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For animation buffs out there, or anyone who wants to hear a wild story from my time in the entertainment industry, gather round.
This is how I inadvertently saved boxes of original art from Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender from being burned to a crisp.
Back in 2018 I was working at a major entertainment company on their social media team. The company had a public facing shop to sell entertainment related merchandise and I would occasionally help promote this on our social channels.
As the company had a relationship with DreamWorks, the shop would occasionally get products related to animated productions for giveaways. One of these was a signed Voltron: Legendary Defender print! I instantly lit up. I knew Voltron, having extensively covered it for a geeky website by that point. I mobilized every connection I could and made this giveaway a massive success for both DreamWorks and our shop.
A month later I was called into the shop office to be shown a new giveaway we’d be doing in partnership with DreamWorks. This time it wasn’t a print. I was instead greeted with four giant packets of animation art. Actual pencil drawings used in Voltron's animation, directly from Korea.
I flipped out at the art, excitedly going through it. Everyone on the shop team was bewildered at my response. I was asked if these would be good enough for a giveaway. I had to stop myself from screaming, “WHAT?!”
I explained that there were Voltron fans who would pay real money for these. The team was skeptical, this was just a children’s cartoon. Who would care about it? Plus, they admitted, no one on the shop team had any idea what Voltron was. After a rushed explanation from me and the assurance there was a hungry market for this art, a few emails were fired off. There was a real possibility of us selling this art in partnership with DreamWorks!
As it happens with major companies, it took several months but finally DreamWorks expressed interest. The shop however needed more information not only about Voltron but the field of animation collectors. I provided a detailed PowerPoint explaining every aspect of the show and its fanbase, while a trusted Voltron collector was brought in to help with the art side of things. They explained that what the shop was holding were key frames, inbetweens, and storyboards from the animation process. We even noted that some of the included timing sheets were printed on the back of old Legend of Korra character model sheets!
Later that week both of us were invited to a warehouse in Burbank to go through and pick out art for eventual sale. We’d both known this art existed as one of the Voltron showrunners had posted about it coming into America earlier that year, but it would now be right in front of us! We speculated how much there would be. A few boxes?
We were greeted with six massive pallets of art, totaling around 40 boxes each, filled with art from the first two seasons of Voltron: Legendary Defender. At first we tired to carefully go through each box to find the best pieces but were told, “you only have two hours.” Hurriedly we matched production codes to fan-favorite episodes and pulled as many folders of art from those episodes as we could. (For fans of the show these were ‘The Rise of Voltron’, ‘The Fall of the Castle of the Lions’, and ‘Space Mall’.) We filled two cars with the animation art, notably weighing them both down, and took it back to the office.
We were soon invited to the DreamWorks campus and the shop team presented how the art would be sold. It was here that we were told that art from the following seasons (3 onward) were due to be incinerated back in Korea soon. My heart fell out of my chest. Instinctively I blurted out, “NO!” DreamWorks had spent so much money shipping the first two seasons worth of art and they didn’t see the point in shipping more, especially as they were still somewhat skeptical themselves that anyone would buy this art. The shop team floated the idea of sharing the cost of shipping more art to America. I even suggested we pick out episodes that had the best scenes and at least salvage those. The meeting ended with everything looking good. Some details would have to be worked out but all seemed promising.
Around a month later I was called into the shop and told it was folding/going out of business. With it went any chance of selling the Voltron art and they’d have to send it all back to DreamWorks. I tried to figure out if DreamWorks themselves were going to sell it but was told the art would be incinerated. It just wasn’t worth the cost of the storage space and they had no desire to sell it themselves. My heart sank. We’d been so close and now it would all, literally, go up in flames. (I later confirmed this with a DreamWorks representative.)
As a thank you for all the hard work my Voltron art collector friend and I had done on the project, the head of the shop gifted us with a large amount of the art. We were now holding all that remained of the art that helped make Voltron: Legendary Defender.
For years I’ve kept this art safely stored and recently decided I wanted to try and finally do what had been so close to happening all those years ago, bringing and selling the art directly to the fans. (And I should make it clear, I am not officially affiliated with DreamWorks.) You can find the art at the link included in this post. (And if for whatever reason it doesn't work, here it is again: https://www.ebay.com/usr/riderjetfire
I look back on the whole thing with a sense of wonder, pride, bafflement, and regret. Wonder that I had just happened to be in the right place at the right time to notice the value of the art. Pride that my friend and I worked so hard to make the deal happen and to convince everyone involved that, yes, there are adult fans who love animation and this show so much that they’d do anything to own a small piece of it. Bafflement at how almost everyone, from the shop to DreamWorks itself, couldn’t understand or were skeptical that enough of these fans existed. Regret the massive roll out we’d planned that would have so perfectly tied into a new season drop of Voltron: Legendary Defender never happened.
Thankfully in recent years it seems more and more companies are taking note of and catering to older fans of animation but there’s still a long way to go. I can only hope to help more and more people understand the community and market there. Who knows, maybe another company could pull out all the stops to make an animation sale like this happen at the massive scale I’d hoped for.
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