The Full Story of Voltron

A small television company in St. Louis asked a Japanese studio to send over "the show with the lion," and the studio sent back the wrong one, which turned out to be a hit. Before it could air, the Americans had to cut the beheadings out of it. When they ran out of Japanese episodes to adapt, they simply animated two dozen more from scratch. And the giant robot that a generation of kids worshipped was, underneath, two completely unrelated Japanese cartoons stitched into one brand.

Voltron: Defender of the Universe was produced by World Events Productions, a St. Louis company run by Ted Koplar with Peter Keefe as executive producer, and it premiered in syndication on September 10, 1984. Its famous Lion Force Voltron was edited and re-dubbed from the Japanese anime Beast King GoLion, made by Toei; the less-loved Vehicle Team Voltron came from a totally unrelated series, Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. Deaths and violence were cut for American children, and the show became the top-rated syndicated children's program for two years, running 124 episodes.

A St. Louis TV station goes to Japan

Voltron did not come out of Hollywood or New York. It came out of World Events Productions, a company that existed to make programming for KPLR-TV, an independent St. Louis station run by Ted Koplar's father Harold. As Koplar explained in a 2020 interview with Rediscover the 80s, the company's first show, its namesake, was a globe-trotting newsmagazine called World Events '80, covering things like the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, and featuring "a young reporter named Bobby Costas, who has done quite well since then." Voltron was the company's "first breakaway hit," and the World Events name stuck.

The origin of the show is a mistake that worked out. Koplar had seen how much striking animation Japan was producing, and wanted a giant-robot show he had glimpsed called Daltanius. The problem was language. "Not knowing a word of Japanese, and our counterparts knowing very little English, we asked for 'the show with the lion,'" Koplar recalled. "This triggered an instant recognition, and the show they sent was, of course, GoLion. After seeing the tapes in our St. Louis office, we scrapped Daltanius for what we knew would be a hit." What arrived was Beast King GoLion, a Toei series about five pilots who combine five robot lions into one warrior, and Koplar knew immediately it could work. "GoLion was immediately appealing to me with its rich, colorful aesthetics and a storyline that I could follow without understanding a word of the Japanese dialog," he said.

Editing the death out

GoLion could not simply be dubbed and aired. It was a darker, more violent show than American children's television of 1984 would allow, and turning it into Voltron meant rebuilding it. "We had to tone down the violence," Koplar said. "GoLion went a little overboard and obviously beheadings were not going to work for kids. All of the episodes had to be dubbed into English and we took some liberties here and there with the translation or to clarify a story point." The larger job was total. World Events optioned the series, restructured the pilot for American taste with "a totally new music score produced in stereophonic sound (new to broadcasting at the time), new scripts, editing out scenes unacceptable to our target audience, and new theme titles," then cleared it to stations nationwide from the small St. Louis office. Once 65 percent of the country was cleared, Koplar said, "we had an entire production staff working around the clock in Los Angeles, to essentially re-make an entire 52 episode series."

Executive producer Peter Keefe, hired by Koplar to run the creative side, framed the goal not as translation but as transformation. In a crew interview for the show's official channel, Keefe said what drew him was that GoLion "possessed soul power," something "so hard to find" that "reaches out to you, that speaks to you, that calls to you, and brings you into its fantasy world." He credited two producers whose editorial styles were "different as night and day" and who "each of them delivered miracles." The point, in Keefe's telling, was "telling stories with splendid acting, and putting the whole of all the ingredients together to make something called Voltron, rather than just disparate elements from Japan."

Running out of show

Success created a supply problem that no toy cartoon usually faces: the makers did not own the pipeline. GoLion was only 52 episodes long, and American stations were airing them faster than they could be recycled. "The demand for more Lion Force episodes was incessant, but Toei had only made 52 and stations were running them to death," Koplar said. "We ultimately produced 24 additional episodes from scratch to meet this demand. With only nine months from start to finish, the time in which we were able to deliver was pretty remarkable." That is why the Lion Force run is longer than its Japanese source: the last stretch of episodes was newly commissioned American-directed animation continuing a story the Japanese original had already ended.

The other Voltron nobody remembers

Voltron was supposed to be more than lions. The plan, Koplar said, was to build the franchise from three different Japanese series, and the second Voltron to reach air, Vehicle Team Voltron, was cut from an entirely separate show, Armored Fleet Dairugger XV, in which fifteen vehicles combine instead of five lions. It did not catch on. "We actually aired the Vehicle Force Voltron episodes first in some markets, which were adapted from a different show entirely called Dairugger," Koplar said. "Its performance was lackluster, and the entire project was in jeopardy. Immediately upon airing the Lion Force episodes, we knew we had a hit on our hands." A planned third Voltron, to be adapted from the series Albegas, never aired at all, though a toy line for it was produced. The Voltron that America remembers is almost entirely the lions.

How the telling has grown over the decades

• 1984 to 1985, on the air. The show itself never advertised that it was two edited Japanese series; to its audience it was simply Voltron. The dual origin was industry knowledge, not public knowledge, for years.
• 2010, the obituaries. When Peter Keefe died in 2010 at 57, his New York Times obituary named him the creator of Voltron and credited the show with having "helped prepare the way for other Japanese-style animation in the United States," the first widely-read summary of what World Events had actually done.
• 2010s, home video and the makers. Media Blasters released the original, unedited GoLion and Dairugger XV in Japanese, letting American fans see for the first time exactly what had been cut. Crew interviews on the show's official channels captured Peter Keefe and others describing the adaptation in their own words.
• 2020, Rediscover the 80s. Ted Koplar's long interview is the fullest first-person account: the "show with the lion" mix-up, the beheadings, the stereo score, the twenty-four from-scratch episodes, and the flop of Vehicle Voltron, all told by the man who owned the company.

The main drift in the Voltron story is about the plan behind it. Koplar remembers the original three-series concept as Daltanius, Albegas, and Dairugger, with GoLion arriving by accident in place of Daltanius; the franchise's own later continuity material instead organizes the three as a Near, Middle, and Far universe. Credit drifts too: Koplar, the owner who discovered GoLion, and Keefe, the executive producer who ran the adaptation, are each described as the creative force depending on who is telling it, and both descriptions are true of different parts of the job. What is not in dispute is the mechanics: two unrelated Japanese shows, heavily re-edited in Los Angeles, cleared from St. Louis.

The honest bottom line

Voltron was not created so much as assembled. It was other people's animation, bought cheaply, cut for content, re-scored, re-scripted, and sold hard by a regional TV company that had never attempted anything like it. Purists can fairly point out that the beautiful robot-lion footage was made in Japan by artists whose names most American fans never learned, and that the deaths and stakes of the original GoLion were sanded off. But the assembly was itself a real act of making. World Events had to invent a coherent, broadcastable show out of foreign footage on an impossible schedule, and when the footage ran out, they made more. The result opened the American market to the wave of Japanese-rooted shows, Transformers and Power Rangers among them, that followed.

Sources

• Rediscover the 80s, "Interview with Ted Koplar who brought 'Voltron' to America," March 2020.
• Voltron official channel, "Crew Interview Spotlight: Peter Keefe, Executive Producer," (video, transcribed).
• The New York Times, "Peter Keefe, Creator of Cartoon 'Voltron,' Dies at 57," Niko Koppel, June 10, 2010 (archival, for Keefe's role and death).
• Wikipedia, "Voltron" (premiere date, episode counts, GoLion and Dairugger XV source series, World Events Productions and Toei credits, cross-checked).

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of ThunderCats and the full story of the Transformers cartoon.

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