"There is a Doctor on Planet Ebb": The Strange Story of Voltron"Voltron: Legendary Defender", a new iteration of Voltron is now streaming on Netflix. You can watch it anytime, anywhere. Gather ‘round the campfire as I tell you a tale of how things used to be. I will set the scene for Fall 1984.
No cable is available in your area with 1,000 channels and every sort of animation you could possibly imagine. No DVDs, no VCR either…you watch what is on or you are entertaining yourself outside with a giant stick that fell off the tree in the backyard. Early mornings, after school and Saturday morning are your “sweet spots” to find you favorites on the 3 or 4 channels that you do have. And certainly, no such conceivable thing as an INTERNET where you could look up information on your favorite cartoon and see how it existed in its original form in Japan. No fact-checking, leading to many a heated argument on the school grounds. (More on that later.) Voltron, like a lot of other Animation that came from Japan in those days was something fresh and new.... the coolest. The ultimate merging of imagination and technology. And Japan itself for a young person growing up in the 1980s in America? The greatest country ever. It HAD to be. It surely was giant robots guarding every street and non-stop action. The Japanese creations were so weird and wacky that the country it came from had to be just as magical. Japan had embraced every aspect of America’s superhero culture, chewed it up, spliced it together and incorporated the result into its own hyper-accelerated pop media landscape. The early 1980’s were when American TV producers really discovered the sheer volume of high-quality animation being made in Japan. These series brought with them their own long-form storytelling and continuity – each episode was a small part in a longer narrative, and they were meant to be watched in order. This was fairly common in Japanese animation, but totally foreign to American audiences, where every episode of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon could have been the first episode. A young kid in the 1980s could immerse himself in his favorite world almost daily, full of twists and turns and heartache and triumph. Even with that, I think the appeal with Voltron was that you could grasp that we were only getting a part of the overall story. The Japanese import, a syndication mish-mosh of other shows stripped of its violence and loaded with re-purposed footage, was part-serialized story, part-Robeast of the week, part-kiddie show cuteness. The story of Voltron is about five peace-keeping space rangers from Earth, who reawaken the legendary Voltron to protect the besieged planet of Arus from Evil King Zarkon of Planet Doom. Zarkon, with the witch Haggar at his side, has an army of vicious Robeasts led (at first) by his doofus lieutenant Yorak, then later his lovesick son Lotor. Zarkon kinda has a blue fish face and the Robeasts, obviously a portmanteau of robot and beast, all tend to look more like beasts than robots (I suspect the “robo” is in there so American kids wouldn't see the weekly slaying of sentient beings.) The Robeasts are shuttled around in coffins called “beastcrafts”, the coolest thing ever to a young viewer.
I remember many school bus rides arguing about who the heck Sven was. He was part of the original team, some swore. The original pilot of the Blue Lion, some would say, while others claimed he wasn't even real. Again, you gotta remember how we first saw these shows. They weren't shown in order – odd, because there is something of a narrative. (Indeed, it takes FOUR WHOLE EPISODES of Voltron before they actually form the robot.) The first blue lion, before the Princess took the seat, was this nice enough fella named Sven, with perhaps the most over-inflated foreign accent you will ever hear. Anyway, the point is that after a few episodes you didn't have to deal with Sven too much. He was attacked by Haggar's blue cat with electric eyes (!) and fell down injured. Hovering over him, team leader Keith says “there is a doctor on Planet Ebb” and then Sven disappears like Poochie going to his home planet. Never to be mentioned again. In the Japanese version Sven dies. In the American version, Sven comes back to much hoopla far later in the series. That wasn't actually Sven. That was Sven's twin brother, but the American distributors brushed that all aside. Turns out the Japanese version had a hell of a lot more violence (and slave abuse and piles of dead bodies), which is why each episode ends with the Robeast getting killed in almost the exact same way. Recycled footage took care of that, and when there was too much of a hole to fill in they could always cut back to Earth's home base known as Galaxy Garrison. Here's the thing about Galaxy Garrison. This footage, mostly comprised of men sitting around a giant table saying “how will we help the Voltron Force?,” is actually taken from another show entirely. The Galaxy Garrison sequences were lifted from “Armored Fleet Dairugger Xv,” and after Voltron ran out of material from the original Golion show, the American producers just decided to switch over to footage from this show entirely. This is where the mysterious “Vehicle Voltron” comes from, which, if you bought the toys was bafflingly called “Voltron I.” You would later (much Later) find out the early Voltron you loved was Voltron III........HUH?!?!? Imagine coming home from school one day,) your five favorite space explorers and their lions are gone. In their place are FIFTEEN space explorers divided into three groups – the Air, Land and Sea Teams – and when the whole group comes together they form a different robot. This second iteration scored poorly, so new episodes with the Lion team were commissioned. To make sense of the continuity it was explained, in a crossover later released as a 45 minute VHS called FLEET OF DOOM, that the Lions were from the “Far Universe” and the Vehicles were from the “Near Universe.” This may lead you to ask “what about the 'Middle Universe?'” And here lies the greatest Voltron mystery of all. There was a kid on the bus who swore, swore, that he had a cousin in Indiana that had “Voltron II” toys. And it was called “Gladiator Voltron.” Whereas Vehicle Voltron and Lion Voltron were comprised of fairly obvious components, this rumored, half-truth of a Voltron was, supposedly, a collection of three middle-sized robots that became a Giant Robot like we knew and loved. And if we just waited, the show would be starting any day now. The show never came, but the legend of “Voltron II” (like the stories of the mighty robot of Planet Arus itself) had some validity. An adaptation of the Japanese show Lightspeed Electroid Albegas was planned but later dropped. And, eventually, Voltron slipped away from afternoon television. Or maybe I just grew up. (I'm sure I didn't go do something outside, as my mother screamed at me to do, I can tell you that much.) So it wasn't until I took a look back at these shows online that I realized just how obviously Japanese they were. Forgetting the hallmarks of what we now recognize as an anime style, there are noticeably non-Western moments all over the place. Whenever the Voltron Force encounters a tomb or a holy place, they clasp their hands and bow their heads as if in Shinto prayer. There are also these giant-eyed space mice running around interrupting the story, a fine example of “kawaii” - the emphasis of cuteness in unexpected places in Japanese culture. I mean, there is a fierce robot versus monster battle in outer space and the show frequently cuts to shots of an adorable, pudgy pink mouse named Cheddar. There's also a lot of bondage play with the Princess. In just the first few episodes she is tied to a chair by her surrogate father and later spanked by her (German?) nanny while the entire Voltron Team laughs. I don't know that this is specifically Japanese, but I submit it as a compliment that anything sexually deviant has a way of having double impact when you know it comes from Japan. Woe be to the millennials who have nostalgia for artless affairs as opposed to the kaleidoscopic, tableaux-rich animation and hazily spliced stories of robot versus Robeast from my misspent youth. Share your memories of Voltron-related confusion in the comments below! And stay tuned for more from Jacurutu99, the latest Trash Mutant on board. |
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