Netflix’s hunt for the family audience continues. After proving they could revive pretty much anything with Fuller House, they’re putting that to the test by trying to bring back the beloved import Voltron.
What we in the west call Voltron has a very strange origin. It’s really two unrelated anime series: The first season is a show called Beast King GoLion, which was heavily reedited and redubbed. In the original, the five pilots are commanding a robot god nobody quite knows who assembled and was split up into five lions to teach him humility, and his five pilots are fleeing an Earth devastated by nuclear war. The second season, where Voltron becomes a Transformer for no explicable reason, was due to the fact that they quickly ran out of GoLion episodes and used a second series, Armored Fleet Dairugger XV, to sub in. Kids were not fans, and the series got canceled after its second season.
The franchise has struggled to recapture what made it great, at least to kids, ever since. The most recent attempt at a series, in 2011, was quickly shuffled off Nickelodeon after the first season, and a movie has been in development hell for more than a decade. Truthfully, this teaser is mostly about nostalgia, and we don’t really have a sense of where the plot might go, aside from the fact that Voltron appears to have been in storage. This is also a test of Netflix in another respect; it’s one thing to get kids to binge watch a cartoon, but quite another to get them to buy toys based off that cartoon. We’ll find out June 10.
(Via YouTube)
