Full Throttle Arcana

Would Voltron be another example of a dead fandom that was inexplicably revived?

Did you ever hear a joke about how, if you change the handle and change the bristles, you don’t have the same broom anymore? 

That’s what happens with fandoms; they don’t actually “come back from the dead" (an awkward metaphor that inappropriately anthropomorphizes) they just come back with all new, sometimes very different people in an entirely new context who view things very differently and who might not be the target audience the property went for in the first place. (This distinction is deeply relevant for Voltron and I’ll explain why.)

For example,  when the pulp heroes originally existed, their audience were working class men and kids. That was who the audience for story and hero mags were. But when they were revived in the 1960s, the audience were…basically…nerds, and the pulp heroes were viewed entirely in the 1960s context of being “superhero prototypes” (it’s no coincidence many post-60s Doc fans’ first novel was Fortress of Solitude). In fact, I think it’s accurate to say that today, there is no real pulp hero fandom, it’s just a weird, legacy corner of superhero comic fandom. This is a shame, because the most interesting things about the pulp heroes are the ways they were different from the superheroes, not the ways they were like them.

That distinction that I made (after a generation or so, fandoms don’t “revive,” they just get different people in a different context who are a different audience) is something that is very important in the case of Voltron because the fandom that embraced the revived series weren’t the people who were around for Voltron originally. It wasn’t as strong of an “eighties nostalgia property,” the way Transformers, He-Man and GI Joe pretty much are at this point. The people who like Voltron now are the “fan set,” and anime fans. You know, the tumblr crowd who make videos on youtube about their fan theories about Steven Universe, who endlessly talk about how Teen Titans isn’t as good as it used to be. There’s some overlap in the venn diagram between them and guys who read Toy Collector magazine in 2004, but they’re mostly different groups.

Think about what a fascinating jump and break that is in the context of eighties nostalgia properties. He-Man and GI Joe are now basically artifacts that exist for collectors who remember them from the eighties heyday, who are large enough to be catered to with great figures. It reminds me a lot of OBSG fandom: it exists but isn’t growing. When He-Man came back in 2002, the fandom that embraced it were the people who loved He-Man in 1984. The reason this didn’t happen to Voltron is that it was never that much of a favorite of the nostalgia crowd. The show could be repetitive and often wasn’t very good, compared to how wonderful and memorable say, the GI Joe comic book was. So Voltron could grow and build a new audience in a way something like Thundercats couldn’t and would be punished for trying. I don’t even think even people who grew up with Voltron remember the leader was a different guy in the old days; Voltron didn’t “stick to the ribs” the way Transformers: the Movie (1986) did. 

Notice, by the way, that the new Voltron doesn’t particularly feel the need to do much continuity fanservice, the way you got in Force Awakens and so on. It’s not like Star Wars, full of memorable images and callbacks to guys like Admiral Ackbar. Except for a few basic things, people don’t really remember Voltron, so they could rewrite the mythology in interesting ways. I’m not saying that was the right approach every time, but it certainly was the right approach for Voltron: people remember it existed but they weren’t super emotionally invested in it.