Live action ‘Voltron’ shambles forward
By all rights, I should love Voltron. It’s a giant robot cartoon that debuted when I was in my early teens…surely it must at least have nostalgic value. Hell, I can’t even get my 5-year-old son to watch it. Is it truly crap, or am I on crazy pills?
My loathing for Voltron aside, Hollywood – not content to have ass-raped only one giant robot series from the 80’s – seems to think a big-screen adaptation is worth dumping millions of dollars into.
Atlas Entertainment’s Charles Roven, Richard Suckle and Steve Alexander are ready to form “Voltron.”
The producers behind “Get Smart” and “The International” (and Roven of course also produced “The Dark Knight) have acquired the rights to make a live-action feature based on the robot-lion property, pushing the project forward after several years in development with the Mark Gordon Company.
Roven and his partners acquired rights to the Japanese title from World Events Prods., a St. Louis-based company that has held those rights for more than two decades. “Wanted” producer Jason Netter of Kickstart Entertainment and World Events’ Ted Koplar are joining the Atlas trio in producing.
“Voltron,” a television hit in the 1980’s that has retained a loyal fan following, features a “Transformers”-like conceit, in which a band of five robot-lions combine to form one super lion. A group of five pilots control the lions, which are charged with defending the planet Arus from villain King Zarkon, who dispatches evil creatures called Robobeats to fight the Voltron robots.
Wait – ‘Robobeats’? I thought they were called ‘Robeasts’ – still lame, but not as lame as ‘Robobeats’…which sounds like some horrible hip-hop Transformers spinoff.
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Don't feel alone. I hated Voltron as well. I think it was the fights, or lack thereof. I really don't consider a Robeast standing completely still as Voltron runs the 500 miles to get to it, and then does nothing as it's sliced in two, to be much of a fight. It's like watching someone chop away at a mannekin, only not as funny.
The truly saddest thing about this is that it's so bad that an American Live-Action adaptation could only improve on the original. Which, as far as anime goes, is like saying that a cake is so bad that giving a puppy salsa and then letting it diarrhea all over it would improve the taste.