Guys, I think I figured out how Lotor was excised from the end of the S7-8 poster. The image wasn’t cropped. It was enlarged, leaving Lotor out of the picture and shaving the top of Dakin’s head off the image (Dakin is the Coran-innkeeper big lady at the end of the poster).
For reference, here is the full poster, as collected from a fan on Reddit a few years ago. I believe it is actually an official poster, not an image recomposed by fans, because it has the Voltron/Netflix logos on the bottom - which are missing in the individual releases throughout the seasons:
The proof hides in small details, so bear with me while I explain why the S7-8 part of the poster was enlarged…
As I accidentally discovered recently, the poster distributed at NYCC 2018 was even more truncated. Allura wasn’t in it either at the end. Here’s a post from Voltron’s twitter, back in 2018, releasing the digital image—which is the so-called ‘full’ S7-8 poster, that includes Allura.
But if you read the comments, there are several people who complain that all the posters given out at NYCC were… misprinted:
Also:
And this:
And again:
On e-Bay, there are still some original NYCC 2018 posters for sale (yes, in 2025) which, as expected, are missing Allura from the end of the print:
An important aspect is that the dimensions of the NYCC posters I found on e-Bay (including earlier seasons, such as the S1-2) are all 17” length, 9.5” height. So no matter what, they had to confine the image into that ratio. That was the poster’s paper size.
Now the juicy part:
—Look at the NYCC physical poster (where Allura is also missing) : Dakin’s head (the big Coran-innkeeper) is cut from the nose up, so you can’t see the eyes.
—Meanwhile, in the digital poster later released by Voltron and in the full recomposed poster, a little bit more of Dakin fits into the image—the eyes are included, but the top of the head is still chopped. (btw, the ratio of the digital image fits the 17x9.5 proportion too):
Which only means one thing:
That the S7-8 poster was neither chopped physically ✂️ (remember, it’s still 17x9.5, just like the previous posters) nor misprinted nor cropped digitally at the very end. The file image was resized. ENLARGED. This way, Lotor wouldn’t fit into the 17” length (and in the initial print run, Allura didn’t fit either, and that’s why Dakin’s head was snipped a smidge more).
My other proof is that when you look at the section where the S7-8 illustration combines with the previous section (S5-6), the photomerge is not perfectly seamless.
A Discord friend noticed some time ago that the S7-8 part of the fully reconstructed poster is a bit more blurry than the rest. Well, that’s because it was enlarged, so the resolution is different. Thing is, it wasn’t enlarged by much. Just a little bit to cut out that one last character. If you play with the resize tool, you can see that by bringing the image a notch down, Dakin’s head would fully fit in, and it would add that little space needed for Lotor to be there.
The problem is… by sizing up the last portion of the poster, it won’t properly stitch together with the previous section. But Photoshop is smart. When photomerging, the algorithm will automatically adjust the image to try to seamlessly merge the images while also maintaining the ratio. Which means that the image will get slightly distorted, but it’s imperceptible, due to its large size. Only when you zoom in, you see the artifacts at the seams, as described above. Also, the process of ‘distorting’ the image will add to the blur effect.
Looking at the overall poster, no other character is partially cropped out of the page. There are some creatures that have wings/fins sticking out. Lions do not fully fit in. But no sentient characters are chopped. Except big-head Dakin. Oh, and Allura’s right foot.
The entire poster is built in four wave-like compositions, to mirror the four poster releases. Each wave has a beginning, a middle and an end. Except the last section, which ends abruptly, with Allura’s hair floating into La-La land, and the green guy above waving goodbye, like a seal of doom.
Also, I do not believe there is more to the poster, beyond Lotor. The big Coranic dragon probably ends with the tail looping down and under its body. The end of the fourth wave.
Some may argue that we also need to see the rest of what’s on top (because some of the creatures’ top parts are cropped out; same with the Lions). But this would mean that the full poster image must be sized down significantly more—creating even more space at the very end (and a reason to believe there was more stuff missing from the poster). I don’t think that was the illustrators’ intention. The creation of these posters, as explained on twitter by an artist who worked on Voltron, was inspired by Kinu Nishimura. Here’s how Nishimura sets the compositions:
Notice how the big elements are not fully included. They are the background for the characters. (Ha, that actually might steer into a more advanced conversation about why the characters are more important than the mechas, but I shall leave that for another time.)
Lastly, if anyone has doubts about Lotor being the last character in the poster, try to come up with another tall guy that Allura may be gazing so fondly at; a character who isn’t repeated at all in the last quarter of the poster.
LOL, Sendak? 😂 (heh, actually Sendak is present in this section). Adult-Lotor is not present at all in the S7-8 poster, although we did see him/his ghost in S8. In fact, he is present only once in the entire S1-8 poster.
TL;dr: The image was not cropped, it was embiggened 😄 This reminds me of some famous stolen museum artworks, where the thieves cut the paintings from the frame.