Voltron vs. Golion and Dairugger

OK, so here is my analysis.  At least the initial one.  I mean, I can't just watch both American and Japanese versions back to back and then not do some sort of an overview of how I feel they compare, can I?

I start with what I watched most recently, the U.S. only "second season" of lion Voltron.  If you read more than a couple sentences of my episode synopses, well, you can tell I didn't like them very much.  It's not (at least, I don't think it is) merely an otaku attitude of "the Japanese version is better."  The animation was subpar and confusing, the episode stories were full of 80's animation stock plots, and the pervading attitude was different, like they had to shoehorn some "moral of the story" into the plots.  Of course, that's more or less a function of western animation in the 80's (that's why G.I. Joe had the "and knowing is half the battle" stuff at the end of every episode).

But the seasons of Voltron adapted from the anime were different, partly because, well, anime didn't have the same constraints.  But there were other differences, too.  You can see a sharp contrast between the way American animation was approached and the way Japanese studios operated.  Both Dairugger and Golion had long-term story arcs to which most episodes contributed.  Plot points established in one episode appeared consistently in subsequent episodes.  I think the planning and preproduction stages for anime series were much longer.

In American animation, (and in live action weekly television, as well), the production was much more rushed.  Each episode was pretty much self-contained simply because the showrunners didn't have a lot of control over the order in which episodes got aired (just look at the airdates of Vehicle Voltron in the DVD collections.  Hoo, boy, was that random),  Now, to its credit, the second season of Lion Voltron did have a story arc from beginning to end--the Voltron force on Arus was now a part of Galaxy Garrison as a whole, and Zarkon was gradually escalating his efforts against Arus, recruiting Merla and the pirates of the Rogue Galaxy.  Tensions between Lotor and Zarkon drove Lotor to rebel, "turn good," and then the whole thing got copped out when it was just a ruse.

Well, at least they tried.  Unfortunately, a lot of plot points couldn't just be carried over from episode to episode.  Lotor's turn, for example, had to be re-established a couple of different times, and there were some episodes where they sort of even forgot he had turned good the day before.

As for the rest of the series--well, I've mentioned it before, I'm partial to Vehicle Voltron.  I can tell you exactly why.  When I was 8, my father watched Star Trek II with me on VHS and took me to see Star Trek III in the theaters (this was 1984).  The same station that would end up airing Voltron started syndicating Star Trek again.  I was totally hooked.  That summer, we also got cable, and the one premium channel we had was the Disney channel.  There was a lot of witches and princesses going on there, and my sister and I, believe it or not, fought over stuff like Cinderella vs. "City on the Edge of Forever."

Then one day after school, I happened to turn on the television and see these robot lions fighting a weird bat monster (this was the fourth episode, where they form Voltron for the first time).  That.  Was.  Awesome.  I watched in religiously, for probably another two weeks.  Then, suddenly, Voltron was different.  Instead of the lions, it was . . . cars?  In space?  Car FLYING in space?  But I hung on, waiting for the lions to reappear.  But, these guys were exploring.  In space.  This was like Star Trek.  But it was like Voltron, too.  Hell, it WAS Voltron.

So, you see, I got into vehicle Voltron over the Lions because, at 8, I was much more into hard(ish) Sci-Fi than fantasy with witches and princesses who lived in castles and talked to mice.  I still liked Lion Voltron.  I just have always preferred Vehicle Voltron.

Of course, I understand why the Lions are more popular.  For one thing, watching Vehicle Voltron as an adult, the scripting and dialogue seems . . . vexed.  Too many characters, too many subplots, too few voice actors, and too many obvious deaths.  The poor show got butchered.  Plus, 5 main heroes vs. the 15 of vehicle Voltron--hell, it was easier to get into.  Keith, Lance, Hunk, the Princess--they all got some focus episodes, we all got to know them and their archetypes pretty well.  We know Wolo got scared in the woods once when he was a kid, we know Chip misses Pidge, we know Cliff grew up on a farm and that Crick and Cinda are from a water planet.  We know that Crick's psychic, Cliff is the reasonable one (except for when he isn't) and Jeff is the hothead (except for when he isn't).  Beyond that, hell, I still can't connect every character to their ship.  We all know who belongs to what lion.  It was harder to get the kind of connection to the Vehicle teams that we kids developed with the Lion force.

Same thing with the villains.  Zarkon was the big bad, Haggar was the witch who came up with most of the plans--and the robeasts--Yurak was the dragon at first, then Lotor was a much more serious threat, all the way to the end.  Then, we have the Drules.  Hazar's the big bad--until he turns sympathetic.  Then . . . Hell, even the World Events writers didn't keep all the names straight.  Malvor/Mongo, Dirka/whatever his name was the second time he appeared . . .  It was confusion.  Add to that the fact the episodes were aired all out of order and the dialogue was rewritten to break up the very strict continuity that was in the Japanese version.  Man, what a mess.

On the other hand, I really think Dairugger was superior to Golion.  Golion was much more formulaic (and I think that was the intent, actually), and the animation was uneven in many episodes, as though they were pressed for time.  The sound editing was . . . weird.  Like the people choosing the sound effects couldn't get a lot of their tapes to work,. so they were stuck with forcing weird sounds in and hoping we'd just pretend they were right.  Dairugger had much, much better sound design and far more sophisticated direction--check out some of the scene transitions in just nay random episode.  As the big fleet engagements got, well, bigger and happened more often, they did resort to a lot of stock footage.  However, the mechanical designs were pretty solid, and they used all the different ship designs for both sides pretty consistently.

Golion, I think, was kind of an experiment.  "Hey, let's make a giant robot--who's mystical instead of technological.  And let's use a lot of European imagery instead of Japanese."  I mean, Altea was basically Jolly ol' England, Heracles was Greek, Jarre was straight out of Sinbad (a European view of the medieval middle east), and so on.  It also had this strange quality of a Chinese folk tale, with the ruthless emperor, having conquered all he could see, being bored in the first episode, only to fall when his own ruthlessness turns against him.  So I think Golion took many more risks.

Dairugger, on the other hand, fell back on some good old well-established anime tropes.  The Rugger Guard is no Space Battleship Yamato, but the overall story arc borrows quite liberally from Yamato: an Earth fleet fighting against a succession of alien commanders (who are all basically humans with funny skin pigment).  And where the Gamilon commanders of Yamato all had names reminiscent of Nazi German generals, the Galveston captains were all named after pirates.  (This might be a common thing in anime of the time, but I just haven't seen enough other examples to make the connection).

My main plan was to compare Voltron and its Japanese source series, and do the same with Voltron's closest contemporary, Robotech.  While I fully intend to do that, I've discovered that Star Blazers is available on Hulu.  I don't have access to SBY in the orignal Japanese, whether the full series or the movie (I watched the movie on Netflix a year ago, but I no longer subscribe to that giant money whore), so I'm only going to watch and analyze Star Blazers.  I think it's a good idea, though, especially since both Dairugger and Macross borrow/pay homage to it so strongly.  So that's my next project here.