I did mini-reviews of the first three seasons of this series when I originally watched them in 2016-2018, but I had never watched the last 5 "seasons" that were really more like 3 1/2 seasons. After I watched the 2011 soft reboot series Voltron Force and completed a trilogy of gender swap books based on Voltron/Power Rangers, I got a hankering to watch this and the DVDs on Amazon were pretty cheap; they were cheaper than a month of Netflix and I didn't have to sign up and cancel anything. Plus then I own them! It seemed like a perfect plan...until it wasn't.
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Anyway, while Voltron Force and the 90s CGI series were soft reboots that were supposed to be sort-of sequels to the original series, the Netflix series is a full reboot. It starts with three young cadets (Lance, Hunk, and Pidge) sneaking out one night when there's an attack by an alien ship. Along with a former cadet (Keith) they find the blue lion hidden away on Earth. It takes them to the distant planet of Arrus, where they go to a castle. The beautiful Princess Allura and her assistant Coran are woken from stasis after 10,000 years to find all their people gone and the Voltron lions scattered.
(Side Note: In my books the fighters--not lions--were on Earth for 1,000 years and someone complained that was too long. The bad guys should have had better technology after 1,000 years! But this has a break 10 times bigger than that! And still the bad guys don't have anything better than Voltron, haven't taken over the entire universe (like Earth), and Emperor Zarkon and his witch Haggar are still alive after all that time while presumably not being frozen. So who's really stretching plausibility here?)
Allura instinctually knows who should go to which lion, which is not the order in the original series. The original order was:
- Keith: Black Lion
- Lance: Red Lion
- Pidge: Green Lion
- Hunk: Yellow Lion
- Sven/Allura: Blue Lion
What never really made sense is that the piping of their spacesuits didn't exactly match their lions because Keith's suit had red on it, Lance's had blue, and Sven's had black. When Allura took over for Sven, hers had pink because of course girls like pink.
In this case the show lines up the colors of their suits with their lions:
- Keith: Red Lion
- Lance: Blue Lion
- Pidge: Green Lion
- Hunk: Yellow Lion
And then Black Lion is piloted by a new character named Shiro who was captured by Zarkon's forces (the Galra) and used in gladiator fights, during which he lost an arm that was replaced with a robot arm, until he somehow escaped. Each character then is assigned a basic role:
- Shiro: the charismatic leader
- Keith: the loner
- Lance: the goofball daredevil
- Pidge: the tech/science genius
- Hunk: the funny fat guy with a heart of gold
- Allura: the strong but not yet wise ruler
After a couple of episodes we find out that Pidge is a girl pretending to be a boy to try to find out what happened to her father and brother, who were captured along with Shiro but separated from him. And no one really has a problem with this. Maybe some fans did, but I always thought it worked better than Pidge being some weird little dude.
The first season has them find the lions, learn how to form Voltron, liberate a few planets, and then bite off more than they can chew by going for Zarkon's base. They are nearly defeated, but with some help manage to escape.
The second season they take a little more measured approach in gaining some allies, especially the "Blade of Marmora," who are rogue Galra soldiers. Then they begin preparing a trap for Zarkon that of course doesn't go as planned, but this time they're able to do some real damage to Zarkon's base and put him in a coma.
These first two seasons are 13 episodes apiece. The problem then arose with the next season when for whatever reason they decided to start halving the seasons. Instead of 13 episodes, season 3 is only 7 and season 4 is 6 and season 5 is 6 and season 6 is 7. Which if you can do math means seasons 3-4 are 13 episodes and seasons 5-6 are also 13 episodes. Just looking on the images of the DVD cases, you can see that seasons 1-2 have as many episodes as seasons 3-6 combined.
And then just to confuse everything further, there are seasons 7-8 that aren't on DVD or to buy on Amazon or anything. Those seasons went back to 13 episodes apiece. I had to sign back up to Netflix to watch those; maybe the pandemic interfered with getting a DVD of those out. I kind of wonder if by that point the show's viewership was down and Netflix wanted to just dump everything out as quick as they could. Basically everything from about season 4 on all came out in 2018, which by today's standards is pretty weird. Maybe everyone had realized they fucked things up and were trying to course correct--though it was too late.
So there really should only be 6 complete seasons, but for whatever reasons they messed up the releasing for the middle ones. The problem with this is for example, Season 3 doesn't really do a lot compared with previous seasons. Shiro disappeared at the end of season 2 so in the first couple of episodes they rejiggered everything to the traditional 80s lineup with Keith taking over Black Lion, Lance the Red, and Allura the Blue. Meanwhile Shiro escapes (again) and returns to the team while Zarkon's son Lotor becomes a new threat.
And just when we're getting some pieces in place, the "season" ends with a flashback to Voltron's creation and the revelation that Haggar and Zarkon are married. I guess they just forgot over 10,000 years? It's not as annoying on DVD now but back in 2018 it was kind irritating to basically just get things started and then find out it was over for months. Especially back then Netflix wasn't really using the week-to-week releasing that most streaming services use now for their major shows. For people used to binging, it was pretty irritating to only get a few episodes and then have to wait.
Crackle did the same thing with the third "season" of Supermansion and it was really annoying too how they'd dribble out a few episodes then make you wait a while to dribble out more and then a third batch. And in between batches they had a couple of holiday shows. I, and I think most viewers, would rather you just did the whole thing at once. If not just put the whole series up at the same time then go through the whole run week-to-week without a lot of interruptions. Otherwise there's so much else going on that it can be irritating to keep track of stuff.
Predictably while Season 3 was just setting the table, Season 4 has more action as Zarkon is reanimated in sort of a Darth Vader suit, Lotor is made an enemy of the empire, and Keith joins the Mormora full-time while Shiro reclaims the Black Lion. The most touching episode is when Pidge finally finds her brother after initially thinking he was dead and buried in a cemetery on a dead world. Then everyone gets together to take down some Galra forces that would give the rebel coalition control of a third of the empire. Of course things don't go as planned and they're bailed out by Lotor.
Unlike the previous shows, in this series Lotor is not really a bad guy. Instead of being a vain, psychotic madman like in the other shows, this time he's smart and cunning. Instead of using force to enslave the galaxy like his father, he wants to discover an easy way to harvest the energy known as "quintessence" to bring everyone together. A kinder, gentler empire. Like Alexander the Great, he allows worlds he conquers to continue their traditions and have some autonomy.
He becomes more important in Season 5, which is another setting the table season as Lotor helps the rebels and kills his father in a duel before attempting to claim the throne. Pidge and her brother rescue their father and Keith finds his mother. And we get stronger clues that Haggar the witch did something to Shiro when he was captured and has turned him into an unwitting mole. Allura and Lotor enter a "white hole" to learn secrets of Altean alchemy.
That all sets up season 6 of 7 episodes. Not surprisingly a lot happens. Keith and his mother find a colony of Alteans and find out the experiments Lotor conducted on the population. Shiro turns on the team. Lotor is consumed with the power of quintessence and makes his own Voltron-type thing. And there's a final showdown between the Lotorbot and Voltron for all the marbles.
Initially I thought season 6 was the end because it seemed like an end and there's no DVD set or anything for the last two seasons yet. There were some loose ends to wrap up, but the sixth season could have been the end.
Instead there were two more full seasons of 13 episodes. Season 7 is an illustration in contrasts. The first 6 episodes are really slow as the lions have to power up and begin a long journey to Earth. It's not until the sixth episode that they can form Voltron! And then they magically unlock rocket boosters that get them to Earth much quicker.
Only they find Earth has been overtaken by the Galra warlord Sendak! There's a two-part episode that mostly details how Earth was taken over except the Galaxy Garrison headquarters thanks to technology developed by Pidge's father. When they make new fighters and a ship, it really made me want a crossover with Robotech. Voltron and the SDF-1 filled with Veritech fighters battle the Galra! It would have been epic!
The lions show up and then begin working with the Galaxy Garrison to liberate Earth. The last four episodes make up for the initial slowness of the season--maybe too much so. I mean the battle is almost constant in the last few episodes with more bullshit complications, solutions, and more complications than the last act of Rogue One. After Sendak is defeated there's some kind of robot that looks like DC's Steppenwolf they struggle to defeat. Inside is an Altean pilot that sets up the final season.
The first couple of episodes again are a little slow as it has Voltron and their new ship the Atlas leave Earth. There's a flashback to how the witch Haggar got her groove (and memories) back and found the Altean colony from the sixth season to recruit them to fight Voltron with giant robots. A planet is destroyed and Allura struggles with the idea that her people are now the enemy.
Most of the season was basically like in Marvel Comics and WandaVision/Multiverse of Madness where the Scarlet Witch tries to warp reality so she can be reunited with her kids and the Vision. In this case it's Haggar who's doing a bunch of shit to break reality so she can be reunited with Lotor and Zarkon. I guess while she can travel the multiverse she can't just go back in time in her own universe to stop them from being killed or anything.
I found most of this season to be kind of disappointing. Mostly it's, "Haggar's doing something so we gotta stop her!" Some kind of half-assed "solution." Screaming and fighting and then probably needing to come up with another half-assed solution. And in the end they solve everything with talking. One character makes the ultimate sacrifice and then Voltron is disbanded because even though the lion piloted by the dead person has had at least 2 pilots over the course of the show (plus 1 original pilot) we can't just find someone else to pilot it. Nope, let's just disband the team. Because I'm sure there would be nothing else for Voltron to do, right?
There's an epilogue that kind of Animal House style tells us what becomes of our intrepid heroes. The controversial one is that Shiro marries some guy from the bridge crew of the Atlas who we maybe saw like 3 times and had like 1 line of dialogue. I wrote a post last year after watching Season 3 of Young Justice where they did pretty much the same thing of just suddenly making a character gay. It struck me as hollow then and this also seems hollow. And pretty much ending your show with Shiro passionately kissing...some guy whose name we don't know? It's like they were saying, "Here, 'shippers,' you want a gay kiss, here's your gay kiss!" And/or, "Hey, Netflix, you don't want us to have gay stuff? Well, fuck you, here's a big fucking gay kiss! Yeah!" It felt so tacked on and pointless. Again, like I say in my post last year, it's not that I don't want gay stuff; I just want gay relationships treated like straight relationships and not just ham-fistedly shoved into episodes. And before anyone who actually watched the show says, "AAAAActually..." I know Shiro sort of "came out" during a flashback in season 7, which again was just thrown out there with no real setup or point to it and like in Young Justice just seemed like the producers were trying to placate viewers by saying, "Hey, look, we have a gay character!"
All that aside, the show itself was still the best of the Voltron series. It has the deepest, grittiest story though it's not high drama by any stretch. It is a decent space opera show that still had enough of the original series to appease longtime fans like me. Though sometimes it was annoying that there weren't enough episodes with Voltron being formed to take stuff down. It's like with The Walking Dead you want to see them killing zombies or that new Game of Thrones show you want to see dragons.
Relating this to my previous entry on the "Navy of Humankind" series, there is kind of a balance you have to walk with a sci-fi property like this. You need human drama but you also need cool space battles. It can't be all cool space battles or it feels shallow. But if it's all human drama, it gets kind of boring for people who want to see the giant robot in more than the title sequence.
They also do a fairly decent job at balancing some of the human drama and battles with a few fun episodes. Like in Season 2 they have to get some stuff for their warp drive and go to a space mall. Pidge and Lance steal from a fountain to buy a video game system--that they then realize they don't have a TV to plug it into--while Hunk becomes a short-order cook who soon becomes a mall version of Gordon Ramsey. There's also a Paul Blart-type alien guard and in the end they wind up with a cow from Earth I'm pretty sure named after a writer/producer. In another episode Coran gets infected with a worm that turns him into a crazy showbiz manager who has the team do increasingly ridiculous stage shows to drum up support--which actually works! In another episode, Pidge and Hunk reprogram a sentry to be like a robotic Johnny Knoxville; when they shoot it into space the instrumental "Amazing Grace" from Star Trek II plays to mimic the scene where Spock is shot into the Genesis planet. In the sixth season, before the home stretch, the team plays a D&D-type game with Coran as sort of the dungeon master. So while the series is grittier, it's not grim and gritty. The 7th season tries to have a fun episode where they end up on this weird game show that's like Family Feud meets Double Dare, but I just found it really annoying rather than funny. The final season doesn't have an episode that's all funny but a couple of episodes are less serious like where most of the crew goes down to "Clear Day" on an alien planet that has a carnival once every so often on the one day their skies are clear. And there's also "Day 47" that's a found-footage episode as some pilot guy is filming a day on the Atlas and his camera ends up bouncing around to show stuff happening.
One little nitpick relating to all that: did they really need Lance and Hunk and Coran as comic relief? It didn't quite get to Transformers 2 levels of needing relief from the comic relief, but they probably didn't need three goofballs. I'm just saying.
Anyway, when I talked about Voltron Force, I mentioned there were a few similarities. In that show each member of the team had a "Voltcom" that gave them a special weapon and could unlock a special configuration/power of Voltron. In this instead of the "Voltcom" each pilot has a "bayard" that gives them a special weapon, though in some cases maybe not as cool as the Voltcom ones. Keith still has a sword, Hunk/Lance have guns, Pidge has some little knife thingy, and Allura has a whip. Shiro doesn't have one because the original Black Lion pilot still has it. The bayards don't change the configuration of Voltron but they give him a different weapon: red forms the sword, yellow a shoulder cannon, green the shield(?), and blue I don't really know. All four together make a really big sword and when the Black Lion's bayard is found, it makes the sword into the Blazing Sword!
The other main similarity was that in the end of that other series the castle could take off and fly like a ship. In this series that happens a lot quicker and becomes a lot more useful as a base and backup firepower. In the first two seasons Allura has to pilot the castle and power its wormhole drive and stuff but after she takes over Blue Lion then Coran does more of that stuff.
There are a few references to the classic series like the Sven reference in the parallel universe. In the D&D game episode, Shiro finds a sword that looks like the traditional Voltron sword. When Allura and Lotor make a special ship, they activate it with the checklist that was used for the original Voltron with stuff like, "Mega thrusters are go!" They use that same checklist for the human fighters Pidge's dad designs in season 7. The first episode of season 8 features a clip from the classic series and to get stuff at a dirt mall, Pidge dresses like and does the voice like the classic series version character; in the same episode Allura tries on an outfit that looks like the classic series one.
The animation used in this series is supposed to be like traditional anime, especially the goofy facial expressions and stuff. Not being a huge anime fan it doesn't do a lot for me, but whatever. I think maybe they use cel-shading or something for Voltron and the ships and stuff but it looks a lot better and less obvious than what they used in Voltron Force.
Anyway, if the release schedule hadn't gotten so messed up, maybe the show could have lasted a little longer. I mean if you think about it, they had 6 full seasons that started in 2016, so if they had just released one 13-episode season a year it would have been wrapping up in 2021. Instead it finished in 2018 or maybe early 2019. But if you're a fan of the original and want a more updated, modern take then it's a good series.
(Fun Facts: I have two Legendary Defender Voltron toys. One is a crappy little non-transforming one with a shield where a lot of paint peeled off almost right away. The other is a transforming one from Target that I got on sale at one point. They made larger toys that could transform for both this series and the original; I got all of the original ones to make the classic Voltron, mostly because the talking Black Lion and a couple of others were on clearance at Meijer stores near me. I always wondered if you could mix-and-match the two Voltrons but never felt like wasting the money to find out.
Steven Yuen of The Walking Dead and Invincible plays Keith and I wondered if Keith not being in a lot of seasons 4-5 might have been because he was still working on TWD. Tyler Labine of Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil plays Hunk, which as I noted in one of my mini-reviews he gets typecast as the funny fat guy even in animation. Watching Whose Line Is It Anyway?--Australia on the Movie House app I realized the voice of Coran, Rhys Darby, is one of the frequent improv comics on that show. He also did a couple of episodes of Mike Tyson Mysteries as Terry the annoying pool cleaner. Arnold Vosloo, the eponymous Mummy in the 1999-2001 movies and also Darkman in the straight-to-video sequels guests in an episode as a Blade of Marmora agent. I'm sure there were others but I didn't pause every episode to find out.
The title sequence for the show never really changes from the first episode. So even in Season 8 they still show the original line-up with Lance in the Blue Lion, Keith in Red, Shiro in Black, and Allura in the castle. Despite that they all switched in season 3 & 6 and despite that the castle was destroyed at the end of season 6. And it shows Zarkon even though he dies in season 5. But at least it doesn't use a shitty hip-hop theme song.)
(Sad Fact: In previous posts I've talked about shitty "fans" who created problems for shows like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Power of the Rings by hating on the inclusion of black people. The shitty "fans" for this show were actually a bit different. According to the Wikipedia entry, there were some who were so rabid about "shipping" Keith and Lance that they threatened to dox and/or kill people who worked on the show if it didn't happen. Which seems pretty ludicrous. They couldn't just do what X-Files, Voyager, etc fans in the 90s did and write crappy fan fiction to post on sites for their fellow weirdos to read? Anyway, it's always sad that some "fans" have to be so shitty and make things miserable for actors, writers, and producers who are just trying to make an entertaining TV show.)
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