We’ve seen Voltron himself already, and even a brief teaser, but Netflix has finally released extended footage from Voltron: Legendary Defender its upcoming reboot of the classic animated series. Check it out!
Revealed by Entertainment Weekly this morning, the new trailer introduces us to the main characters — a dysfunctional group of friends which includes Keith, Lance, Hunk, Pidge and Shiro (the character known as Sven in the original show) — who come across the Blue Lion mecha and Princess Alura, and are tasked with forming Voltron to protect the universe from a deadly new threat. Also… there are barf jokes?
The humour on display might grate fans looking for a more serious Voltron cartoon, but according to one of the show’s executive producer, Lauren Montgomery, the series will honour the nostalgia and innocence of the original Voltron cartoon while using darker elements that were found in the original anime the show was adapted from, GoLion:
We rewatched the original, and went back and watched GoLion. Although the imagery is the same, there are some pretty different themes in the [GoLion] stories. It almost hews a little closer to Game of Thrones. There’s some crazy stuff that happens, and it’s pretty dark.
But it also had higher stakes as far as drama. So we cherry-picked those while trying to keep some of the fun lightheartedness of what Voltron was for us as kids.
This first trailer definitely focuses on the lightheartedness more than anything, though. But we’re not that worried — Montgomery and her fellow co-producer Joaquim do Santos also co-produced Legend of Korra, another animated series that managed to frequently be goofy but still have major dramatic stakes.
All 10 episodes of Voltron: Legendary Defender will be available on Netflix from June 10th.