Voltron t-shirts carry the story of the show that taught a generation of American kids to love anime before most of us knew the word. In 1984, a small St. Louis company called World Events Productions took a Japanese robot series named Beast King GoLion, wrote brand new English dialogue over it, trimmed the darkest scenes and sent it into syndication as Voltron: Defender of the Universe. It became the top-rated syndicated children's show for two years, and five robot lions became a permanent part of Gen-X wiring.
Five Lions, One Robot, Zero Translators
Here is the part I love most. The people who made Voltron could not read the show they were making. According to the production history, executive producer Peter Keefe and director Franklin Cofod had no way to translate the Japanese episodes into English, so they watched the footage, worked out what was probably going on, and hired writer Jameson Brewer to write all-new dialogue to fit the pictures. They also edited out the more violent scenes and remixed the audio into stereo.
Think about that. Planet Arus, the witch Haggar, the Robeasts: a whole mythology written from the pictures alone, like being handed a silent movie and told to invent the plot.
Keefe had started out as a movie critic at KPLR-TV in St. Louis, and World Events was founded there in 1980 by Ted Koplar, son of that station's founder. The defender of the universe was a St. Louis kid.
How a Japanese Robot Show Became an American Cartoon
The original series, Beast King GoLion, was made by Toei and Tokyo Doga and aired in Japan on Tokyo Channel 12 from March 1981 to February 1982, running 52 episodes. World Events licensed it from Toei, and Voltron premiered in American syndication on September 10, 1984.
There are two origin stories floating around, and both are fun. One says Ted Koplar spotted GoLion at a science fiction convention in 1983 and saw its potential for American TV. The other, the one fans love to retell, says World Events had actually planned to adapt a different Toei show, Future Robot Daltanious, and asked Toei for the master tapes of "the ones with the lion." Toei shipped GoLion instead. The producers liked it so much better that they went with it. Either way, I love a happy accident. Some of the best things in life happen because somebody grabbed the wrong box.
What Got Changed on the Way Over
American children's TV in the 1980s had strict standards, and GoLion was a much darker show than the one we watched. The changes were not small:
- In GoLion, the five pilots return home in the then-futuristic year of 1999 to find Earth destroyed by a nuclear war. In Voltron, they are space explorers sent by the Galaxy Alliance, and that opening is gone.
- The original Blue Lion pilot, Takashi Shirogane, is killed early in GoLion. In Voltron, his counterpart Sven is merely wounded and sent off to a hospital planet to recover.
- The castle nanny, Nanny in the American version, is shot and killed in GoLion. Voltron removed the scene and used stock footage to keep her around in later episodes.
- Scenes of torture by the alien conquerors were cut.
Softened? Absolutely. But without the softening, a lot of us would never have met these lions at all.
"And I'll Form the Head!"
If you were a kid in the mid-80s, you can probably still recite the formation sequence. "Activate interlocks! Dynotherms connected! Infracells up! Megathrusters are go!" Then the five pilots called out their parts: "Form feet and legs! Form arms and body!" And then Keith, in the Black Lion, delivered the line every kid on the playground fought over: "And I'll form the head!"
The team, as American kids knew it:
- Keith flew the Black Lion, which formed the head, torso and upper legs, and he led the team.
- Lance flew the Red Lion, which formed the right arm.
- Pidge flew the Green Lion, which formed the left arm.
- Hunk flew the Yellow Lion, which formed the lower left leg.
- Sven first flew the Blue Lion, which formed the right leg, until Princess Allura took the controls, which made a lot of kids very happy and gave Prince Lotor something to be obsessed with for the rest of the series.
Then came "Form Blazing Sword!" and the Robeast of the week was cut in half. Same ending every week, and we waited for it anyway. Predictability was the comfort food of the analog age.
A small bonus fact for the trivia night crowd: the narrator who opened the show with "From days of long ago, from uncharted regions of the universe, comes a legend" was Peter Cullen, the same voice actor who played Optimus Prime.
Vehicle Voltron, the Season Nobody Asked For
After running through the GoLion episodes, World Events needed more Voltron, and they reached for another Toei series, Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. This became the second season, often called Vehicle Team Voltron. Instead of five lions, it had fifteen vehicles in three teams (Land, Sea and Air), each able to combine into its own machine, and all fifteen joining to form Voltron.
Fifteen pilots is a lot to track when you are eight. The vehicle season did not match the ratings of the lions, because viewers had already bonded with the original team. So World Events did something unusual: it hired Toei to animate 20 brand new lion episodes just for the American show. That is how big the lions were.
There was even a third Voltron planned, based on a show called Lightspeed Electroid Albegas. Matchbox released toys for it under the name Voltron II, but the series itself never aired. Somewhere, grown adults own toys from a cartoon that never existed, and I salute them.
The Toys and the Ratings
In 1984, Matchbox imported the die-cast Lion Force Voltron, along with the Gladiator and Vehicle versions, from the Japanese toy maker Popy. If you had the die-cast lions, you were royalty on your block. The cheaper 6-inch version could not come apart, but a Voltron is a Voltron.
The show was an immediate hit, topping the syndication market for children's programs in the mid-1980s. Syndication meant your local station picked the time slot, after school or a weekend morning. Either way, it was sacred. You did not schedule a dentist appointment against Voltron.
The 80s Anime Wave, and Where Voltron Fits
Voltron was not the first anime to reach American screens. Speed Racer aired in Japan in 1967 and 1968 and turned up in American syndication around the same time. Battle of the Planets, adapted from Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, was the most successful anime in the United States in the 1970s. And in 1984, the same year Voltron premiered, Harmony Gold released Robotech, an 85-episode series stitched together from three different Japanese shows.
What made Voltron stand out was how big it got. When Peter Keefe died in 2010, The New York Times credited the series with helping "prepare the way for other Japanese-style animation in the United States." A lot of later anime fandom owes a small debt to five lions dubbed by people who could not understand a word of the original. Even the business side tells the story: Toei eventually sold its rights to GoLion to World Events, because the show had drawn only average ratings in Japan compared to its popularity here.
Voltron Keeps Coming Back
A legendary defender does not stay retired. In 1986, World Events hired Toei to make Voltron: Fleet of Doom, a one-off special that mixed lion and vehicle footage with new animation. In the late 1990s came Voltron: The Third Dimension, a computer-animated sequel set five years after the original, with Neil Ross, Michael Bell and B.J. Ward returning as Keith, Lance and Allura, and Tim Curry taking over as Prince Lotor. Voltron Force premiered on Nicktoons on June 16, 2011, and ran one season.
Then DreamWorks Animation and World Events teamed up with the Korean studio Mir for Voltron: Legendary Defender on Netflix. It ran from June 2016 to December 2018, 78 episodes across eight seasons, and won over critics and a whole new generation of fans. It went back to the GoLion roots, with the Galra Empire and a pilot named Shiro, a nod to the original we never got to see.
And yes, there is a live-action movie in the works. Amazon acquired the rights, Rawson Marshall Thurber is directing and co-writing, and the announced cast includes Henry Cavill, Sterling K. Brown, Rita Ora and newcomer Daniel Quinn-Toye. I will believe in giant robot lions on a movie screen when I see them, but I will be first in line.
The Lion Handshake
Here is the thing about wearing Voltron. It is a question you ask without saying anything: "You remember the lions too?" And the people who do remember always answer. Someone in a checkout line tells you they had the die-cast set. A coworker admits they always wanted to be Pidge. A stranger yells "And I'll form the head!" across the bleachers. Good nostalgia should be fun, and nothing is more fun than finding out the person next to you also argued over who got to be Keith.
Our Voltron category has a good spread of designs for that handshake. A few favourites:
- Form the Head, for the kid who always called dibs on the Black Lion.
- Pilots and Sword Pilots and Lions put the whole Voltron Force together, lions and all.
- Lion Formation shows the lions lining up for the big moment.
- Katakana features Japanese lettering, a quiet tip of the hat to the show's Japanese roots.
- Classic 1984 Defender, Defender of the Universe and 80s Checkerboard lean all the way into the decade.
- Luckiest in the Galaxy and Voltron Christmas Wreath are for fans who want their giant robot dressed for the holidays.
If giant robots and space adventure are your thing, the Science Fiction category is a natural next stop, and the Cartoons category and TV category are full of other shows from the same era of after-school and weekend-morning television.
Fit Notes
Every Voltron tee comes in Small through 2XL, and more than half of the designs go up to 5XL or 6XL depending on the design and the shirt colour. Our Plus Sizes category gathers the bigger sizes in one place, and the Voltron Tall t-shirts category is there if you need more length: a Tall tee adds three inches of body length at the same width as the regular size.
Defender of the Universe, Defender of the Wardrobe
A small company in St. Louis, a box of tapes from Japan, a writer inventing dialogue for scenes nobody could translate, and five lions that turned into the robot every kid on the block wanted to be. Voltron t-shirts carry all of that. Put one on, and when somebody shouts "Form Voltron!" at you from across the parking lot, you will know exactly what to say back.