MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

By: Joshua Glenn
January 22, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

VOLTRON | 1984–85

I turned 17 around the time that Voltron: Defender of the Universe first aired. (It instantly became America’s No. 1 syndicated children’s show, thus paving the way for everything from Power Rangers to Pokémon.) I’d grown too old for cartoons, or so I no doubt wanted to believe at the time. But I lived half-time at my father’s house, where I often minded my kindergarten- and preschool-aged half-brothers. Seeking relief from the insipidity of Strawberry Shortcake and Care Bears, and doing so only when my father and stepmother were safely out of the house, I’d sometimes sit down with Peter and Matthew for an episode of Voltron.^*

^* Footnotes in this essay represent my 17-year-old self’s internal monologue.

In a typical episode, the evil King Zarkon would dispatch warships and/or an enormous “ro-beast” from Planet Doom to terrorize the beleaguered citizens of Arus. Who’d fight off Zarkon’s attacks? Off-world champions from the Galaxy Alliance, piloting robotic lions — that’s who. Keith, the team’s leader, wasn’t very interesting^*… but my brothers and I got a kick out of Lance, the sarcastic ace pilot; the diminutive genius Pidge; the irascible Hunk; and the stoic, Swedish Chef-soundalike Sven (later replaced by Princess Allura). At a climactic moment in each episode, the team’s lion-mechas would assemble into a giant sword-wielding robot: Voltron! Voltron, it seems, was an emergent phenomenon: something greater, that is to say, than the sum of its parts. This mechanism proved very appealing.

^* What kind of bad-ass team leader is named “Keith”?

I’m not the only Voltron viewer who would continue to think about the show well into adulthood. The Wu-Tang Clan, for example, were obsessed: “So, when you see me on the real, formin’ like Voltron / Remember I go deep like a Navy Seal!” Busta Rhymes was, too: “On and on, hey, on and on and on / You won’t understand when I form Voltron.” In 2002, Voltron would make a cameo appearance in several installments of David Rees’ extraordinary online clip-art comic Get Your War On. And in 2016, I was amused by a scene, near the end of Deadpool, where Wade faux-naively says: “You know, for a second there, it felt like we were three mini-lion robots coming together to form one super-robot.”

Unlike these, my more distinguished fellow Voltron exegetes, however, what I’ve brooded over for the past 40 years is not Voltron’s more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts mechanism, but the oddly frequent discrepancy between what the show’s characters claim we’re seeing vs. what we actually see. In the show’s pilot episode, for example, we witness what is clearly our own planet, Earth, devastated by a World War III-like exchange of US and USSR ICBMs. To this vision of horror, Keith responds like so: “Looks like all the people of Arus made it to their underground shelters!” ^*

^* What the…?.

In another scene from the pilot, Pidge catches sight of a ro-beast eating what appear to be the severed limbs of Arusian prisoners of war. Horrific! (How could I have allowed my siblings to witness such horror?) What does Pidge report back to the others about his glimpse into the hellish abyss? “Oh wow, I can look right down into the monster’s feeding pit!” In yet another episode, Zarkon callously treads upon on a pile of corpses. “Just lazy slaves,” explains one of his minions for our benefit. There’s even an episode in which [SPOILER] Sven is killed; though we see Keith and Lance sobbing over his body, however, somehow we hear Sven’s voice (though his lips — his dead, Swedish lips — remain motionless) instructing them to “Send me to a hospital!” ^*

^* “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along…”

Only recently did I finally learn that the “Lion Force Voltron” episodes I’d viewed in 1984–85 were an American adaptation of two unrelated, not so family-friendly Japanese series. Highly creative, wildly disingenuous editing and rewriting ensued. Much like Voltron vis-à-vis its own limbs, then, the “text” of the Voltron that we know and love is… an assemblage. Perfect!

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

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