Voltron: Supercool TV or Anime Mutilation?
I loved Voltron as a kid. It was the coolest thing on TV, or at least the coolest thing I had ever seen on TV. Five giant robot lions that can combine into an even larger giant robot with a sword fighting huge monsters from outer space. How could anything be any more awesome than that?
It wasn’t until much much later that I learned the truth. Voltron was a lie. It had been brutally slashed, edited and re-written. What I saw wasn’t the show that the creators intended. It was merely the desecrated corpse of Go-Lion being manipulated and made to dance like a macabre puppet all in the name of the almighty dollar.
Ok that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the point hiding beneath the thick layer of melodrama remains true. Voltron isn’t just a translation, it was so heavily edited that it’s a different story.
Just a couple of examples of the sort of thing cut from, or changed in, Voltron.
- In Voltron the characters are a team of “Space Explorers”. They’re not the only surviving people from Earth thanks to being away on a space mission when it was destroyed.
- The Lions are just legendary machines. Voltron isn’t some sort of super-being that was split into 5 parts by a goddess for being an arrogant bullying douche bag.
Are The Changes A Bad Thing?
I like to see anime brought over with as few changes as possible, but in this case I think the changes were a good thing. Voltron: Defender of the Universe got a lot of kids hooked on anime, including me. I can remember watching anime shows before that, but Voltron firmly solidified the foundations of my anime obsession. I don’t think Go-Lion could have done that.
Anime, Opinion, Voltron: Defender of the Universe, Beast King Go-Lion, Go-Lion, 80s, TV, Cartoon
December 20th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Why am I not surprised? Actually, this sounds very similar to ADV/Harmony Gold’s treatment of Robotech, which I still like regardless. Ditto for Voltron.