Albegas

[Falconhood]

I found this in my files. I got this 5" tall robot at the Gay Dolphin in Myrtle Beach when i was a kid. I was so obsessed with Albegas, the Voltron that never was.

[Ben-Ohki]

I'm obsessed with it even today. I never saw one in person, but I had seen the pictures on the backs of Voltron packaging of the proposed "Voltron II." I loved that fan-made OP video using the soundtrack of the regular Voltron OP but substituting in Albegas footage - it was awesome and inspiring... what could have been? What kinds of new "Drule" faction and "Robeast" variant would WEP have written up to tie it all together with their "Galaxy Garrison" plot lines?

[magengar]

"Galaxy Garrison" LOL! ;D Man, I never stopped laughing
at that name to this day. I laughed at it when I used to watch
the Voltron series back in the '80s.
It sounds like a brandname coffee flavor for military facility-exclusive
coffee machines; or a super-tough Khaki starch. ;D

zozo-Magengar

[Falconhood]

I just can't understand how there is no official DVD of the Albegas series. And if there ever was a Laser Disc or VHS or VCD, i can find no evidence of it at all. sigh.

[brollicon]

i have the red and black version the blue goes for too much on ebay so who knows if i will get it one day

[Falconhood]

exactly! why is the blue so rare? i have a black-red-black DX VoltronII(Albegas)

[Ben-Ohki]

From what I gather on other forums and places around the web, blue plastic was notoriously bad. It apparently turns brittle faster than other colours of plastic produced by Popy of that age. I don't really understand it, but as a general rule, it's really hard to find the blue Albegas unit without cracked legs or otherwise broken parts.

[Falconhood]

someone has dumped 10 episodes in 2 parts on youtube! it's Arbegas, the spanish dubbed version, but it's HOT! love the animation!

[magengar]

If I had the time, the patience, the resources, and the facility
to translate those from Spanish into English subtitles and
convert the audio back to Japanese, I'd do it all.
Unfortunately, my hands are tied at the moment.

zozo-Magengar

[Falconhood]

it's enjoyable as is...maybe one day someone will post the japanese versions, or MORE of these...10 episodes is better than nada.

[Kidchuckle]

is it just the japanese one thats brittle. I do remember matchbox having it in stores. And it being released even with out the show.

[admin1 aka Ed]

Feb 18, 2010 21:33:29 GMT -5 Falconhood said:

I found this in my files. I got this 5" tall robot at the Gay Dolphin in Myrtle Beach when i was a kid. I was so obsessed with Albegas, the Voltron that never was.

I've never seen that box....an import I gather. Was it the one that has body pieces that swap and swords? The rare standard sized toy? -Or was it the Poem one that has some diecast but a good deal of plastic?

E

[Falconhood]

it was super crap cheap...but it was all i could find when i was that age. the body was metal, the arms and legs plugged in and were plastic. legs didn't really move, and the arms had shoulder movement.

[TheMazingerZ]

Oct 3, 2010 18:56:00 GMT -5 Kidchuckle said:

is it just the japanese one thats brittle. I do remember matchbox having it in stores. And it being released even with out the show.

Nah, the Matchbox is just a bad. And not only the plastic, the diecast in the lower legs and hips can be easily crushed with minimum force... I did it to mine ... (but found a replacement later on) ;D

}D

[Ben-Ohki]

All the more reason I'm overly annoyed with the chronic delays from Toynami's vinyl line-up. They made a great Lion Voltron (nevermind the slightly uneven paint). But they've been taking so long with the Vehicle Voltron vinyl, their Voltron license is expiring... but I'll bet good money a vinyl Albegas would have sold like hot-cakes (at least to the hardcore community) - too bad it'll never happen. This "lost" Voltron has an undeniable cult-status.

[xiombarg]

I think in the old days they hadn't figured out how to make pigment out of synthetic materials so they were still using toxic material like cobalt to make blue color, probably creating chemical reactions within the plastic and causing it to break down.

It was my college painting teachers opinion that this was why Van Gogh went crazy, because he would get paint all over himself and eat it on occasion.

[magengar]

I find it scary that you comment about how Blue was made back then
(I meant, the IDEA of how the color was made back then, for plastics).
I wonder if Blue is the only color affected by breakdown and wear-n-tear.
I browse thru websites of Resin-casting shops and i see materials like
colorants which you add into the resin to make it the color you want.
Other colorants are powdered so that you "dust" the mold with the
powdered colorant before you pour the resin... the resin then absorbs
the colorant and becomes a solid form of the color when cured.
I hope I don't encounter color breakdown when I try using colorants
for resin projects.

(By the way, my comment here is Off-topic from the Albegas topic.)

zozo-Magengar

[magengar]

Yeah. It seems Albegas is the unsung hero of
the Voltron family. I'll never know how it got
categorized as a "Voltron", nor why it's been
left out of the party as an "obscure" character.

zozo-Magengar

Oct 4, 2010 9:30:07 GMT -5 Ben-Ohki said:

All the more reason I'm overly annoyed with the chronic delays from Toynami's vinyl line-up. They made a great Lion Voltron (nevermind the slightly uneven paint). But they've been taking so long with the Vehicle Voltron vinyl, their Voltron license is expiring... but I'll bet good money a vinyl Albegas would have sold like hot-cakes (at least to the hardcore community) - too bad it'll never happen. This "lost" Voltron has an undeniable cult-status.

[Ben-Ohki]

Oct 4, 2010 13:14:26 GMT -5 magengar said:

Yeah. It seems Albegas is the unsung hero of
the Voltron family. I'll never know how it got
categorized as a "Voltron", nor why it's been
left out of the party as an "obscure" character.

zozo-Magengar

According to the documentary vids in the early Voltron DVD sets (I don't know if they repackaged everything in the recent sets), Voltron was pretty much produced on-the-fly. Firstly WEP had ordered footage from 3 series intending to make a Robotech-like trilogy. But there was a delivery screw-up and they got the tapes for Golion instead of one of the others they wanted... so they went with that. The DairuggerXV portion didn't take-off the way the GoLion portion went, so they they arbitrarily scrapped the Albegas portion of the project and commissioned new stuff featuring Lion Voltron instead, going down in history as one of the few times the adapted version of a dubbed anime got new episodes not part of the original Japanese series.

Albegas is now just a relic of the times... appearing only on the backs of old toy-boxes and the occasional cameo in comics, etc... he's not really canon as far as Voltron goes... except in our collective imagination.

[Kidchuckle]

Oct 3, 2010 21:55:39 GMT -5 TheMazingerZ said:

Oct 3, 2010 18:56:00 GMT -5 Kidchuckle said:

is it just the japanese one thats brittle. I do remember matchbox having it in stores. And it being released even with out the show.

Nah, the Matchbox is just a bad. And not only the plastic, the diecast in the lower legs and hips can be easily crushed with minimum force... I did it to mine ... (but found a replacement later on) ;D

}D

sigh thats too bad. I remember staring at the box in toy stores. I never had the money to buy them as a kid.

Maybe Bandai will make SOC versions and make them the way they should be made