This Week In Retro: Voltron: Defender of the Universe (1984)

September 10, 1984: Activate interlock! Dynotherms connected! Infracells up! Mega thrusters are go! 

by Diamond Feit

Confession time: I'm not really a giant robot fan. I love stories about the robots themselves; The Transformers taught me all about good versus evil and respecting the lives of all sentient beings. Yet an alarming percentage of the mecha genre is dedicated to the people who sit inside or otherwise wield the robots as tools or conveyances. I don't want to hear about the fragile little pilots and their tiny problems when a piece of fiction promises me a massive marvel of science.

I wish I knew where this bias came from because it has stood between me and a number of all-time classics. For decades I avoided Neon Genesis Evangelion because the initial episodes focused so heavily on family drama and one deeply depressed teenager. I keep trying to get into the Gundam saga yet each time I sit down with it I'm stuck staring at a bunch of hapless space colonists. I remain curious about the Macross franchise but then I see titles like Do You Remember Love? and I decide it's probably not for me.

Adding to my confusion about this personal prejudice is the fact that 40 years ago, a giant robot anime introduced me to the genre while also introducing me to anime in general—even though I had no way to know that at the time. For me, an ignorant child, I saw Voltron: Defender of the Universe as just another cartoon like Superfriends or Spider-Man, albeit one that kicked a lot of ass.

Everything you need to know about Voltron, you'll learn from actor Peter Cullen in the show's opening. Against a backdrop of deep space, the narrator tells us that the eponymous robot is "loved by good, feared by evil" and Voltron's actions brought peace to countless planets around our galaxy. Yet the arrival of a new, sinister force necessitates sending five Space Explorers to return Voltron to active duty.

As Cullen's voice-over lays out the show's premise, the audience gets a good look at Voltron in motion. From a pure design standpoint, Voltron lives up to the hype; its body covered in a patchwork of bold colors that really pops on the screen. All four of Voltron's limbs feature a mechanical lion's head in place of hands or feet, and each one roars on command. The robot can also summon a blazing sword out of thin air, a move that makes no sense but looks awesome regardless.

We also see a glamor shot of five men in gleaming spacesuits, form-fitting and color-coordinated exactly in the way that real spacesuits aren't. Cullen hypes them as "specially trained" without elaborating in the slightest, and we never see them do anything but pose dramatically in this sequence. It makes sense though, since the show's called Voltron: Defender of the Universe, not Five Space Explorers.

Much of the footage seen in this introduction comes from the first few episodes of the show where the five heroes run afoul of the evil King Zarkon, escape his dungeon on Planet Doom, only to crash-land on Planet Arus where they learn Voltron's whereabouts. The once-invincible champion now exists as five separate robot lions which the Explorers must learn to control and unite to form Voltron in order to fend off constant attacks from Planet Doom. Once all the pieces are in place, the bulk of the series follows a simple formula with a new scheme from Zarkon in each episode leading to an attempt to take over the Planet Arus, only for Voltron to rise and defeat the invaders.

I can hear you, dear reader, react to that last paragraph with utter dismissal in your voice. "That just sounds like Power Rangers," you say, having seen various groups of teens in colorful jumpsuits pilot different vehicles that form giant robots for decades now. Indeed, American TV producers created Voltron by licensing an existing Japanese cartoon—in this case the 1981-82 series Beast King GoLion—so they could rename and dub all the characters for English-speaking audiences.

There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about GoLion; it did not invent the formula of humans teaming up and summoning/making a robot to fight monsters, it merely followed in the footsteps of dozens of earlier live-action and animated programs that showcased said concept. Yet most Americans—certainly most English-speaking ones—had never seen or heard of anything like Voltron before. Compared to the generally timid Saturday morning cartoons then airing on U.S. TV networks, Voltron offered tons of sci-fi action, a new monster every episode, and actual combat with stakes for the characters on-screen.

Naturally, the producers had to expurgate entire chunks of GoLion to make a kid-friendly show by U.S. broadcast standards. Every adversary that Voltron defeats, no matter how fleshy, became a "robot beast" or Robeast in the English-language script. Scenes of violence against humans were either cut outright or explained away with statements insisting that devastated buildings or scorched homes were always safely evacuated. When Dragon Ball Z initially caught my attention in the late 90s, it suffered from the same sort of conspicuous editing only by then I was old enough to notice.

With both Voltron: Defender of the Universe and Beast King GoLion available in full on YouTube today, viewers are free to watch every episode and compare the many differences between the two, no matter how minute. That was never an option in 1984, so a run-of-the-mill Japanese cartoon could wow American audiences simply by existing. Everything we view today as obvious cost-cutting techniques—such as reusing the same animated sequence whenever the team forms Voltron to fill air-time—thrilled me as a child. Recycled or not, watching the five robot lions combine into the giant heroic robot was the reason I tuned in to the show in the first place; I didn't care that it never changed because I loved every second of it. Even as an adult I still get a kick out of hearing the theme song kick in as the five lions soar into the sky and transform.

Just as the towering robot conquered King Zarkon's forces, Voltron had an immediate impact on kids tuning in across the United States. As a first-run syndicated program, Voltron: Defender of the Universe aired Monday through Friday in most markets—New York included—granting me a daily fix of interplanetary combat. When the English program burned through the entirety of GoLion in just a few months, it used footage from its immediate Japanese successor Armored Fleet Dairugger XV to continue the saga. I found the switch from five heroes in robot lions to fifteen heroes piloting smaller craft rather jarring, and history has shown other kids felt the same way. This drove the American producers to commission more episodes from Toei in Japan in order to bring back the now-famous Voltron Force to U.S. airwaves in 1985.

Re-examining the show as an adult, it's impossible not to observe Voltron: Defender of the Universe struggling against its meager budget. The producers hired voice actors to overdub the characters, but also asked those actors to perform multiple parts apiece—including recurring roles central to the story. I swear I could hear scenes where Jack Angel yells at himself or Michael Bell has to juggle different accents in one conversation. Besides serving as narrator, Peter Cullen also plays both the royal servant Coran and his departed master King Alfor; early episodes show Coran brief the late monarch's ghost on more than one occasion.

Voltron: Defender of the Universe episodes continued to run for years, driving toy and VHS sales in turn. Even today, with generations of kids familiar with other programs which perpetuate the same themes, "Voltron" serves as an English-language shorthand for building a new entity out of separate pieces. Subsequent Voltron TV series have come and gone in the United States, so many that I remain surprised that a big-budget Hollywood film has yet to follow given that Transformers, G.I. Joe, and even Power Rangers have managed to turn up on the big screen.

Even more surprising is the scarcity of Voltron video games. THQ and developer bEHAVIOUR Interactive made a twin-stick shooter called Voltron: Defender of the Universe in 2011 for the PlayStation Network and Xbox LIVE Arcade—one of nine other bEHAVIOUR games released that calendar year. THQ declared bankruptcy in 2012 and delisted many of their titles as a result, Voltron included. A 2019 Steam Early Access release, Voltron: Cubes of Olkarion, is likewise no longer available. It's hard to believe a cartoon so popular its title became a figure of speech has zero video games on shelves in 2024.

Maybe we don't need Voltron in a media landscape where programming made in one nation in one language can launch worldwide on streaming platforms already localized. Maybe Voltron did its part to usher in a wave of anime appreciation in a United States that viewed Japanese influence as a potential threat. Maybe we can appreciate the irony that one of the biggest cultural imports which told of an ancient power assembled from disparate parts was itself an amalgam of different TV shows stitched together by American producers.

In other words, even Voltron was a Voltron.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.