The trash of Con!

While I was reminiscing about Fort Hood last month I briefly mentioned going to my first anime convention there. Well guess what I found buried in the attic tonight-the flyer for "DEFCON 2:The Wrath of Con!" Whoa these dudes were my kind of corny writers. I would have subtitled it "The Con of Wrath" and expected people to figure it out. Actually if I was running an animation convention I would title it "JACRAPAMATION WORLD" and the subtitles every year would be the names of old Tranzor-Z episodes. DUDE ARE YOU GOING TO JACRAPAMATION WORLD: THE AMUSEMENT PARK OF TERROR? OH HELL YEAH!



Looking at the flyer I was surprised to see it was in 1996 instead of later as I thought. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised since I don't remember much about it at all. When it comes to anything I did in the 90s I'm kind of like Princess Leia remembering her mom-all I have is images and feelings. There was the awesome Robotech poster I remember seeing that might have been at the Antarctic Press booth since '96 was around the time they were granted the comic license from Harmony Gold. I remember how the building was a giant sports bar with a boxing ring right in the middle and that's where they put the half dozen or so dealers. Talk about intimidating. I didn't step into the ring because I didn't know much about anime and I suspected the whole thing may have been an elaborate cartoon schoolgirl porn sting operation. Plus I've always been cheap. Hell, I think this flyer is the only thing I got from the show. Here's to the days when 10 bucks could get me lunch, some comics and admission into a convention. (Most of all here's to not throwing crap away!)

THIS UNIVERSE AIN'T NEAR ENOUGH FOR THE BOTH OF US

This week saw a gigantic DVD release of epic importance in the sci-fi/action genre. I don't mean the final movie in the Fast and Furious quadrilogy, I'm not talking about the Drangonball:Evolution DVD, I don't even mean the final season of Battlestar Galactica came out. I mean VOLTRON: FLEET OF DOOM! This is the legendary meeting of the two Voltrons! It's so legendary I didn't even know what it was when I saw it on the shelves at Best Buy. Honestly I've never even seen it before and didn't know it was coming out. I think that's partly because this 44 minute "movie" is the Voltron equivalent of the Star Wars Holiday Special. The Voltron media overlords haven't exactly tried to keep its awfulness hidden and suppressed but they weren't in a rush to get it out there either. Last night over dinner I was telling my wife I needed to seriously do this Voltron movie post I've been meaning to do because people everywhere will be clamoring to find out about it! Then she spit all her food on the table laughing because she said using "Voltron" and "serious" in the same sentence was an oxymoron. I FORGET SHE IS NERUO-TYPICAL.

WARNING: Roboplasticos on your TV are larger and more colorful than they appear here


YVMV: YOUR VOLTRON MAY VARY

That Media Basters put this out on a wide release DVD is a big deal because "FLEET OF DOOM" hasn't been available at brick and mortar stores before and this release is different from the previous online exclusive DVD which got pretty bad reviews. Aside from problems with the quality of the cartoon, what really irked some people was how the first FLEET OF DOOM didn't work in older DVD players. Even DVD players hated it. But this time around those problems have been overcome and there's even a 5.1 track on it. It looked really good with crisp, vibrant colors when I watched it and even the normal stereo track I used sounded great. Before I start I need to make clear that I'm only a casual Voltron fan and I'm not much of a DVD reviewer either, so this is going to be a really unprofessional post with mostly uninformed opinions and some poorly taken low resolution pictures I shot with my camera on the wrong color and brightness settings. Pretty much the same crap I always do. Also in the interest of full disclosure: I still don't own any Voltron toy robots.

WARNING: Contains four times the recommended daily allowance of Peter Cullen


THE DIFFERENCE IS PEOPLE TOOK ROBOTECH SERIOUSLY

It is necessary to understand FLEET OF DOOM's place in the pantheon of Voltronology if one is to understand why it falls short of greatness. I wrote before about how excited I was that Media Blasters released the original uncut GoLion-the series that got edited and dubbed to make the first season's worth of lion Voltron episodes. Unlike those early lion episodes, FLEET OF DOOM isn't a re-editing of a pre-existing Japanese animation. The vehicle and lion Voltrons were never in the same cartoon in Japan because they were two entirely separate series when they first started out there. FLEET OF DOOM's storyline was written by the American writing team at World Events Productions, but then they left the scripting and animation to the Japanese animation studio. It's a combination of combining robot cartoons that took the combined efforts of people over two continents. It's production rivals the complexity of building the large hadron collider, and like the large hadron collider it will leave you wondering if turning it on was a good idea.

Worship at the altar of Cullen voiced characters!

The best way I can explain it is let's say someone made a television show out of spliced footage of T.J. Hooker episodes and lots of Priceline.com commercials. Then they got everyone together to do a brand new original 44 minute super episode where T.J. Hooker and the Priceline negotiator team up and half the cast was William Shatner. That's exactly what FLEET OF DOOM is, except Shatner is Peter Cullen. I know what you're thinking-How can you go wrong when half the cast is Peter Cullen? Plus it's Voltron! How can you go wrong with TWO Voltrons? How is FLEET OF DOOM not the Citizen Kane of combining space lions and spaceships space operas in space? Well the problem is a) the Voltrons are barely even in this at all and b) the other half of the cast is not also Peter Cullen.

Lotor ponders whether his dynotherms are connected and his mega thrusters are indeed "go"


FRANKLY MY DEAR THEY DON'T GIVE A DOOM

Unfortunately FLEET OF DOOM is not 44 minutes of two Voltrons being doomed by various fleets, like all Voltron cartoons it is instead 43 minutes of humans and aliens coming to grips with their emotional problems and crap like that, plus one minute of Voltrons and fleet dooming. This is why Voltron is not taken seriously. This is why Voltron totally dropped the ball in the genre of cartoons with multicolored combining space robots made up of public transportation vehicles and/or robot zoo animals. Damnit, I don't care if Hagar the witch wishes she was pretty again or Commander Keith wet the bed when he was little, JUST GIVE ME VOLTRONS AND FLEETS WITH LOTS OF DOOM! If they wanted to do drama and add emotional weight to the story they could have given Lion Voltron the space rabies and have vehicle Voltron put him down. Damnit stop trying to be Saturday morning Shakespeare and just give me the roboplastic apocalypse already!

BLOOPERS OF THE DOOMED

As far as DVD extras, FLEET OF DOOM contains the first episodes of lion and vehicle Voltron, plus a two minute 'bloopers' reel. Instead of bloopers it's really a series of short comparisons between finished and unfinished animation sequences. They'll show a brief scene as it originally aired then follow that by the same scene but with some animation elements missing or altered. It's not really bloopers as in "ha ha funny mistakes", it's more like "ha ha boy if you thought the animation sucked now you should see how bad it really was before we fixed it".

What should have happened was the lightning was white, but once it was blue! Hilarious!

IF I SAID IT WAS GOOD I WOULD BE LION

The only appeal here is the novelty of having this previously super-rare chapter of Voltron history on a DVD that actually plays in DVD players. Even then it's hard to recommend-the story takes so long with setup that nobody even forms Voltron until over half an hour into the 44 minute feature. They spent most of the time with the lion team's human characters and villains so it feels like a lion force cartoon with a cameo by the vehicle guys and not a true two Voltron movie. Getting the two Voltrons together is an ambitious idea but 44 minutes was not enough to do justice to all the human and alien subplots and still have time for lots of robot lion and spaceship battles. This should have been a 5 part miniseries like GI Joe so the characters could be fully explored while letting the Voltrons see some action in all their forms. For $14.99 it's too much, especially for such poor quality animation. The final climactic battle with both Voltrons looked so poorly animated it was like I was watching someone reading a Voltron comic book or playing a Voltron RPG or just flashing storyboards on the screen. It would have been nice if FLEET OF DOOM were an extra on the Voltron series DVDs. Heck, it would have been nice if it was a cartoon that had some actual animated Voltrons in it!

All this pineapple salad is gonna kill me someday OR: Robotech? More like roboTALK! HUR HUR OR: HOW MUCH ROBOTECHS CAN I BUY FOR 10 SPACY BUCKS?

Service Merchandise 11/27/86

Robotech was this really weird cartoon that came out in '85 when I was eleven. It had a great name and the opening promised fantastic battles with cool robots but then I watched it and it was something else entirely. It was actually very little robots and a whole bunch of cartoon women being all bitchy. Talk talk talk blah blah blah that's all they did. Then to make it worse sometimes there was kissing and what 11 year old boy wants to see that. Since it was originally a show for Japanses they had to edit out all the scenes with cartoon ass which I would at least have had fun laughing at but I never got to see any. I'd estimate it was 22 minutes long and 19 minutes was cartoon Vagina Monologues in Space then maybe 3 minutes was robot action, two of which were the opening and closing credits. It was the biggest robot cock tease show in the history of UHF television.

SOMEBODY NEEDS TO SHUT UP AND LET THE ROBOTS TALK

OG Wilson 11/28/85

Maybe I lacked the maturity or the attention span necessary to endure watching Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants with Robots but to this day I can't figure out what they were thinking or who the target audience of Robotech was. I think it was 8 year old tomboys with green hair and a little bit of overlap with the overweight jet fighter pilots demographic. Because as a boy I sure as hell wasn't looking up to the men in the show, who were all fat or dumb or extremely effeminate or bad pilots or they had blue hair. Plus all that talking. God damnit, the guys talked almost more than the women. Talk talk talk blah blah blah that's all they did. Mostly they talked about Protoculture, the mysterious jet fuel they gave to the robots. They built up so much mystery and intrigue around Protoculture that I wondered what Protoculture really was and what mysterious and intriguing effects it had aside from making you talk a lot, but it turned out Protoculture just makes your cartoon suck.

Karls Toys 12/20/84

Sears 11/16/86

For some reason I was in a Robotech mood yesterday so I updated the Vintage Space Toaster Palace with over 25 new* Robotech ads. When viewed chronologically they tell the story of the Robotech toylines, the story being that the toys were almost as big and confusing a mess as the cartoon. Robotech the name was first used by model company Revell on a line of robot model kits that were conceived before (and totally independent of) the cartoon. There were lots of different robots in the Robotech model line because Revell licensed them from a bunch of different Japanese model kit makers like Imai and ARII among others. The earliest ads for Robotech product I've found are for the 1984 releases of those Revell models. Revell also licensed a building block toy from Takara originally called Blockman but they changed the name to Robotech Robolinks and I've found an ad for one of those kits, too. Then in 1985 Matchbox came out with their action figures and vehicles based on the cartoon. Plus there are a couple of ads for toys from Mospeada (the cartoon that became Robotech's third 'season') that hit the shelves of grocery and retail stores well before they eventually showed up in Robotech boxes. There was also a little bit of overlap thanks to Japanese toymaker Gakken releasing their officially licensed versions of the Mospeada Alpha robot jets which I've covered before and I put up ads for some of those, too. And finally I have the crown jewel of my Robotech ad collection-an ad for Robotech dolls.

BUT MACROSS-NOW THAT WAS A GREAT SHOW

Toys R Us 12/14/86

I'm really happy to have a more respectable Robotech section now instead of just the four dinky ads I had previous. It's mostly my fault because although I've had most of them for a while I've just been too unenthusiastic about Robotech to put them up. I was also embarrassed about not having any sort of ad for the SDF-1. How can you have a Robotech ad section and not have the SDF-1? But I did find an ad for a mini SDF-1 in Houston so hey, it's my time to be a star if you know what I mean. Still, an ad for the big Matchbox SDF-1 is one of those holy grails of mine and I hope to track one down someday. Because Please Save Me Robots isn't about being grateful for what toy robots newspaper ads I've found, it's about whining like a bitchy, effeminate, overweight, blue-haired robotairplane pilot about the really bad haircut I just got.

*over 20 years old