The Voltron series underwent a great deal of censorship for the American version. To appease American censors at the time, all death was eliminated, people where just sent away to be healed, robot duplicates, or being sent into another dimension even.
Couple sliced in half with much blood
In the pilot episode
- Episode 22, Deadly Flowers, featured in the Japanese version the flowers killing people in great number. In the American version, the people were just under a sleeping spell.
- In Episode 38, "GoLion Hunting", innocent helpless people are being brutally murdered by the Death Commandos, a group of blue skinned people who enjoy cutting them up. There is a great amount of blood shown. None of this made it to the Voltron counterpart, "Raid of the Red Berets".
To see this and other examples, or learn more about Voltron, visit: http://www.youtube.com/user/WorldEvents and look through all that stuff there.
Content edits
- Shots of shooting/explicit torture (e.g., whipping) prisoners/civilians/slaves, and some shots of corpses were removed.
- Bloody arena battles, most notably in the first episode of the series, were heavily edited to remove most of the graphic scenes of characters dying.
- Zarkon's soldiers were referred to as robots as opposed to alien soldiers. Also, crews of space ships that were destroyed were often either said to have been evacuated prior or referred to as robot-ships in order to lessen the impact of their deaths.
- In the case of special characters who died in the original series, they sometimes escaped (in the case of Haggar/Honerva) or sent off-planet to receive medical treatment for their injuries, even though they died in the original Japanese series. Since this was the case with Sven (Shirogane) and Nanny (Hisu), the scenes of their funeral and characters visiting their graves were thus cut. While Sven was "brought back" through the use of Shirogane's younger brother (who was an exact lookalike of his dead brother) being declared to be Sven, both Haggar and Nanny would be absent for several episodes until the show's United States exclusive second season aired, bringing them back to the forefront.