Oh, my brain...

[amethyst73]

Home sick again today.  Better than yesterday, but I figured that staying home and continuing to rest was the better part of valor, and indeed I am going back to bed soon.  However, I wanted tea first, and having discovered yesterday that one of the cartoon series that I enjoyed watching as a kid, Voltron, was up on Hulu, I picked an episode at random and watched it as I drank my tea.

Wow.  Talk about gender stereotyping and massive inefficiency, not to mention bad science.

In the episode that I picked, "The Lion Has New Claws," all five of the lions are piloted by guys.  (Admittedly, one of them is some random kid, but still.)  The Galactic Council is all white males.  The good guys and bad guys appear to have one token interesting female each - the princess on the good-guy side (who will, in fairness, end up piloting one of the lions) and the witch on the bad-guy side.  (And the princess has an Older White Male to advise her, of course.)  There are other women on the good-guy side, but they're all effectively peasants and mothers, no figures of power.  Because the bad guys are aliens (and this particular episode showed very few of them) it's hard to tell whether there are any non-powerful women at all.

Inefficiency: Why do the pilots (1) have a drop-tube down to their individual transit vehicles, which (2) then take them to the lions?  Wouldn't it be more convenient to park the lions on the palace grounds?  (3) Why do they go through announcing the procedure of forming Voltron every time?  Why not just do it?  Everyone knows which part they're supposed to be.  Oh... It's so the writers have to come up with that many fewer seconds of actual plot!

Bad science: Yeah, it's sci-fi/adventure, I know.  But nonetheless, you have to laugh in disbelief when the witch tells her monster-of-the-day "It's only ten million light years to Planet Ares.  We'll be there in a matter of moments."

I think my brain just lost a few IQ points.  Now, will I risk further damage by picking up what will no doubt end up being further horrendously stereotyped episodes of those gotta-buy-them-all cartoons, He-Man and She-Ra, also currently up on Hulu?

Comments

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

Heh. I, too, loved Voltron as a kid, but I would be frightened to watch an episode now, for much the reasons you mention. Really? There's one female pilot, and she flies the pink lion, and she's basically not good for much? Really? My pet peeve was that they would generally try to fight the monster as lions, get beaten around for a while by the monster of the week, and then form Voltron and chop it in half. If the lions are so weak, and Voltron is unstoppable, why not go straight to forming Voltron? :) (See also firing the big spinal laser in Starblazers, etc.)

[hoshikage.livejournal.com]

Getting smacked around before using the deathweapon is The Formula(TM) for anime (and live-action shows, for that matter) of this type in Japan. I don't say it's smart, mind you - it's just that these are intended for kids and that's the formula the kids are used to. (Also, the original Golion dates from the 70s - not exactly a great era of enlightenment in entertainment. ^_-) One generally doesn't watch these things expecting them to be High Art... or at least I sure don't.

(Minor correction: The princess' suit is pink, but she flies the Blue Lion. This is one of the few shows of this type where the suits totally don't match the mecha for some unknown reason, but this is also why the guy who pilots the Black Lion wears red - the leader of the team ALWAYS, without exception, wears red in Japan.)

And now that I have sufficiently proven that I have far too much experience in this highly silly area, I'm going back to work. ;)

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

I stand corrected re the details of the princess's pinkness. :)

I know that that's the formula, but my point is that it's a really stupid formula. At least sometimes they would render the deathweapon inoperable for a while so that the point was how to get it back on line. But yeah... not really the best basis for a plot, even for a kids show.

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

Yup, yup. FWIW, the other animes of this style (four-guys-and-a-girl-in-vehicles-of-one-kind-or-another), I kind of think that the girl pretty much *always* wears pink and has a matching vehicle. And in the show where they all wear helmets where the visor is some sort of bird beak, the guys all have falcon/raptor type beaks, and the girl is all too clearly a duck or swan or something.

And in the episode I watched, one of the characters was taken out of commission early in the second half, so they couldn't form the deathweapon for the monster of the week. (They got in the requisite formation sequence early on to repel a starship attack from - I kid you not - Planet Doom, which is where the bad guys live and where the twisted landscape apparently lies in perpetual twilight, in contrast to the pretty white castle inhabited by the good guys.) But they beat it anyway by virtue of a handy cliff over a handly lava pool.

(All that is much more information than you really needed, wasn't it? Oops.) ;)

[orewashinanai.livejournal.com]

There's a video game series called the Super Robot Wars series, which is a toybox sort of game where all the giant robots from different series are all put together into the same universe. I only bring it up because for the really really big robots, it's built into the game that you can't use all their cool deathweapons until you've taken a bunch of damage, which apparently builds up your deathweapon energy. I dunno if they did this ironically, humorously, or it just makes sense to the Japanese somehow.

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

I've certainly seen that same idea, e.g. in Final Fantasy 7, where receiving damage increases a character's Rage (or something); once the gauge is full, they can pull off a special technique.

Belated happy birthday!

[orewashinanai.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

Oh that's true, I hadn't considered the fact that limit breaks were exactly that....

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

Limit breaks! I knew they had a special name, but it's been years since I played.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Nor had I, but yeah, that totally makes sense!

I think it's a pacing and a we-want-you-to-have-badass-powers-but-have-fights-that-last-longer tactic, both in cartoons and in games.

[hoshikage.livejournal.com]

Wow, SRW comes up in conversation and it's not me bringing it up! ;) There are other ways to build morale (deathweapon energy) and it's good for other things besides powering the deathweapons too, but... now I'm getting too much into game trivia. ;)

As for why they did it in SRW, I suspect it was specifically because that's how it works in the relevant giant robot shows... :P

[karakara98.livejournal.com]

Are you referring to G-Force? I think you're right about the costumes.

I have fond memories of voltron from them time I was 9 or 10, but I was passionate about G-Force when I was 5. The thing is, I remember a couple of the plots from G-Force. There was the one where the leader gets kidnapped and they try to convince him he's moved forward in time, and the one where the leader un-masks the bad guy, and the bad guy turns out to be a girl (dun-dun-DUNNN). I will take your word for the fact that Voltron is disappointingly silly now, but I think I may need to revisit G-Force to see if the emotional impact carries through at all.

Thanks for making me think about my childhood TV watching preferences!

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

After looking at the wikipedia page... yup, G-Force was the one. Turned out the gal wore a swan helmet, and wielded (you ready for this?) a yo-yo as her weapon. Everyone else gets a real weapon, but noooo, not the girl character...

[catagon3.livejournal.com]

Heh. Andrew was watching Voltron several weeks ago and occasionally He-Man gets watched on TV.