Trivia / GoLion

• Acting for Two:
  • Masako Nozawa (yes, that one) voices both Hiroshi and Honerva.
  • Ryūsei Nakao voices Shirogane and his twin Ryo.
• Channel Hop: The show was outright sold to World Events Productions in 2000 (with WEP fully gaining live-action rights in 2010) due to the success of Voltron.
• Crossdressing Voices: Hiroshi (aka Pidge) was voiced by Masako Nozawa, probably explaining why the version of the character in Voltron: Legendary Defender was Gender Flipped into a Sweet Polly Oliver to make the group Two Girls to a Team rather than The Smurfette Principle.
• Dueling Dubs: Italy got a straight dub of the first 26 episodes of Golion in 1982, as well as an Italian redub of the U.S. Voltron adaptation in 1986. The Golion dub, which has been rerun as recently as 2011, keeps the characters' original Japanese names. However, since that dub omits the second half of the series, episodes 27-52 were only available in Italy in their Voltron edits.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Anime Works North American DVD releases are long out of print, with only Volume 2 remaining affordable from third-party retailers. The US iTunes digital downloads aren't available for sale anymore either.
• Playing Against Type: Akira Kamiya as Prince Sincline. Imagine the heroic voices of Ryouma Nagare, Kazuya Ryuuzaki, Kenshiro or Ryo Saeba... Now put them on a vicious Overlord Jr. who has all the aspirations of being an Evil Overlord and generally being an utter bastard and threat to the GoLion team.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: World Event Productions, the people behind Voltron, originally wanted to make an adaptation of Future Robot Daltanious. Through a poorly worded request for a mecha anime, "the one with lions", Toei Animation mistakenly sent over Beast King GoLion instead. They ended up liking GoLion more than Daltanious, so they just kept going with GoLion. It ended up successful beyond their expectations.
• Tom Hanks Syndrome: Shirogane is voiced by Ryūsei Nakao. Early in Nakao's career, he voiced heroic rivals, heroic anti-villains, and heroic teammates like Shirogane. This was before he landed the role of Frieza, which started his pigeonholing of sadistic screechy villains.
• What Could Have Been: Early concept art for the titular robot shows that three of the robot lions were going to have manes on their heads. This was dropped in the final design.

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