Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

[jason voorhees]

I'm slightly disappointed that it seems that it's not on the Planet Arus. The themes of the series rocked my world as a 11-year-old; this decimated planet where the citizens were forced to live like rats, this ghost of the dead king haunting his chicken-shit lame-ass daughter to do something, the 5 Earthling Blue Collar stumblebums who are suddenly named the champions of Arus, and the spiritual aspects of a robot who always had some supernatural tricks somewhere in the harddrive (Ghost in the Machine and all that.)

However, these images gave me those good ol' mark chills.

[Spearmint Rhino]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

I always used to wonder what the fuck early 90s rappers were on about when they compared themselves to 'Voltron'.

[evilC]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

I'm not familiar with the history or mythology of Voltron, but...

Those stills are fantastic just as pieces of art.

I wonder, though - will the filmmakers have been able to resist going for (what is today's 'default' mode of) super-jerky 'handheld' style camerawork, a la 'Cloverfield'?

I'm longing for a reaction in the opposite direction and instead having huge panoramas of landscapes with the monster in question doing its thing, but with an almost utterly still P.O.V. It almost looks like that might be the case from those images, although I'm perhaps being overly optimistic, there.

[evilC]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

Oh, and then there's these, for Hobbes - the Reebok 'Voltron' series:

-

[sw2borshch]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

Similarly to SR I have lots of earwormlets of "Voltron...rejuvenate" & "We forming like Voltron", I always imagined it to be like TerraHawks.

[hobbes]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

Oh, and then there's these, for Hobbes - the Reebok 'Voltron' series

Reebok? What do you think I am?

[evilC]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

I was half expecting that. :-)

Not knowing trainer etiquette, I knew there was a 50% chance I was committing a huge faux pas.

[Mumpo]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

Coming soon: Muton And Cyborg, The Movie

[jason voorhees]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

Well, to talk about the effect on NYC rappers...(Reed will also chime in as this is another in a list of the WPIX threads...)

WPIX-11 was a very, very, very important channel to Generation X. For the older generation, it had the Yankees and Mr. Money Store Phil Rizzuto, but as I've said before, from 1984-1988, it was the only place for kids aged 5-16.

3:00 Heathcliff
3:30 Thundercats (The "Thundercats....HOOOOO" inspired many hiphop calls)
4:00 VOLTRON
4:30 GI Joe
5:00 Transformers

Then Jem and then Fame would come on, which was the homework signal.

For Americans, it was the first major giant robot anime that we had ever seen. To boot, it had plot and storylines that blew our minds (such as showing a planet that was absolutely decimated, an evil witch who could cast spells on robots, a main character not only being Swedish - but getting a career-ending injury which removed him from the team, etc.)

So while WPIX had karate movies on Saturday afternoon, Voltron would come on for all of the 5 boroughs for 5 days a week, and thus you had 90% of the inspiration for the Wu Tang Clan.

[sw2borshch]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

Ah jason, you've given me such a mindworm there of those double page ads for the new ABCNBS schedule for Saturday morning TV that popped up from time to time in the Marvels & DCs that my dad used to buy [strike]himself[/strike] me when I was kid.
There'd be half an hour of the Groovy Ghoulies, then half an hour of Captain Caveman, the all-new Popeye show for half an hour, Battlestar Galactica, the impossibly exotic looking Fat Albert and Friends, Battle of the Planets, perhaps an Incredible New Smoo (what was the old one like?), a Hanna-Barbera half hour and a whole load of other amazing looking stuff from 8am to 12pm whilst we had Noel bastard Edmonds to put up with.
I was insanely jealous about these half hour cartoons - I thought we must have been getting the right royal shaft as they were on for twenty minutes here. I knew nothing of advertising arrangements in the colonies.

So. What was Fat Albert like? Was watching it better than going out selling "Grit"? And was it true - did girls really sell "Grit" too?

[jason voorhees]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

That whole lineup was 1978-1981. Post Star Wars and all of that.

Battle of the Planets would make a great film, as long as it was R (in other words, Gatchaman instead of Battle of the Planets or even worse, G-Force - although the last of which with Casey Casem doing 7-Zark-7 probably made it a lot more palatable to a kid.) To this day, seeing long-haired mulleted baddies in bell-bottoms still gives me the creeps...


Even moreso when they got whacked in the head with a flying hubcap and made those angry-ass faces with their mullets trembling like leaves in a hurricane...


Or wise-ass bosses wearing lipstick...


Or the good guys wearing the costumes from Dazed and Confused...


As long as it would take place in the 70s, I'd love it.

The Schmoo was my favorite for about a week or two as a kid, and the old one was a 1940s comic book. I loved the Schmoo-inspired character on the Herculoids, Gloop:


I loved that he had no business or style fitting in with the rest of them, but you could tell in real life there would be something as insanely improbable as him. Sure enough, there is the orchid mantis:


So Fat Albert. Yes, it was great. Not awesome, but great. It always fell just a tad short in every episode, whether being too preachy or too convenient or having something just off. Fat Albert himself never got hit overdrive, as he was always just a little too lame or subdued.

However, it led people to believe that there was a world outside of suburban New Jersey, where people hung out in a junkyard in the Bronx, and pool sharks would bleed a character dry, or another would find himself in a highrise penthouse of a heroin dealer who wanted them to take a $5 sandwich bag around the corner, or the threat of venereal disease was lurking in a kiss.

The Fat Albert Theme

[sw2borshch]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

Whoops, yeah, Schmoo. Anything showing incredible smoos would have to be an 18, or an X, I suppose.

Knowing that I had a few of my American comics in my loft, I went up for a root about last night.

My copy of "Weird War Tales" from November 1980 heralded "Tale Spinners From Out Of The Sky", or CBS Saturday.
8am New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle
8.30am Tom & Jerry Comedy Show
9.00am The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Show
10.30am The All New Popeye Hour
11.30 Drak Pack (this looked like teen Munsters, I should hunt for it on youtube, I so wanted to watch this when I was seven)
12.00pm The New Fat Albert Show (with a cartoon Bill Cosby?)
12.30pm The Tarzan Loan Ranger Adventure Hour
1.30pm 30 Minutes/In The News (was this like John Noakes' Newsround?)

I mean, we got a lot of this stuff, but it always seemed more exciting in the ads.

[jason voorhees]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

That may have been the worst lineup on CBS for the 80s. Almost all of those were lame retreads. They tightened up with Dungeons & Dragons, which was an absolutely spectacular cartoon. It was basically Narnia with 9-sided dice, but a great story with awesome characters. Really an underrated show. Muppet Babies could also go punch-for-punch with the Smurfs.

NBC changed everything in 1981 with the Smurfs and Spiderman and His Amazing Friends. That version of Spiderman lasted about 10 years, and had awesome color and animation. NBC always had the best color, from Miami Vice pastels to the blue smurfs with white shoes.

The real tripped-out shows were those Sid and Marty Kroft craptacular live-action shows like HR Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost. I could go into them a lot more, but it's 11pm and I have another day of teaching middle school special ed in a few hours.

[Gangster Octopus]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

jasoń voorhees wrote:

The real tripped-out shows were those Sid and Marty Kroft craptacular live-action shows like HR Pufnstuf

We used to get that over here. Truly terrible it was.

[Tactical Genius]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

This is taking me back to the early 80's cartoons between playschool and Newsround.

Battle of the Planets, The Space Sentinels, Spider Man and his amazing friends (the lady in it was hot) He-Man, Dungeons and Dragons, Thundercats, Rolf Harris Cartoon time.

JV must have been in heaven having a channel that showed stuff like Cyborg, Gi Joe (Action man to the rest of us) the cartoon with the mechanical dinosaurs all day and every day as our schoolfriend who went to the US for summer would tell us about.
And on a Saturday we had the Banan Bunch with Rocket Robin Hood and Popeye.

But the best time was in the Summer and TVAM on ITV for Roland Rat and Malley's mallet.

The Summer of 83 had the pac Man cartoon which I thought was ace.
I tuned in the summer of 84 to watch the same and i saw this goofy carton with some robots, I thought what is this rubbish until the robot transformed into a Beetle, uh?
The another robot transfered into a Porsche, then another transformed into a Gun, then when another transformed into a Walkman and started ejecting cassettes that transformed into a Panther and a bat i was hooked for life.

The never showed transformers again on tv for about 6 years and we had to make do with Gobots.

J

[Stumpy Pepys]

Voltron - Defender Of The Apple

I read an article on TV Cream that explained the original Japanese version of Battle of the Planets was a very different beast:

The show was actually a heavily edited and sanitised version of “Science Ninja Gatchaman”, one of the first adult orientated Japanese cartoons. Zoltar was actually a hermaphrodite who kept on changing sex, explained in the kiddie edit by pretending Zoltar’s female body was his “sister”. Also, Jason swore a lot and punched everybody, including Princess – gasp! The last few episodes were never translated as they were too violent and miserable (ie, good): Jason got a bad brain injury, started losing control of his body, was captured by Zoltar and shot in the head many times with a machine gun. Zoltar then got depressed and committed suicide, by hurling his/herself into a pit of lava when the rest of the team confonted him (“Die,everybody! DIE!”) Also 7-Zark-7 wasn’t in the original, he was animated by the company who dubbed it and slipped in at bits of the show for sappy moral puke.