Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

The last time I commented here about Voltron Legendary Defender was just after I'd finished the fifth block of episodes on Netflix. I'd mentioned "more than an impression" of forward momentum to the story, and overhearing rumours of working towards a conclusion. When the sixth block of episodes showed up in turn, though, I didn't seem to have quite the same drive to watch on a regular schedule. Avoiding what other people are saying about the series because of another impression that "commentary on domestic series inevitably winds up dwelling on the mismatch between what the commentators imagined they'd get and what the creators can actually offer" did get to weigh on me; sometimes, there seems advantages to the limited length of time anime series run for even if a good many of them are just supposed to lead into original sources running to greater length.
( More than I'd first expected )

The short third series of Voltron Legendary Defender was followed in close order by a short fourth block on Netflix, even if not quite fast enough for my self-imposed old-fashioned pacing to unite them back into a once-a-week season. Where that third series had made some changes to the arrangement of good guys and bad guys alike to remind me of the original series, though, the fourth series moved things a bit closer back to how the show had started without the impression of a total reversion. (All of it has provoked a thought or two anyway that perhaps I noticed the name "Keith" being used back in the original series without fixating on it, but perhaps that also leads me off-field to remembering seeing a character in the Gundam 0083 anime called "Chuck Keith" with a slight resemblance to me at a moment where I was getting into anime MSTings, and reacting with the gleeful thought "Guilt-free self-insertion!" However, that series as a whole did manage to leave me not that inclined to go back to it...)
( The impression of forward momentum... )

Returning to the original Voltron (as distinct from the anime series it was made from) after long years, though the episode at the top of a playlist on Netflix introduced by people working on the new Voltron Legendary Defender, did bring to mind all those old impressions of just how hard the dialogue was trying to claim the animation wasn't showing anyone being killed. Instead of stopping there content in my convictions and moving on to "The Real Ghostbusters" or something else, though, I did keep working my way down the list, and a few more things started striking me. If the episode at the top seemed to have been selected in part because it didn't display a familiar formula, a good number of the episodes just below it were from quite early in the series, often featuring conference-room scenes from Dairugger XV (which became "the other Voltron") cut into them. I could understand this getting to the point where it just couldn't be repeated any more, but it was something to see an effort made to link the two series, even if that effort didn't seem particularly remembered by anyone. More than that, there were moments that didn't quite seem to be followed by "so he was a robot after all" or "they were just knocked out."

For all of that, I was interested when vagaries of schedules brought me straight from the first episode of the original series to the episode that concluded the second set of episodes of Voltron Legendary Defender. There was what did seem like "a final consequence if you can notice it" and "another sudden revelation about a character" that did seem, at last, to tie into the sudden revelation about a different character that had concluded the first set of episodes and left me jumping at a theory. In some ways, Voltron Legendary Defender can be exactly the story it's saying it is, distinct from the suspicious yet amused impressions that had done a lot to keep the original stuck in a small corner of my mind. At the same time, with what new "mecha anime" series do appear these days seeming to have a hard time garnering positive comments from other people, the giant (piloted) robot action the concluding episode got around to was quite satisfying in its own way.

In the raffish pantheon of mid-1980s cartoons, Voltron's niche may be smaller than some but it does seem remembered, its title invoked in the sure expectation of bringing back memories of "five robot lions that combine to form a mighty robot." (That, though, does remind me of the seeming accidents of history that made the other Voltron, the "fifteen flying cars, plane-things, and nondescript aerial bricks that combine to form a mighty robot," stick in my own memory, even if some of that may shape a certain subtle dismissal different from the usual shrugging off...) More than that, in possible place of nostalgic merchandising the title's been applied to new animation (now produced on this side of the Pacific) in just the past few years. I do know the series "Voltron Force" didn't seem very popular among those whose opinions of it I did see, even if they never seemed to articulate specific reasons for that. However, this wasn't the end of things. In its constant push to produce content that can't be taken away by the studios, Netflix announced it would be streaming another new Voltron series, and its staff including some people who'd worked on the Avatar franchise seemed to help some wait for the actual work to judge it. The first preview clips prompting recognition of how Voltron's combination sequence now obviously drew on the well-regarded stock footage of the giant robot anime GaoGaiGar attracted that much more attention, and when "Voltron Legendary Defender" began streaming I started taking it in. I was perhaps still weighted by recent ambivalent thoughts about intellectual property being recycled by corporate owners as if to avoid the risk and effort of coming up with new fundamental ideas, but it's also more than easy to recoil from thoughts of self-proclaimed fans monstrously incapable of conceiving others might like something they don't. I did at least wind up imagining it's possible there could even be parents drawing on their own memories with the thought it's for the sake of their kids, perhaps even connecting two generations (although this not having been the case when those parents were kids themselves can pack its own uncertainties...)
( Even after all of that, though... )