Voltron
I: Origins
Back in the early days of
the development of Voltron Defender of the Universe, World Events
was working with Toei to bring over a group of three unrelated cartoon
series to be combined into one full series for American audiences.
Most remember the Lion robot as "Voltron" but from the beginning,
Armored Fleet Dairugger XV was always slated to be Voltron I, despite
frequent reassignments for the middle and far universes.
The Vehicle Team DVD boxed
sets contain a bit of a hidden gem: the original pilot episode for
the Vehicle Team series. There are a few glaring differences between
this episode and the rest of the series, all of which are quite fascinating.
The first and most immediately
obvious difference is that the leader of the Air Team is not named
Jeff. They named him KEITH. Imagine that! I think the writers liked
the idea of a team leader being named Keith so much that when production
shifted quickly over to the Golion-based episodes, they gave the name
to the space explorer we now know as the pilot of the black lion.
The next and less obvious
element that was present in the pilot episode was the location of
Galaxy Garrison. In the finished Vehicle Team and Lion Force episodes,
GG was firmly established as being on planet Earth. In the Vehicle
Team pilot eposide, it was on another planet called Terra. We don't
get much else in the way of backstory on planet Terra, but it seems
obvious to me that the idea of a remote planet Terra could have been
repurposed in the Alebegas-based series as the name for a planet that's
been settled in the Middle universe. Just a thought!
The third and final difference
is not so much between the pilot episode, but some of the early Vehicle
Voltron episodes versus the remainder of the series. Most will cite
the 5-minute stored energy limitation as being an artifact of early
writing that was quickly abandoned. The DVD extras revealed that writers
were working on both Vehicle and Lion episodes at first, then they
focused on the Lions until they were done and then went back and finished
the Vehicle episodes. So it stands to reason that some early writing
left some script inconsistencies with the remaining 3/4 of the series.
What's that artifact, you ask? The home planet of the Drules is described
as... are you ready for it? PLANET DOOM. I kid you not. Go back and
watch episode 73, "In Search of New Worlds".
Also note that it takes the
voice actors a little time to settle into their 15+ character roles.
Some of the voices don't solidify until about 4 or 5 episodes in.
It takes a few episodes for Jeff to actually not sound like Keith.
I find things like this to be quite fascinating. Many look for canonical
reasons for why things change without explanation (i.e. five minutes
of stored nuclear energy), but the truth is, the writers were propably
writing at breakneck speed, had to cover 104 episodes, and switch
gears in the early weeks from universe to universe. In the end, we
got ourselves a massive set of shows that brought us some of the best
anime since Star Blazers had left the airwaves a few years earlier.
I can be happy with that!
