Wait. What happened with Bob Koplar and Voltron? There were reasons as to why it was so bad?!
And before I go any further, I have no clue if you already know who Bob Koplar is, but if you do, then this little explanation will just be for anyone reading this who doesnât: Bob Koplar is the current head of WEP (World Events Productions), the company that made the original show in the 80s and owns the Voltron brand. Dreamworks at the time of the Netflix Voltron seriesâ production only had the rights to adapt the existing Voltron material and did not own the brand outright. All scripts/episodes for VLD had to go through Bob for approval (by his own admission, although the video where he acknowledges this has sadly been deleted from Youtube).Â
So with that explanation out of the way, the reason the final season of Voltron is so bad was because the showrunners and writers at Dreamworks had a very specific story they were trying to tell, while based on comments made by cast, crew, and Koplar himself over the years, Bob wanted 1) a glorified toy commercial to sell toys to 6 year old boys, and 2) a successor to the previous Voltron series, Voltron Force.Â
Based on all the evidence found in and around Seasons 7 and 8, the crewâs plans for the final seasons would have involved revealing that Lotor was still alive in the Rift, that he was innocent of the crimes he had been condemned for, and that he would reconcile with Allura and Team Voltron before joining them in the final battle against Honerva.Â
Bob found out about this while the crew was making Season 7 and ordered them to change it. Based on interview comments and the history of the Voltron brand, the most likely reason was because he wanted Lotor to remain a villain so he could be reused as the antagonist of a sequel series. The crew complied and removed much of the content surrounding this plotline from Season 7, but then reworked it into Season 8 and tried to push for their planned ending anyway, banking on the fact that by the time Bob found out theyâd defied him it would be too late for him to do anything. Instead, the showrunners were forced to cut out multiple episodesâ worth of footage and then rearrange what was left in order to have the number of episodes their contract with Netflix obligated them to release. (A summary of the most notable evidence of changes within the season itself, along with a rough outline of what the final season shouldâve looked like based on what was removed, can be found here)
And this all happened after production was already completed, as even the animators and most of the voice actors were surprised by the version of the final season we got.Â
Bob has also been implicated by multiple interviews with cast and crew as pushing back against the crewâs desire to include queer characters and relationships in the show, and prevented them from including any same-gender romance between the paladins.Â
If youâre interested, the group of fans behind much of the research into the Bob-mandated editing of Voltron Season 8 has put together a few reconstruction videos depicting an approximation of what the unedited versions of certain episodes would have looked like.Â