Age does NOT make everything better...

I was poking around the Xbox Live Marketplace the other day, and on a whim I decided to download the first episode of "Voltron: Defender of the Universe." I had watched a handful of episodes years ago as a kid and since the video was free, I figured "Why not?"

Where should I begin? This show is so bad it almost blew my mind. I've never seen the original anime (apparently called King of Beasts Golion according to Wikipedia) but I can only hope that it wasn't as retarded or poorly written as its English counterpart. I won't use the word "translation" because it seems large sections of the story were entirely rewritten for some reason. But the voice acting is just terrible; it reminds me a lot of the old Godzilla movie dubs where the actors ham it up, there's dialog in places where it doesn't seem like anyone is talking, and occasionally lines just seem to be thrown in because there were lip flaps there and the writers couldn't think of something that made sense. For example, the evil King Zarkon is gloating to his minions about his apparent victory and conquest of the galaxy when the camera cuts to his advisor's cat, then back to him. What does King Zarkon say? "Kitty is excited." I'm serious. The music and the sound effects are equally bad, invoking the worst aspects of the 1980's preoccupation with the synthesizer. And there are some places where sound effects make sense (like say, a building collapsing on enemy troops), but its eerily silent. Just the goofy synth music playing in the background.

As far as the animation itself, it looks to have been fairly low budget and roughly comparable to stuff from the same time frame. In a way, I give it a pass as far as animation quality just due to its age. If something new came out with the weird pacing and screen wipes and some of the awkward motion animations, I'd toss it out in a heartbeat. The only thing I can attribute it to is nostalgia and if I condemn the animation quality in Voltron, I have to condemn most of the cartoons from my childhood and I'm not quite ready to do that. I still have a stubborn, almost quixotic hope that one day, one of these series will live up to the image I have of it in my memory. But yeah. Unless you have a high tolerance for shitty acting or get a kick out of watching terrible dubs, stay FAR away from Voltron: Defender of the Universe. If you have fond memories of the show, stay even further away.