Voltron/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Lion Voltron

  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Whatever else you might think of the show, that central theme is remembered by millions for a reason. (Well, okay, two reasons.)
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Lotor is so very, very much this. It doesn't help that a lot of his worst acts were edited out, or being shown as being in love with the princesses instead of being attracted to them because of their resemblance to his mother.
    • Even less helped by the purely original third season of the show, which has him become much more of a conflicted character, rather than the straight-up villain he was in the Golion-adapted first season.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Sven.
  • Fan Preferred Pairing: While the Canon Keith/Allura pairing has a LOT of fans, an almost equal number of fans like to pair Allura with Lotor, in part because of Lotor's Draco in Leather Pants vibes, and in part of scrub off some of the Purity Sue aspects of Allura. It should also be noted that a small but vocal minority would prefer Lance be with Allura (this troper included).
  • Fanon: The comic adaptation written in 2002 features a lot of Epileptic Trees style explanations for things. Why does Voltron need five pilots instead of just one guy summoning all five lions together? Because you need five brains in a neural network to control something the size and complexity of Voltron. Why does Vehicle Voltron have so many more parts than Lion Voltron? Because when they reverse engineered the superior ancient technology, they lost a lot of efficiency, so they needed a lot more people to spread the load around to.
  • Golion Is Big In America: Voltron is far better known in America than GoLion is in Japan. In fact, GoLion is almost forgotten there. This is because when the show premiered in Japan, there were already tons of transforming/combining mecha shows on airwaves, while in America it was pretty much the only show of its kind (not to mention it had to compete with Super Sentai in Japan too, which America didn't get until the early 90s).
    • Also, Vehicle Voltron is better remembered in Russia than in America because it was shown there first.
  • Macekre: Played straight in terms of some of the plot, like making the villains somewhat more one-dimensional, or in terms of Lull Destruction (holy cow the Lull Destruction). However, Voltron also subverts the trope; most people consider the show a "good" Macekre in that while the changes were vast, they were chiefly done so that the show would even be airable in the US, and the edits didn't remove what made the show fun in the first place (e.g., people in combining robot lions having one Big Damn Heroes moment after another).
  • Memetic Mutation: AND I'LL FORM THE HEAD!
  • Narm: Just watch this video of some of the best moments of the show and wonder if anyone had a straight face while recording their dialogue.
  • Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Yikes, it can be hard to understand why anyone ever liked this show, when a modern viewer sees it. The Lull Destruction, the Stock Footage combining sequences, the formulaic episodes... it's worth remembering that Voltron really was bigger than the Transformers at one point, though. Nobody had managed any real success with importing Japanese cartoons previously, until WEP managed just the right balance (for the time) of editing and keeping the core of a good series (along with picking something Americans would like) that struck the chord Voltron did. Had Voltron not shown how an imported series could be financially successful on a huge scale, we may well have never gotten Neon Genesis Evangelion (via ADV Films), Gundam Wing, the Power Rangers or even Robotech.
  • Unfortunate Implications: How Coran and Nanny basically treated Allura when she wanted to pilot. That episode was one of the least rerun on Toonami.
    • Although Allura is the last of the royal family, so they aren't totally unreasonable to not want her to fly. A better case would be when Nanny volunteers to scout recruits; she puts an emphasis on having a man pilot the Blue Lion.
    • Also, subverted in that they turn out to be dead wrong.
  • Woolseyism: Sven ought to be the Woolseyism poster child.
    • To detail: in GoLion Shirogane, the character that would become "Sven" was killed off early on so that Fala could become a pilot. However, the Japanese rather liked the character and wanted him to return, so GoLion has his twin brother show up at the end of the series, which ends up feeling a little ham-fisted and awkward. World Events Productions, on the other hand, had a "never say die" policy at the time; to get around this, they rewrote the script: Sven was taken off-world to receive medical attention from an attack on his life. So when the time came for Shirogane's brother to show up, they just brought Sven back. Many fans, in both the US and Japan, prefer this change.
      • Though there were a few artifacts left over. Notably, when the narrator is announcing that Sven will eventually recover, he's speaking over a shot of the palace... with the flags flying at half-mast.

Vehicle Voltron

  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The reaction from American fans when the series changed from Lion Voltron to Vehicle Voltron, since they didn't know the whole story behind the production of Voltron.
  • Macekre: From what I understand, the entire nature of the conflict between the Galaxy Alliance and the Drule Empire was changed. Also, of course, being forced into the same universe as Lion Voltron.
    • The Galaxy Alliance was only in this show, and called the Terran League.
    • The two short kids were not brothers.
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