Hilarious In Hindsight / Voltron: Legendary Defender

• In the Latin-American Spanish dub, Eduardo Garza plays Matthew Holt... and in the LA-Spanish dub of the original Voltron he played Pidge. Aka the character who, in this continuity, is Matt's sister Katie under a male identity.
• Voltron: The Third Dimension had a joke in the pilot where Lance said to Keith: "Tell them I'm your little brother." As of "Legendary Defender" Lance is officially a year (or three) younger than Keith.
• Lance demanding of Keith "how many Lions do you need?!!" turns out to be prophetic since as of Season 3, both Lance and Keith are up to two Lions so far — Blue/Red and Red/Black respectively.
• It's very commonplace for fandom to compare and make crossovers between Shiro and the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Bucky Barnes (whom Joaquim Dos Santos acknowledged the similarities to) or post-Red Hood Jason Todd (who shares his shock of white hair and also happens to be an Alternate Company Equivalent of Bucky). In Season 3 of Young Justice (2010), Red Hood appears and is voiced by Josh Keaton. Meanwhile, the Bucky jokes got even funnier in season 3 when Shiro shows up looking Seriously Scruffy and very similar to the Winter Soldier, and downright hilarious as of season 6 where Shiro's major subplot is directly lifted from the climax of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
• Likewise, it's very common to compare Shiro to Chris Evans' take on Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe due to his Heroic Build, leadership, and overall personality as a supportive Nice Guy to his friends, with a great deal of fanart having been drawn of Shiro dressed in Captain America's uniform and similar. Shiro's voice actor Josh Keaton would go on to voice Captain America as Chris Evans' soundalike in What If…? (2021).
• A lot of jokes were made comparing the Season 3 episode The Journey to the final season of Samurai Jack, given that it's a somewhat darker, slower-paced, and visuals-heavier and dialogue-lighter episode than usual, involving a Seriously Scruffy-looking Japanese guy (Shiro) fighting his way through robots, monsters, and a snowy death planet mostly by his lonesome, having to cauterize a bad wound, and occasionally interacting with a pair of quirky aliens. Due to Production Lead Time, the episode would've had to have been written before the airing of Samurai Jack earlier that year, making the similarities a funny coincidence.
• Could potentially count as Harsher in Hindsight depending on what side of it you're on, but a lot of the "age discourse" when it came to the Ship-to-Ship Combat between people who paired Keith with Lance vs Shiro became invalid with Season 6 when Keith spends two years with Krolia in the Quantum Abyss, while Shiro, Lance, and the others remain the same age. In other words, not only is Keith a 20 year-old adult while Lance remains a teenager and minor at 17, but Keith now has an age gap with Lance.
• As with the above, a lot of the Ship-to-Ship Combat revolving around the ethics of former Fan-Preferred Couple Shiro/Allura, whose extreme fans were responsible for initiating and dictating the course of the show's notorious Ship-to-Ship Combat^note Early on they attacked rival ships for being either "pedophilic" or "heteronormative", pestering the staff about it and thus kicking off the "age discourse", only for both major points of attack to crash and burn spectacularly — first with Allura being confirmed a teenager and thus pedophilic according to the rules they themselves set, and later with Shiro being confirmed gay, versus other Shiro ships became completely moot given that it turns out Shiro is gay.
• There is a rather bizarre series of NSFW fanarts (artist unknown) featuring Keith frenching a wolf, dating as far back as around the time the series debuted. Flash forward to the show's sixth season, and Keith now has an actual pet wolf.
• In Super Robot Wars W, GoLion was featured together with Tekkaman Blade, whose titular character was captured by aliens, given cybernetic upgrades, and has an Evil Twin (sort of) just like Shiro.

  • The game also happened to have A ship that transformed into a gigantic mech.
  • Speaking of a lion mecha cyborg pilot, the GoLion crew also met Guy Shishioh in that game.

• One of the theories more commonly thrown around was that a sixth lion would be introduced so all the main characters could be Paladins and be part of Voltron. Not only does Shiro become the captain of the Atlas but the Atlas also fuses with Voltron in the final season.
• After the two years of Ship-to-Ship Combat, in-fighting, and harassment campaigns that made Voltron shippers so infamous, the only ships that received canon confirmation for this show were Lotor/Allura (which ended poorly), Matt/N7 (an Offscreen Romance with a background character), Allura/Lance (which ended in tragedy) and Shiro/Curtis, an extremely minor character in a Last-Minute Hookup which itself came about as a last-minute Author's Saving Throw. In other words, absolutely nobody won.
  • This also isn't the first cartoon some of Voltron's creators made that got tremendous flak for controversial canon ships, over which LGBT representation was a major issue.
• As mentioned under Fandom-Specific Plot, Altean Lance is a tremendously common fanfic trope, often with him being reimagined as a relative of Allura's, or replacing her role in the story entirely. In the finale, Lance does acquire Altean markings on his face... but as a result of his romance with Allura, a plot element that such stories usually and often deliberately go out of their way to preclude.
• Pre-release interviews for Voltron mentioned Game of Thrones as an inspiration, citing its penchant for serial storytelling and political intrigue. A few months after the release of the frostily-received final eighth season of Voltron came the final, also numbered eighth, season of Game of Thrones, which also earned itself a great deal of fan backlash and negativity despite a more positive reception from professional critics. Many of the criticisms leveled at both shows' final seasons were the same, including rushed pacing, plot holes and dropped plot points, nonsensical shifts and frequent bouts of idiocy in characters' behavior, and unsatisfying character epilogues.
  • And on that note, Voltron was only the first of multiple highly popular series (another notable one being Star vs. the Forces of Evil, though Game of Thrones was certainly the most notorious of them all) which concluded around the same relatively brief span of time on downer finales that were extremely disliked for relying on twists with zero buildup simply for shock value, giving rise to the multifandom meme of "subverting expectations". For people who were fans of several of these series, it's either darkly hilarious how so many shows could commit the same folly, makes it worse, or softens the blow.
• The episode where Coran contracts the Slipperies seemed prophetic after Netflix's Carmen Sandiego cartoon cast Rhys Darby as Neal the Eel, a criminal who can literally slip out of almost any trap.
• In 2006, an infamously terrible fanfiction named Voltes V Versus Voltron The Godaikin Wars was written, by a hater of Voltron (1984). According to the fic, Team Voltron is being manipulated by a mage named Paul The Imjad who pretends to be their friend but is actually using them. Romelle states that he is a villain and no one should trust him, but no one believes her until it's too late. Come Legendary Defender, Romelle calls out Lotor for being a Devil in Plain Sight and exposes his true nature to Allura and Team Voltron, and they also don't believe her at first until they see his villainy with their own eyes.