GoLion Introduction

While some of the connection of GoLion, the original Japanese animation done by TOEI on which the LV series was based, is in the site's FAQ, not everyone reads FAQs. So this page will serve as a quick overview of this series, and how it relates/differs from the dubbed product.



In 1981 in Japan, a show called Hyakujuu-Ou Go-Lion (or Hundred Beast King Go Lion, shortened to simply 'GoLion' by most fans) aired and it was one among many shows with a mecha kind of theme. It ran for a standard season there, 52 episodes in all. I have unsubbed copies of all the episodes, and can tell you that some images and violence was cut from the original. It is harder to tell at this time the extent of plot changes that happened in the course of dubbing to English. Not even the names stayed the same. Though someone on our message board here, Rian, knows Japanese and from a clip she viewed, was able to discern that in GoLion, the characters that we know as Haggar, Zarkon, and Lotor are all related - Haggar being the matriarch of that royal lineage! So who knows what else WEP lost in translation.



I do know, thanks to information in the extras in the DVD sets that are out now, that WEP apparently didn't do any direct translating anyway. They simply wrote a story line based on the action on the screen, less what they cut out that was deemed too harsh for US children at the time. A lot of scenes in Voltron, you'll notice, get recycled. In the case of LV, for instance, the ending where Allura kisses Lance is used several times even if it didn't really make sense with the rest of the story. This, presumably, is to make up for chunks of time cut out of the original eps where battle scenes got bloody, a character died, or there was just something too risque going on.



I also learned from the DVD extras, that WEP originally sought out three seperate anime shows to dub and market to the US, and that it was ironically DXV that caught their attention first. This might explain why it seems the Drules at times are more influential than those in the LV show, and how the Galaxy Alliance was so central to plot points in both shows - the GA originated in DXV and was not a part of GoLion originally. Those scenes were spliced in to blend the two series, that were of course seperate and unrelated in Japan, into a cohesive story line. Given how similar a lot of toons were in Japan at the time, it was actually pretty easy to do what WEP did, and tweak a few things to make both shows feel 'connected'. Weird to think, though, that the most successful of the Voltron franchise, Lion Voltron, was almost done as an afterthought!



Also, you can note on the toy boxes of the time, that LV toys declared it "Voltron III", and VV was actually "Voltron I" solidifying this idea that VV was the first to be developed, and LV last in line. Go figure.
However, history showed that kids responded to Lion Voltron much more than they did the Vehicle version, and so, VV has not seen an extended second season, a new series, or much else since then. Lion Voltron, on the other hand, has seen various incarnations and revivals beyond the 52 dubbed eps from GoLion, beginning back in the day when WEP commissioned TOEI to animate another 20 episodes for a second season to be shown here in the states. Various other projects and reruns have featured Lion Voltron, right up until now where a feature length live-action movie is being anticipated.



Once WEP had license to do with these series as they would, LV and VV both debuted in the fall of 1984 - looking like their Japanese counterparts, but tamed and given different story lines. And of course part of that was tying the two shows together, among the fabrications was making the characters Pidge and Chip related as twin brothers. The third series WEP gained was supposed to be a third "Voltron" installment (or confusingly, Voltron II), presumably weaved into the other stories, but ultimately got shelved - perhaps due to the uneven response between LV and VV. It's unclear whether there was even a English dub pilot made of that, but I do remember toys coming out for it.



When the promised subtitled originals are released from Media Blasters, I plan to do a GoLion ep guide that more closely compares and contrasts the differences in the two shows. Already I can tell that they are different enough to consider the shows canonically quite different. Just the simple fact that many characters die in GoLion, that are said to have somehow survived in Voltron, that changes things dramatically between the two series. One of the biggest known and talked about plot bombshells is the famous return of Sven in the LV series. In GoLion, his counterpart clearly dies and the man who appears later that resembles him is actually his brother. In Voltron, WEP used their similarity in appearance to simply say Sven came back into the storyline.
Of course, under the GoLion tab on this site you can view cut scenes from the original, and hear some of the original audio, too.

So go discover Lion Voltron - as you'd maybe never seen or heard him before!

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