I've watched some Youtube clips and the new Evanescence song for the new Devil May Cry series coming out. It got me thinking. The 2016 Voltron series REALLY came out at the wrong time.
One of the main problems with it is the tonal whiplash. It's marketed as a children's series, containing childish humour and light hearted episodes. But then near the end, it talks about the horrors of war, shows a character's melted corpse on screen and kills off the only female black character instead of the robot lions. It's a disjointed mess.
Yes, it's possible for the series to be targeted at children and still have mature elements. Shows like Avatar, Gravity Falls and The Owl House prove that in spades. However, it takes a special kind of talent to be able to pull that off, and the showrunners there clearly weren't up for the task thus all of the tonal whiplash.
Plus, it's pretty obvious that the showrunners just wanted to tell an adult story. They weren't able to, because adult non-comedy cartoons like Castlevania, Lackadaisy and now Devil May Cry never came out yet, so it would've been taking a huge gamble that Viacom didn't want to take. They went behind the higher up backs to add in the elements that they wanted, despite the story not being fit for any of them, so it just becomes a muddled mess.
If it came out now, it could've been a straight up adult animated series. It would've been able to tell a mature war story without feeling the need to add in those childish elements. If they needed to market a product, they could've done model kits. Japan does that with the Gundam series, so western content creators could've done the same.
Do I think that it would've been good? Probably not. It was a product of its time and has plenty of writing issues in hindsight. It would've at least wouldn't suffer from the massive tonal whiplash.
Hi there, thank you for the Ask!
Do I think it would have been good?
Well, the story would be more coherent, and that alone is probably enough to make it good. But I don’t think it would have been influential good. I don’t think it would have inspired the same level of passion in fans. I’ll ramble here as I circle back to this.
It’s a shame that VLD couldn’t be either the Y7 ATLA-in-Space-with-Robots that fans were thirsting for; or the gritty dystopian Voltron/Robotech mashup that the showrunners had initially planned (which I suspect would have been more like G.I.-Joe-in-Space).
I believe that focusing solely on either direction would have worked better than what we got, but that the latter could not have been done for DreamWorks, and still would not have been as successful as VLD managed to be even if a more coherent story and consistent tone would have provided a better story. As much as I hate how season 6 ended (and the series in general), I will defend VLD in that it had successes, and that it achieved something.
Fuck if I know what that something was. People still talk about it. Fans still fan for it. WEP hasn’t abandoned it. They regularly post about it on their official socials, while they almost never post about Voltron Force. The toyline may have shat the bed, but there is something about the IP that has value. Ultimately, that is the big goal of licensing: to extend the IP, get more eyes on the IP, and eventually Hollywood will want a live-action film version, which is all IP-holders ever give a shit about. On that basis alone, VLD was a success. It’s the same business strategy as other sell-toys-to-children IPs (e.g. Transformers), where sometimes fans have to suffer through shit tier sequels or reboots just to get one really good iteration further down the line. VLD was a total fail on selling toys to a demographic that doesn’t play with toys anymore but whatever.
One of VLD’s successes (though absolutely not one intended) is in how it inspired a lot of fans to be interested in other giant robot series, beyond even the source material for the ‘84 Voltron. The story we got (despite its flaws) inspired enough passion for fans to go looking. Even if not all of those who went looking became diehard fans for mecha anime or sentai shows, I see it as a win that fans tried something new to them.
One of VLD’s failures is related to that tonal whiplash, in that there is a big difference between the tone of a giant robot series and a “war story” (whether drama or comedy). That’s on the showrunners for not understanding the difference (though I’d argue that many in their position would also not understand the difference). Even Robotech (and its source, Macross), isn’t the kind of war story that people (especially in the West) typically think of as a war story.
Since VLD cribbed from Macross quite a few times, the war story of Macross is relevant to VLD’s “war story” fail.
In Macross, the main conflict (the A plot) is not won by giant robot fights, planet crushing space ships, special ops teams, or by sacrificing goddesses to stop the inter-dimensional time traveling of narcissistic mothers. It’s won by culture.
A teen girl singing about love crushes (hah hah) the warrior culture of an invading alien force better than any weapon could. Her singing renders them helpless, confused, disoriented, and curious about those they’ve been commanded to destroy. Thus they become unable to fight properly. Her singing awakens something in them that their culture has forced them to deny. The point being, that if a culture is focused entirely upon the mechanics of war, then it cannot sustain itself. War is not culture.
The Zentraedi were so focused upon war, that their ships, machinery, robots, etc are in complete disrepair. There are only warriors, and a handful of leaders. There is no one able to repair. There is no one with the knowledge of how to fix anything, or to create anything new. The few with such cleverness exist in spite of what they have been created to be. The Zentraedi exist only for the sake of war.*
More than anything else in VLD, the showrunners claiming that it was a war story, really ticked me off. War messaging is something I will die on a hill for, because so many people think of a war story as being about the glory of battle and big damn hero moments. There is a place for that of course, plenty of sagas passed down through time revolve around such things. And yet, even those stories had another point to them beyond thrilling camp fire entertainment. Even a war propaganda story has a point that can be clearly communicated (albeit shameful or disgusting).
The key to a war story is not in the glory of its battles (or even the cleverness of strategy and tactics), but the message, the point. The message can be simplistic: “don’t dishonor the gods” or “war is bad”, but the point is in the “why” (if that makes any sense).
I never got a sense of any kind of coherent message in VLD, especially not the kind that is served by a war story. And because of that, I’m disinclined to think that VLD-for-adults could be successful at any time (2015-2019 or today) when the intention is to shove a giant robot story into a war story.
It’s tough enough to do giant robots. Giant robots that transform to combine into a singular giant robot of ultimate power, is a very specific kind of power fantasy construct that has little to do with war itself, and instead more to do with processing the trauma of war (especially invasion and mass destruction by a foreign adversary). In those stories, alien invasions are symbolic (like really think about post-war Japan and the answer will come to you), so even if the story implies a war, it’s not really a war story.
Anyway, I’m rambling. VLD couldn’t even manage a Pyrrhic victory ending correctly. LOL
* Similarly, the tension between culture and politics drives the plot in Legend of the Galactic Heroes (though it be strategy pr0n for history-and-sci-fi nerds). Totally different kind of plot resolution, and the violence subverts the concept of glorious battles. I always recommend LoGH to anyone wanting “war story in space”.
