Another favorite.
Pidge's home planet
We open on Castle of Lions. And Nanny. Blaugh. Allura has to get married off to a prince consort to be coronated. And the team's not good enough. But hey, they'll make great butlers. Y'know, it's a good thing we don't have to sit through all of that political crap and talking, talking TALKING in Vehicle Voltron. I mean, watching our heroes in silly Buckingham Palace uniforms kissing the hand of the princess in Disney's enchanted kingdom is NON. STOP. ACTION.
Just as bored as I am, the team (sans princess) goes to castle control and sees radioactive missiles bombarding the planet Balto, Pidge's home planet. The team decides to go intervene, but princess, Coran, and palace gaurds come to stop them. If they leave, they leave Arus without Voltron. And then, Nanny. Keith makes the point that Voltronb's duty is to defend other planets in their federation. Coran places them under house arrest. They beat up the guards (damn, those guys have a shitty job). They leave without Allura and the blue lion.
As they fly off, Coran opens fire with the castle's AAA batteries. To, y'know, give them a salute. Yeah.
Ah, planet Doom. I was kinda jonesin' for that clanky planet Doom music. Zarkon, Lotor and Haggar all watch the team fly to Balto. Lotor takes off with his flagship and a flight of other ships. This is the first time we get a good look at the other ships in Lotor's fleet.
The team approaches Balto, which has been destroyed, wiped out. They fly over a city swamped by lava. They near Pidge's village, and land near his old school. It looks like the people escaped to another planet, but the planet is lost. Inside the school, they suddenly hear weapons bombarding the position. It's Lotor's fleet. He deploys fighters.
Keith shoots fighters down with his proton missiles, while they others fire their lions' shoulder weapons. Then Lotor launches the Robeast--who is basically Kurt Langstrom, the Man-Bat, with a Haggarian makeover. He launches missiles out of his shoulders, then flaps his wings real hard to blow the Voltron force out of the sky with a tornado. Then it commences to strafe them. Oh, yeah, and he has batwings on his knees.
Allura sits in her room, and they can apparently see Balto through her window. Keith convinces her to go to their aid through, um, telepathy? I think it's meant to be a radio transmission, and WEP is kinda pretending they're in castle control. Coran and Nanny try to stop her, but they don't try very hard.
Lotor observes the princess' arrivle while the robeast knocks the team into a crevasse. Red lion tunnels through the rock. As Allura arrives, the shoots a flight of Doom fighters down from behind. This turns Lotor on. So he hits blue lion with some sort of energy weapon from the bow of his ship.
Underground, Lance uses red lion's weapons to start a volcanic eruption, separating the team from the robeast, and disabling Lotor's ship. The team sees the princess, and they form Voltron. They start the fight with the electro-saber, deflecting energy frisbee things the robeast launches from its mouth. Voltron throws the sabre, then the robeast pins them to the volcano with a force field thingy from its wings. Then the volcano erupts more and knocks the robeast over, breaking the forcifield. They form blazing sword, and destroy the robeast with some weird star-shaped enery blast.
Lotor is angered that they've destroyed yet another robeast, but a robot convinces him to leave before the planet explode. The team follows suit, shedding a few tears for the passing of Pidge's home planet. And this is the first planetary explosion we see in Voltron--there'll be plenty more in Vehicle Voltron (well, at least three more). Pidge wishes he could have seen his back yard again. Allura offers to make Pidge an honorary citizen of Arus.
After the last commerical break, we get a hodge-podge of scenes edited together to represent Pidge's new citizenship celebration. Y'know, to make up for all the stuff that was cut out of Golion.
Goodbye Earth
Because it's EARTH that's actually being destroyed, seemingly by a combination of the after-effects of World War III and a meteor bombardment, not by any efforts of the Galra empire. But even though this is the original Japanese version, I'm not so much of an Otaku that I will claim that the Japanese version of something is ALWAYS better. The opening bullshit with the princess being told she has to get married off isn't any better in Japanese. In fact, Hys' voice grates on me even more than Nanny's weird Russian milkmaiden accent.
However, I wonder if the prince Fala is supposedly marrying in Hys' hallucination is a "cameo" of a character from another series, or just a generic character design.
When they go to castle control, they're just looking at Earth out of nostalgia, but happen to catch the meteor strikes. They're pretty vague about what exactly is happening. Fala tries to appeal to the team, while Raible is the one who brings out the guards. And . . . Hys. But at least I don't have to keep track of a dozen different Drule captains. That would suck!
And as they launch in the lions, we're serenaded by a thematically weird choice of music. I guess it's a variant of the black lion theme. Because they mention black lion in the chorus. Oh, and Raible is actually trying to shoot them down. Suzuishi gives Kogane some crap about wanting to stay on Altea (these are really about as far as the hints of a romance between Kogane and Fala get, reams and reams of fanfiction be damned).
Daibazal doesn't think too much of the Golion team, since they're prone to internal dissent. 'Cuz, y'know Galra just kills everyone before they get to the point of dissension.
When they arrive at Earth, they see that entire oceans have been replaced by magma--at least the oceans the animators remembered to draw as magma. They fly over a shelter near their old Fuji Space School. And where their families all used to live. They enter the shelter to see a skeletal hand that scribbled on the wall in blood. Then a tremor shatters the skeleton and it's all reduced to dust. And Galra attacks.
Weapons used: Black bazooka, red laser, green gun, (yellow) gatling missiles. And the beastman is named Batolda. That's right, Batolda. I sorta like his design. He's kinda back to the Deathhell and Galcia realm of beasstman designs.
Suzuishi says he'd be happy to die on Earth. Seidou calls him a dumbass. Fala, in her room, is looking at Earth out a window (!?). And she hears the voices of the team in her head. She decides she must go after them. And she is able to reason with Hys and Raible. It seems as though she simply doesn't want them to be on an obviously dying planet like Earth, not that she knows they're under attack. But then again, she's not surprised to see Sincline's forces.
When they form Golion, it's again Formation V. With an instrumental part toward the end.
Heh. Batolda. And he talks! He tells Golion to die, just before the volcano erupts. They form Jyuoken and use the "Great Whirlwind" attack. Apparently that's the Golion verson of the Tachikaze or sword wind.
As they leave, Kurogane seems to think making mount Fuji erupt is what destroyed the Earth, but Kogane assures him that it was the "abnormality" they saw back on castle control's monitors. And Fala offers Altean citizenship (more or less) to all of them.
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