One Princess to Another/The Great Army of Darkness

One Princess to Another

We open on planet Pollux.  Interesting.  A big blue ship that's basically a Doom fighter with scale and coloration issues takes off.  The guards rouse Prince Bandor.  A woman rushes into Bandor's room and gives him a note from Romelle.  She and Sven are going to Doom to thwart a new Doom plan.  Bandor's s'posed to contact the Voltron force.

Zarkon has summoned Lotor and that gooney council from the episode when Yurak kacked.  He has a new plan: create 500 super-robeast to overwhelm Arus.  Haggar says the strongest robeasts will be taken to satellite Nuclon where they will be supercharged.  The robeasts will then be sent all over (?) to store energy.

The council is reusing a lot of different animation models here.  We see Yurak, his adjutant, some random Doom noble, as well as the same guys as were in the council earlier.

The robeasts are to fight in the arena to determine the strongest.  Again, we see many of the same robeast animation models with wacky coloration.  The audience, however, is using totally different animation models from before.  And there's a lot of panning past static cels.  Scheduling problem?  Running out of budget at the end of the series' run?

Sven, romelle, and their resistance fighters watch the proceedings and ponder Zarkon's plan.

The fighting in the arena, and the zany recolorings, continue.

The resistance fighters confer in a secret cave.  Sven decides to sneak aboard the ship to the secret factory satellite.

The team receives Sven's message about the plan.

Sven has a robeast costume in a box.  I wonder--can you get one of those at Hot Topic?  There's some dialogue between Sven and Romelle--romance, romance, blah blah blah.

The team has a brief conference in the conference room.

On doom, the 500 robeasts are being loaded onto a crazy-looking transport ship.  In his robeast costume, Sven sneaks aboard by pretending to have a tummy-ache to a suspicious guard.  At least, that's what I thought was going on when I was 8.  Sven is aboard, Romelle and her fellow freedom fighters return to hiding, and Zarkon launches the transport.

The robeasts are hangin' out, doing, miscolored robeasty things aboard the ship.  A guard enters the big gymnasium-looking place, and Sven grabs him and interrogates him.  He finds out where the ship's map his and knocks the guard out.  Sven changes out of his robeast costume into the guard's uniform to make his way to the bridge.

The team is waiting tensely in the rec room when Coran tells them Sven's slipped aboard the transport.

Sven plants a bomb that sets off alarms.  He gets to the bridge and sends the crew to the engine room.  He sees the map to Satellite Nuclon.  The crewmembers pause in the doorway and ask him what he's doing there.  Sven fires on them, and then trashes the controls and hops down a convenient chute to a waiting fighter.  He flies off and the ship explodes.  Quite badly, I might add.  Sven gets back in contact with Voltron and tells them were the Lazon factory is.  Keith orders the team to the lions.

Zarkon is angry that a spy has destroyed the transport.

The team reaches the satellite--they must be going fast.  They're lion-colored comets and Keith is animated with a weird effect.  Zarkon watches their progress and launches a wacky-looking rocketship/spider robeast to intercept them.  They veer off of their approach to the satelliete and begin firing on the robeast (black lion shoots white beams out of the black bazooka, and each of the other lions fires a lion-colored beam out of its mouth).  It shrugs off their fire.  It then launches ridiculously big missles that hit each of the lions and send them spinning.  They pull out and form Voltron.

The robeast grows legs with spikes and turns into a spider, sitting on top of the satellite.  First Voltron tries Grand Fire, then they form the blazing sword and punch through the robeast and the satellite.  twice.  Everything gets all explodey.

Back on Doom Zarkon is angry that his plan is AGAIN ruined by Voltron.  Coran transmits a message to Romelle that the satellite is destroyed, but there's no word on Sven.  Romelle goes outside.  A figure in a guard uniform sneaks up behind her.  Yeah, it's Sven.  More romancey stuff.  And then Voltron poses.

The Great Army of Darkness

Watching this episode, I got the feeling that there were far more scene changes and cuts and background--not to mention characters--than in most episodes.  Maybe the weird recolors and reused animation models were to keep costs down and keep them on schedule for all the craziness that occurs in this episode?  Things do happen even faster than usual here.  We start on Heracles, see the Heraclean castle, then go to Demon castle on Galra, and the arena, and Ryou and Amue's hideout, and Castle Control, AND the satellite and the transport ship. . . . pant pant pant.  Not to mention all the robeasts and others.

Daibazaal has been on the throne for 400 years, and now Golion has assembled an alliance of five planets (five?  I guess the sand planet is the fifth?  Otherwise, it's Altea, Heracles, Jarre, and Amazon).

The satellite Nuclon is called the secret factory on the attack planet Midway.  Huh.  Diabazaal also plans to send the beastman to Galra-ruled planets to be energized and launched from them as staging areas.  Which was kinda garbled in Voltron, but again, WEP must have had access to translations.

Just about all of the early arena beastman models appear, as well as Deathhell, that cobra guy, and the very first beastman.  Interestingly, Daibazaal consistently calls them all mecha beastmen.  Even though they aren't.  Also, Daibazaal is very interested in maintaining direct control of this, rather than allowing Sincline and Honerva to supervise.

Oh--in Ryou's report to castle Gradam, he explains that all of these hand-picked beastmen will be used to pilot mecha beastmen that are apparently being built at an unknown plant (well, it's on Midway, but Ryou doesn't know that).

The tummyache is explicit in Golion; it's funny that I picked up on this poorly-animated body language so quickly when I was a kid.

Ryou jumps the chief engineering officer who claims that only the commander knows their destination.  Ryou actually squeezes his throat until his face turns even bluer.  That was awesome.  And cut for Voltron.  Ryou blows up the armory and sees from the bridge screen that Midway is in sector XN.  Then he shoots the crewmembers.  And about every control in the bridge.  We get some interior views of the deathblack beastmen gettin' exploded when the transport goes up.

The team launches to the elevator version of the theme.

There's an awesome scene with Galra radio operators warning Midway of possible enemy attack.  Straight out of a WWII movie, seriously.  (Look up Battle of Midway, you doofus).  The spider-rocket is designated Mecha Beastman Alpha.  The lions fire on it with all their usual weapons: black bazooka, water rod, sandstorm, big fire, etc., but they're all animated as beam weapons.  They form Golion to the black lion theme.  The destruction of Alpha and Midway is done to the instrumental version of Formation V.

Amue acts like she's about 6 at the end of the episode.  Well, that was the market this show was aimed at, wasn't it?