A Ghost and Five Keys/A Ghost and Five Keys

As we move one episode closer to Voltron/Golion's first appearence, I want to bring this up.  As a kid, once I saw the first four episodes, I discovered they had them on VHS at the ol' Video King.  So I'm pretty sure we rented that sucker every weekend for three months.  Which means when it was on Cartoon Network when I was in college, I was less inclined to watch the opening episodes (y'know, 'cuz I'd seen 'em so many times).  Then I realized that they were far less formulaic than the succeeding, um, entire series, save for the last several episodes when they take the fight to planet doom.

And now that I've seen them again as a post-college adult, and now that I've seen Golion, I realize that the Golion episodes follow a progression, an escalation, if you will.  It's not so much formulaic as it is cyclic.  Some of that is lost in the translation and editing, but not all of it.

A Ghost and Five Keys

We open on planet Doom, Zarkon and Haggar discussing the five fugitive slaves upon whom Zarkon is spending all of these military resources.  Actually, this serves as more recap, explaining who everyone is and what they're doing.

Haggar convinces o'l' Zarky to send a Robeast.  The Robeast does a serious WWF bodyslam to a yellow opponent, then gets send in a "Beastcraft" (soon to be called Space Coffin) to meet up with Yurak's forces.  Said forces, however, have a combined-arms force of gray foot soldiers with rifles and those awesome-looking fighters.  Who proceed to go all Spaceballs and "comb the desert."  By shooting at it.

Well, that's one way to search.

Meanwhile, Corran won't let them use the lions, so Pidge goes out on his own.  While he goes running headlong into a lot of fangy folk with energy weapons, Corran takes the other four to King Alfor's tomb.  The Princess tags along--even though she's just, y'know, a girl.  They take a super high-tech elevator about three miles below the surface to the tomb.  The tomb looks very Parisian-catacombs.

Upon their arrival to the tomb, the ghost of King Alfor appears.  Even when I was 7 or 8, I tried to rationalize it by imagining it was some kind of AI-powered interactive hologram or something (yeah, probably not in so many words).

They open Alfor's coffin, and this very Renaissance-European crypt contains, um, an Egyptian sarcophagus.  Huh.  Actually, I kind of like the weird collision of styles.  It makes me think of the old Battlestar Galactica.

Yeah, one of the keys is missing from its container in the coffin.

We then cut to Pidge, who's dodging barrages from the Doom fighters and taking out swaths of the soldiers.  Um, robot soldiers.  And Yurak is riding on the deck of one of the absolutely kick-ass skull tanks.  I got one for my birthday when I was a kid.  Its jaw flapped open and closed and its eyes rolled around when you pushed it on the floor and turned its wheels.

Pidge calls for help, and the team decides to go after him.  Allura finally convinces Coran to allow them to take four lions out.  We see for the first time that the center console in the control room is on top of a zipline elevator that leads to shuttles that eject the chairs up another elevator to the lions.  Wow.  And really, this isn't the most complicated launch sequence in all of anime, either (just wait for Dairugger).  Everyone is in their respective lions, except Keith is in the green one. Lance is red, Sven is blue, and Hunk is yellow, and the extended launch sequence introducing them all is pretty cool.  In an animation error, the green lion's red trim is extended in a number of shots.

Pidge has apparently been taking his toll on the Doom troops, but now they have him cornered and exhausted in a series of ravines.  One of the soldiers yells at him in gibberish, which is a nice effect--I always like it when you get the idea that alien marauders don't just speak American English.  In reality, they probably had to use a sound effect because giving one of their six actors another speaking part would have sent them over budget.

Arusian survivors rescue Pidge from a laser-induced avalanche, and pull him into a network of caves.

The four lions attack Yurak's force, and tear through the fighters and tanks.  And scare the crap out of Yurak.  Pidge watches them from the caverns (which, from the opening sequence, Zarkon revealed that he knew about them, but in a display of arrogance, apparently didn't think the Arusians would shelter the Voltron force).

The four lions wipe out Yurak's detatchment, and chase him back the the Rooster Assault Frigate, which his tank cruises right into, and it launches.  The space coffin with the Robeast arrives, and after a bit of resistance on Yurak's part, Haggar orders him to use it.  The space coffin faceplants into the desert, and the Rooster Frigate fires some sort of energizer beam and supersizes the Robeast, which is now all fangs, bat wings, and, um, drill-bit nipples.  Huh.

The design was kind of mind-blowing to my little Catholic-schoolchild brain.  It look sort of . . . dirty, but without being so.  You have no idea how many variations of this Robeast got scribbled on covers of notebooks and on the backs of assignments.

Rather than focusing on defeating the beast in front of them, the team talks about how they will get the fifth key and be unstoppable with Voltron.  And get beaten unconscious.  The episode closes on the Robeast chortling in a downright disturbing voice.

A Ghost and Five Keys

Here are a couple of comments about the brief history of Golion that starts the opening of every episode: the planet we see in the opening seems to be Galra.  And Golion is fighting a beige version of the Beastman that appears in this episode.  So, was ancient Golion just wandering around the universe, beating up random beastmen who were also just wandering arond the universe?

We open with the same basic discussion between Daibazaal and Honerva.  And Honerva's voice is creepy as all hell.  Honerva's suggestion of the beastman has Daibazaal wondering if she's questioning Sadak's competence.  How did these people conquer the Great Dark Nebula?  Probably by being totally ruthless.

The narrator implies that Sadak's fleet lands in the desert to establish a staging area for their scorched-Altea search.  The anime always manages to convey a better sence of military organization, no matter what the series.  In American animation from the same period, we had the standard set by Transformers and G.I. Joe, where every seemed to be about as well organized as a bunch of junior high kids tooling around the neighborhood on bikes.

Suzuishi goes out to singlehandedly wipe out--er, spy on the Galra advance, mentioning that he's the descendent of ninja.  Well, I'm the descendent of central European farmers, but if you put crops and fields under my care, we'd all starve.

Anyway.

As Raible takes them to the tomb, we get a flashback of Daibazaal as he orders Sadak to execute the Altean royal family.  Fala had at least an older brother and sister who look to be near-teens here.  Oh, something I forgot to mention in the first episode: Coran was the castle diplomat, while Raible is the strategist.  Interesting.

Fala, in convincing Raible to allow her to go to the tomb with them, informs him of her intention to fight alongside Golion.  This is where the "you're just a girl!" comment comes from.  Raible is shocked, because this is a Japanese series from 1981 and it was still okay to make fun of girls like this.  Especially in a boy's cartoon.

Anyway.

Unlike in Voltron, this is apparently the first time Fala has been in the tomb.  Kurogane gives us a rudimentary lesson in counting in Japanese, and they discover there's a key missing.

The Galra infantry, the Black Army, as Sadak calls them, march to some crazy process-trumpet sound.  It sounds plenty alien.  Once you accept that aliens, y'know, follow Napoleonic war conventions.

When Susuishi calls for help, his belt buckle is a communicator.  I kind of like how there are little utilitarian attachments to the uniforms--the keys, for instance, attach to the breast pockets of the uniforms.

When the team goes down the elevator, the numbers of the ziplines are 1-Kogane, 2-Kurogane, 3-Seido, and 4-Shirogane.  I'm pretty sure this changes in other episodes.  And, if Kogane is going to green lion--is blakc lion 5?

A friend of mine refused to watch Gundam Wing because he thought the idea of calling unmanned mobile suits "dolls" was stupid.  He hadn't actually seen any of the series, he just thought "dolls" was, um, unmanly or something.  I guess getting upset of the elevator numbering is only slightly more ridiculous.  But it's the kind of thing I like to point out.

The Galra soldiers speak normal Japanese when they bury Suzuishi in the avalanche.  I like how crazy, alien-looking fish-men just have normal voice performances, instead of the "cartoon bad guy voice" American actors feel compelled to use.

That secret hatch the Altean survivors use to rescue Suzuishi?  It's got a serious staircase carved right into the rock going down a ways from the entrance.  Whatever the Alteans were doing for the last fifteen years, they weren't just sitting around waiting for Golion to come back.  If they were gonna cower in caves, they were apparently going to do it in style.

When the lions wipe out Sadak's forces, they use an array of weapons that they seem to find by randomly hitting buttons.  Why don't they use them against the deathblack beastman when he arrives?  They just charge at him.  Yellow lion launches a missile out of that tube on its back, blue lion has an energy beam in its tail, and red lion has fire breath.  Then Kogane just rams the last fighter in green lion.  Well, I guess if that's your leader, setting examples . . .

I love the crazy Kaiju roar sound effect they give the beastman.  It's so over the top and ridiculous.  Oh, I guess they do use some weapons against the beastman--yellow and blue lions use the same weapons as before, and green lion uses missiles that launch from just in front of the red backpack.  Not that it does them any good.  Apparently they're fighting in quicksand.