and downs of his career, recalling that a friend once told him _"You're not on anybody's list." If proper crediting is one half of your CV, the other is your professional network. "People forget me," said Dennis. "I was easily forgettable."_

ThunderCats has never had one generally agreed-upon season structure. While the first 65 episodes are clearly Season 1, the second order of 65 episodes were produced over several years, with three batches of 20 episodes each released for syndication from 1987 through 1989. So while many sources, including Peter Lawrence, refer to them all as the second season, you'll also see references to Seasons 3 and 4.

Dennis designed for the last 35 ThunderCats episodes, show 96 through 130. Where do they fall?

Dennis is precise about his own starting point, because he's kept everything! Reading from his book of production materials on camera in 2026, he said, "I joined at episode 96, “The Totem of Dera,” written by J. Larry Carroll, and the date on the script was September 30th, '87."

Dennis's collection of sketches and production material from his time on ThunderCats suggests that he designed for every episode thereafter, except possibly for show 110, "The Last Day," which featured no new props, characters or locations. Everything else, from "The Totem of Dera" through to "The Book of Omens," passed across his desk.

Dennis studied illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1969 to 1972, wanting to draw comic books, and came into animation sideways: children's educational filmstrips, then novelty record commercials, then graphic animation and station identifications for HBO Sports and ABC. His first adventure series was The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, where he storyboarded whole episodes.

That is what put him in front of Rankin/Bass. The recommendation came from Galaxy Rangers character designer Ed Lee; Rankin/Bass producer Peter Bakalian made the call and set up a meeting with supervising producer Lee Dannacher.

Dennis arrived at Rankin/Bass and dove right in, but his earliest sketches weren't quite... Thunderian enough. “I remember some of the first things I submitted to Peter. He said, ‘No, that looks like Galaxy Rangers_. You can't draw like that for us.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ So I had to learn the style for_ ThunderCats that was already established."

Given the scale of their output, Rankin/Bass's staff was startlingly small by modern standards. Just ten people! Woodyard was often the only artist in the building.

PAC is Pacific Animation Corporation, the Tokyo studio built out of the remains of Topcraft when most of that studio left to found Studio Ghibli. Dennis is consistently generous about how they transformed his designs into final animations.

"All I had to do was one or two pencil sketches, not even finished sketches, and one maybe a turnaround here or there. And Pacific Animation Company made it look good."

His other standing duty was quality control on the way back. Storyboards returned from Tokyo, and he read them for continuity errors. That’s what led to him eventually writing. "I think that’s one of the things that endeared me to Peter. I picked up a couple of his mistakes in the storyboard! So that’s when they said, ‘Hey, you want to do a script or two?’"

In October 2024, Dennis wrote a short line on his blog that reads differently now: "I'm still hoping for the toy companies to make figures of the T'Cats characters I designed for the last season."

And in July 2026, Super7 finally released ULTIMATES figures of two of those characters: Jagara and Zaxx. Dennis was delighted, if a bit surprised.

When they were announced, Dennis started looking back at other Super7 releases and noticed some familiar items! “There’s the props that I did. There’s a [sphere]. There’s a mirror. Hey, that’s the stuff I did! So, again, I'm happy to see it.”

After ThunderCats ended, The Comic Strip had wound down, and Telepictures was acquired by Warner Bros., Rankin/Bass tried to keep things going. Dennis is one of the few staff members who was still there for this final chapter, and he recently recalled what turned out to be the nail in Rankin/Bass's coffin.

In 1988, the studio developed a low-budget pilot called CBTV (Comic Book Television Video), to pitch to its new corporate owner. It was meant to be a live action/animation hybrid, starring Maggie Jakobsen, Frankie Pace and Steve Sashen performing sketch comedy and reading from comic books that would be animated on screen. As art director, Dennis recalls pressing Masaki Iizuka of Pacific Animation for more dynamic animation. Masaki refused; the budget was too tight.

PAC delivered the pilot reel, which Arthur Rankin Jr. screened for the team. Then he turned to the room and issued a stark verdict.

Rankin came back from pitching the show in LA and gathered the staff. "He just said, ‘We’re closing. Those guys hate our guts. They don’t like us because we’re from the East Coast. They’re not going to give us any kind of money."

After Rankin/Bass shuttered, Dennis went back to freelance work for HBO and King Features, then on to a career that outlasted Rankin/Bass by twenty years and took him from New York to California to Seoul and back.

Dennis left the animation business in 2008 and moved with his family to Rochester, New York, his wife's home town. He worked as a library technician at Brighton Memorial Library and then spent thirteen years as a senior library clerk at Monroe Community College's downtown campus. He is now retired, still drawing, still posting, and has taken part in Inktober every year since 2017. He trades as Dragonfly Entertainment under a banner he chose carefully: “On my profile online I call myself a journeyman artist because I've done a lot of different things.”