Pokemon

Original Title: ポケットモンスター
Romanized: Pocket Monster
Literal:

Plot Synopsis

Ash Ketchum (Ketchum = Catch 'em... Get it?) is a ten year old boy who, like any ten year old boy, is overcome with joy at becoming an official Pokemon trainer. At the age of ten, children are of legal age to leave home to catch and train Pokemon and prepare for the Pokemon League. After receiving his license, Ash receives his first Pokemon, Pikachu. Later joined by Misty and Brock and constantly being tormented by Jessie, James and Mewoth of Team Rocket, Ash's quest to become a Pokemon master will lead to a lot of adventures, trials and excitement.

Quick Review

Rating: 3.5 / 5
Reviewer: Legion
Review Date: 2000-09-28

The kids love Pokemon, but anime fans are pretty evenly spread out on the 'like it, hate it' sides. Some complaints are that it's childish and dumb. Most complaints go to the syndication treatment such as overlays that cover Japanese writing with English writing, censoring ('natch), censoring/omission of religious implications and Japanese culture, and the dubbing. Do I agree with this? In short, no. The story is simple, but there's some continuity and it's still fun and quite imaginative. Many episodes also provide a good message for children. There are a few edits or dialogue alternations to deal with cultural differences or religious things, but enough is left intact that complaints are really nitpicking. The show is not technically impressive, and while the dub starts out rough it gains strength as it goes along and matches up reasonably well with the original voices. On the positive side, most of the background music is left in from the original, and many of the pokemon retain their original "Japanese" nonsense voices.

Pokemon is a great kids' show and a pretty good anime for the anime fan with a kid at heart, and the syndication treatment is awesome to boot.

US DVD Review

There are a number of DVD incarnations, including the "10th Anniversary" editions each of which has a handful of fan-voted episodes for popular Pokemon. All of the DVDs are dub only, though they occasionally feature episodes that weren't shown on TV.

Content Guide

Though there is fighting and the occasional not-entirely innocent comment, it is essentially appropriate for all ages.

Violence: 1 - The Pokemon battles are mildly violent, but the human characters are not often injured.

Nudity: 0 - Nada, it's a kids show.

Sex/Mature Themes: 1 - Somewhat mature jokes here and there (ex. "Gee, that's a cute outfit Misty,").

Language: 0 - Nothing in the dub.

Notes and Trivia

Based on three things: An original concept by Satoshi Tanjiri and a tremendously popular series of video games and manga of the same name. Note that there is a sequel TV series (Pokemon Advance) that is still ongoing in both the US and Japan.

A note on the title: While the Japanese title generally uses the full "Pocket Monster" name, it is frequently shortened to poke-mon, which is where the English title came from. The accent that Nintendo uses for the title--Pokémon--is technically not necessary in Romanizing Japanese, but it makes it clear that the "e" should be pronounced "eh" rather than "ee."

Something funny to note about the changed names. They have a couple of Old West puns that were not present in the Japanese version. Jessie James ring a bell? You could have called it a coincidence were it not for the other Team Rocket villains, Butch and Casady.

The main characters' original Japanese names were as follows: Ash was Satoshi, Misty was Kasumi, Brock was Takeshi, Gary was Shigeru, and Jessie and James were Musashi and Kojiro. Musashi and Kojiro were two famed samurai, and Satoshi and Shigeru are rumored to be references to the creators of Pokemon and Super Mario Bros., respectively (Satoshi Tajiri and Shigeru Miyamoto).

For those wondering about the "religious" alterations, the one that generated the most controversy was the "Manji" symbol, a four-armed symbol that has been used in Buddhist art and symbolism for a very long time. It is very commonly seen in Japan--it is, for example, used to mark Temples on maps--but the symbol unfortunately looks quite a bit like a mirrored swastika, which lead to some misunderstandings that eventually caused the symbol to be removed from one of the merchandising spin-off cards. Fans of the original Legend of Zelda may remember that one of the dungeons in the game had a manji-shaped layout, though I don't remember any controversy at the time.

Finally, a note about the infamous "Seizure" episode: the original episode 36, about Porygon. A scene in which Pikachu stops an attack by several missiles included a "special effects" shot of a blue and red flashing pattern. Bright flashing lights can induce seizures in a certain type of epilepsy, and this effect was coincidentally "just right" as a trigger. This, unfortunately, induced vision changes, nausea, or full-on seizures in somewhere between 600 and 700 Japanese children, as well as a few older folks who were watching, most of whom had not previously been diagnosed with epilepsy or had an epileptic seizure. The show was dropped from the air for four months while the phenomenon was investigated, and the problem was determined to be a sort of "perfect storm" combination of the right colors, the right rate of flashing that interacted with the scan-rate of TV, and stressed-out kids sitting too close to the TV. Since then such flashing effects have been done at a lower brightness and particular color combinations avoided, and while the offending shot was cut for Japanese re-runs of the show, the episode was dropped from video release both in Japan and internationally. For reference, this type of epilepsy has an incidence rate of somewhere around 1 in 5000 people.

Availability

Available in the US from VIZ on dubbed DVD and dubbed VHS. The video releases occasionally contain "Never seen on TV episodes."

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