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Youthful Dreams Made Real:Net Fans Revive an Animation Franchise - Page 2

© Shannon Muir

Some people credit me for starting the boulder rolling down the hill. A lot of people say they put up their sites because they saw mine first. I really can’t say. What I do know is that things started to happen.

All the web sites fans dared to put out there (myself included) spoke loud and clear to the folks at World Events Productions, who had done the dub work on the original VOLTRON series. They had a hint of the show’s continuing popularity through some letters and late-night airings on St. Louis’ KPLR-TV -- which had a long standing relationship with World Events through broadcasting executive Ted Koplar’s interest in both businesses. The sites gave them something solid and substantial, not to mention free promotion.

Unlike the efforts of some companies to shut down fan sites, World Events embraced the fans’ Internet presence. With that they attracted toy giant Trendmasters at http://www.trendmasters.com, Mike Young Productions and the now-defunct Netter Digital Entertainment to sign on board and create VOLTRON: THE THIRD DIMENSION, a 3D CGI series picking up five years in the future. Ultimately, they produced twenty-six episodes spanning two seasons (a season lasts from Fall of a calendar year to the Fall of the next calendar year, for those not familiar with industry-speak).

Some people liked the CGI version; others hated it. I have mixed feelings but recognize its necessity as a marketing tool to get an old franchise a little added attention. After all, it was one of the first motion capture CGI TV shows and the first CGI series to be totally produced in the United States.

World Events also created an official site for VOLTRON -- http://www.voltronforce.com --and encouraged fans to be involved. And, in what’s hard to be a humble opinion, they paid respect to the fans by embracing the work of one fan as "official" with proper credit and compensation. The material in question, a starmap of the galaxy in which the show is set, came from myself. This knowledge as gathered partially from episodes and partially from my own theories, clearly served as a resource for the writers who didn't work on the prior series. I wish others had been given similar opportunity.

Maybe I was the most powerful voice, but I don’t want to imply I did it alone. The combined work of all the fans was required to become the powerful chorus that reached the ears of World Events Productions and beyond. Below are some of the better-known VOLTRON fan sites:

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