Cartoons
Four series, one name
Ask a fan how many episodes of Voltron there are and three different answers come back.
All three are built into how the show was made. World Events Productions went looking for a giant robot to bring to American television, asked Toei for the tapes with the lion in them, and were sent something other than the show they had in mind.[1] What arrived was Beast King GoLion, and they liked it better than the one they had asked for!
So the first fifty-two episodes are GoLion, dubbed and re-cut. The Vehicle Team episodes are a completely different anime, Armored Fleet Dairugger XV, with its own cast, its own ship and a war that never reaches Arus. And between them sit twenty episodes that have no Japanese source at all, commissioned from Toei after the Lion Force half turned out to be the popular one.
Voltron is two unrelated Japanese cartoons wearing one name, and the seam shows.
The seam is visible in the footage itself. Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear war in GoLion, so there was no Earth material to cut to whenever the American script called for Galaxy Garrison; every one of those scenes, and the pilots' arrival on Arus, is Dairugger footage spliced into a Lion Force episode. The borrowing runs one way, out of the Vehicle Team show and into the Lion Force one, because the Lion Force show had nowhere else to get an Earth.
The numbering misleads for a separate reason. The blocks did not air in the order they are numbered: Vehicle Team went out between the two halves of Lion Force, so episode 73 reached televisions well before episode 53 did.
The 1984 series is three blocks
Here is what sits where, and which of them has a Japanese original.
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Lion Force, part one
Episodes 1 to 52
Beast King GoLion, dubbed and re-edited
Aired 10 September to 27 November 1984
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Vehicle Team
Episodes 73 to 124
Armored Fleet Dairugger XV
Aired Winter 1984 into 1985, and the air dates are disputed
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Lion Force, part two
Episodes 53 to 72
No Japanese source. Newly animated by Toei for World Events Productions
Aired 21 October to 18 November 1985
The blocks add up to 124 episodes, and the 2019 complete-collection set counts them the same way. The disputed air dates sit on each series page.
The four series
Each of these has its own page with the full count, the studio, and the places our sources contradict each other.
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Defender of the Universe
1984 to 1985 · 124 episodes · First-run syndication
The one everybody means. It runs to 124 episodes and it is assembled from two Japanese cartoons that have nothing to do with each other, plus twenty episodes with no Japanese source at all, which is why no two fans agree on how long it is.
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The Third Dimension
1998 to 2000 · 26 episodes · First-run syndication
A CGI sequel set five years after the original, and the first Voltron story to take a position on its own continuity: it ignores episodes 53 through 72 outright, which are the twenty the Americans wrote themselves.
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Voltron Force
2011 to 2012 · 26 episodes · Nicktoons
The original pilots take on cadets, and the show ends mid-story: a second season was written and never funded, so the last episode is a cliffhanger that nothing resolves.
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Legendary Defender
2016 to 2018 · 78 episodes · Netflix
Eight seasons in two and a half years, and the only version to go back to the Japanese names: Takashi Shirogane is the Black Paladin here, where 1984 called him Sven and wrote him out in episode six.
Footnotes
- The story that World Events asked for "the ones with the lion" and were sent GoLion by mistake, when they had been after Future Robot Daltanious, comes from a Riverfront Times profile of the company and is repeated in Wikipedia's production section. We could not reach a World Events primary source to confirm it; the company's own pages survive only in the Wayback Machine.