Netflix's Voltron: Legendary Defender

This honestly went from "oh man, another Voltron?" to "June 10 can't come soon enough".

It confused me a bit as a kid that some of the Voltron Force's uniform colors lined up with their lions, but not everybody's, Keith wore red, but piloted the black lion, Sven wore black and piloted the blue lion, Lance wore blue and piloted the red lion. Hunk and Pidge lined up with their lions, and Alura wore pink cuz....she was a girl, I guess, and it was the '80's. This might have been addressed in the Japanese original (perhaps Sven/Shiro piloted the black lion originally over there) but it never was in the US version. . Now, apparently, at least at the start, Keith's lion lines up with his uniform. I'm going to assume that the same will hold for Lance and Shiro.

edited 26th Mar '16 10:05:45 PM by Robbery

Since no one else posted it, here's the first look trailer:

Also, was anyone else surprised/made ecstatic that Finn the Human will be in this show as another character wearing prominently blue?

I don't exactly know why though...

edited 27th Mar '16 7:53:17 AM by TargetmasterJoe

What don't you know? Why you were surprised/made ecstatic, or why he's on the show (as, from what you said, I'd guess Lance? Or perhaps Prince Lotor?)?

I have always shaken my head at the various Voltron sequel attempts which seem to forget that mecha have existed besides Voltron. Voltron Force was just the absolute worst.

But this? Animators from Korra but not the two leads? Netflix? A combination sequence that is straight out of Gao Gai Gar proving that yes, the people who made this realize other mecha shows exist? I am actually optimistic. Cautiously optimistic, but optimistic all the same.

The CGI Voltron was pretty bad, and really only had the advantage of Neil Ross, Michael Bell, and BJ Ward. I never saw Voltron Force, but it didn't look good from what I DID see of it.

I don't know why I'm excited that Jeremy Shada is gonna be in this.

Yeah that transformation sequence really reminded me of Gao Gai Gar.

In any case, this should be a great reintroduction to Voltron for the 21st century.

EDIT: Hey, what was people's problem with Voltron Force? Because surely one of the complaints couldn't have been Voltron itself, since he looked really sleek.◊

edited 27th Mar '16 10:46:19 AM by TargetmasterJoe

It was a super robot show where the robot was virtually useless. All the bad guys were made out of Kryptonite, and a major gimmick was that Voltron would run out of power every episode until a new kid's eyes started glowing and give it a new super power. Man-portable energy lassos could bring down the lions.

Ah, thank you.

By the way, I've already started a new Work page for Legendary Defender.

Feel free to add to it as we get more info.

P.S. Is there a way to know how many Work pages we tropers have created individually? I feel pretty proud about how Legendary Defender is like the fifth Work page I've created. (Created the Work pages for Song of the Sea, Supertron, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and DuckTales (2017).)

EDIT: Whoops, forgot I also created the Work page for I Hate Fairyland, so the Voltron: Legendary Defender page is my sixth rather than my fifth.

EDIT 2: Double whoops, forgot I started the pages for Captain Earth, Transformers vs. G.I. Joe, Clive Barker's Next Testament and Robin: Son of Batman. So Legendary Defender is my 10th page. Sweet.

edited 3rd Apr '16 10:00:03 PM by TargetmasterJoe

Can I just say that I love that poster with the Obari shading?

A Voltron reboot by mecha fans. Don't make me excited after Voltron Force literally had Voltron getting taken down by a shotgun. A regular human scale 12 gauge.

Uhh...okay. I now feel even less bad that I missed this show completely.

Any action show has to be more than just combat, but I will say that, combat-wise, I hope the Blazing Sword doesn't end up being the solution to everything. From what they've described, it sounds like they've got a handle on it though.

edited 27th Mar '16 2:35:46 PM by Robbery

Yes, they also said that Voltron won't show up all the time (is there a trope for that?) and some situations will be solved by either the individual lions or the team itself.

Oddly enough, I recall one episode of Sym-Bionic Titan where the Titan didn't show up at all, which I thought was kinda weird, but then again, it was kinda justified why they couldn't use him since Ilana was going all The Metamorphosis and turning into a horrific xenomorph expy.

Another thing going against Force is that they introduce 3 random new teens just for the purpose of succeeding/replacing the original team for some reason. One of them was Allura's nice which kinda created a plot hole.

Added a Trivia page for the show.

Also doing some more tweaking with the main Work page, does the Universe here count as an Ultimate Universe?

I'm pretty sure it is, but I wouldn't mind some clarifying.

The frustrating thing about Voltron Force is that there was one super-cool idea in it that I had always wondered about when I watched the original Lion Voltron - what would happen if one of the other lions formed the head? (In Voltron Force, they used a different weapon than the Blazing Sword and had different capabilities.) I do kind of hope that idea, at the very least, is salvaged (because I don't care, Red Center and "Form Blazing Guns!" was badass).

For this one... I'm cautiously optimistic. I like that the cast looks like modern takes on the original designs, and I like some of the noted story points (worth noting that there were a couple of occasions where they won without forming Voltron, so saying that will happen again is a nice Call-Back). Though maybe it's just nostalgia, but I'm kind of hoping at least one character is a full-on 80's anime tribute in style. I kind of miss that.

They actually made a point in the original show that each Lion could ONLY form it's respective part of Voltron. In the opening episodes, the key to Black Lion was missing, and it took them awhile to find it (the mice had it, as it turned out), and they couldn't form Voltron until they did.

Voltron Force's problems were legion, but the majority of the issues stemmed from the writing side. It looked bland, the designs were generic as could be, but that was the least of the show's problems. The writing was from people who thought mecha anime began and ended with Voltron, so the things they did which were supposed to be impactful felt lame. And the show seemed to go out of its way to support this, where I felt like if a writer admitted to having seen another mecha anime, they were fired. The robot itself seemed increasingly useless to the infamous episode where it was disabled with a shotgun. We get three kids no one asked for, with two of them being Mary Sues and one who seems to go through character development only to have that taken away at the last second and rendered useless and/or villainous.

And did I mention this show aired a few months after Gurren Lagann aired on Sy Fy? Tough act to follow, but it was doable.

You need to be realistic with the fact that the brand Voltron at this point, is a kids/all ages thing. Expecting a Getter Robo-sequel bloodbath is just silly. But at the same time, I feel like the people who worked on Avatar, considering how good a job Last Airbender did with it, can make this a show which appeals to multiple age demos. Being out of Nick's thumb can't hurt either.

I think that's why the idea that the people who worked on this have seen other mecha besides Voltron (and Evangelion, can't forget to name drop Evangelion when talking about mecha cartoons for reasons) is so encouraging. They've seen stuff that works and stuff that doesn't. They're not going to present an idea that was old hat in 92 and go "This is the coolest thing since Voltron never did it."

Maybe I'm over-analyzing it, but while I disliked a lot of elements in Korra, there were some really good people working on it, and the show had flashes of brilliance. I'm hoping, free of the two head writers, they can bounce back, so to speak.

edited 29th Mar '16 5:10:27 AM by Beatman1

The writing for Force was from people who thought mecha anime began and ended with Voltron?

Why would they think that?

Also, is it just me or do Legendary Defender!Voltron's lower legs (from what little we've seen of them) remind you guys of something out of Gundam?

edited 29th Mar '16 6:27:40 AM by TargetmasterJoe

I guess the idea was to create distance from the legions of shows available in the US that aired on TV and do its own thing. What it established was the show feeling outdated and lame. Hell, in the seemingly requisite 'the fans suck' episode, the strawman was mad that the show didn't resemble the old one. Meanwhile, between Sentai and FU Ni there's tons of mecha shows online for free or cheap that went way beyond the scope of the original series or Force.

Fleet of Doom has nothing on the Jeeg team up.

It's weird how some people in the showbiz industry think, huh?

Anyway, how do guys think the show's character interactions will be like, basically what we saw in Avatar and Korra, or something else entirely?

I only hope there's no badly done romance here.

I hope Lancer's flirting with Allura won't be TOO painful.

I was looking through the Voltron Force thread again and forgot they actually had Allura say Voltron was never meant for close-range combat.

You know, the giant robot that's main weapon is a sword?

That's just contradictory.

I have to concur. That's dumb...even for a Canadian cartoon.

Force was co-produced with Canada, right?

edited 29th Mar '16 2:33:25 PM by TargetmasterJoe