I was a teenager in the late '90s and the Pokémon anime show started airing on TV in the US. I remember catching the very first episode to air on TV and thinking that this show seemed really awesome! If I hurried, I could just barely catch it every day as I was arriving home from school.
Also, the Pokémon trading card game became a national phenomenon and everyone my age and younger was collecting the cards and trading/battling with them. I was awful at card games, but I collected a decent amount of first generation cards. I still have them to this day, neatly arranged in a binder.
I never got into the games. I watched some of my friends play them, but I hardly ever owned Nintendo consoles, and never Pokémon games. When I did finally get a chance to play a Pokémon game, it wasn’t really fun. Not my kind of game, anyway.
I remember someone releasing a fan-made 3D open-world Pokémon game online a little over a decade ago and it was the coolest thing I’d ever played! But Nintendo refused to make an actual open-world game for… reasons. Fans demanded it, but Nintendo wouldn’t budge. They wanted to stick with their old formula, which keep loyal fans loyal, but also kept other gamers out of the franchise.
The success of Zelda: Breath of the Wild must’ve changed their mind, though. Just the other day, I was watching a buddy of mine live-steam a Pokémon game and it was an open world 3D map to explore, so I guess Nintendo got there eventually. But video games have progressed a ton in the past decade and it’s not that impressive anymore, so I’m still not that interested in playing it.
I have been a fan of anime in general since I lived in Japan for a few years in my late teens/early 20s. It was my lifelong goal to find a complete collection of Pokémon episodes in its original Japanese, since I don’t like English dubs. It always loses some of its original culture and context when it’s translated into another language. However, Pokémon is the one anime series that’s eluded me all these years.
I couldn’t figure out why this show didn’t have an easy-to-find original. Turns out, it was dubbed in the era of 4Kids, when they didn’t care about preserving the original show’s story and instead made up their own American-specific dubs to appeal to American audiences. As well as arranging the events in each episode to match their new dub, so you couldn’t just play the original Japanese audio over it. Finding the original show in America is pretty much impossible, thanks to the 4Kids version being extremely popular in its day and dominating the US market.
I just recently found the original show in high(ish) quality on Japan’s Amazon Prime. So at 40 years old, I can finally watch Pokémon in its original Japanese format and not the butchered American version that changes everyone’s (and every Pokémon’s) names, removes Japanese cultural references, and mixes up the plot and whatnot. I’m already a handful of episodes in and it’s excellent!
Even though I have the reverse perspective on the games (I do like open world games, but I like the old formula you speak of better for Pokémon), we probably share an opinion subs over dubs. Interesting read, thanks for typing all that out! This is the kind of response I was really hoping to get to my question, and I am really enjoying the answers everyone put here.
I was a teenager in the late '90s and the Pokémon anime show started airing on TV in the US. I remember catching the very first episode to air on TV and thinking that this show seemed really awesome! If I hurried, I could just barely catch it every day as I was arriving home from school.
Also, the Pokémon trading card game became a national phenomenon and everyone my age and younger was collecting the cards and trading/battling with them. I was awful at card games, but I collected a decent amount of first generation cards. I still have them to this day, neatly arranged in a binder.
I never got into the games. I watched some of my friends play them, but I hardly ever owned Nintendo consoles, and never Pokémon games. When I did finally get a chance to play a Pokémon game, it wasn’t really fun. Not my kind of game, anyway.
I remember someone releasing a fan-made 3D open-world Pokémon game online a little over a decade ago and it was the coolest thing I’d ever played! But Nintendo refused to make an actual open-world game for… reasons. Fans demanded it, but Nintendo wouldn’t budge. They wanted to stick with their old formula, which keep loyal fans loyal, but also kept other gamers out of the franchise.
The success of Zelda: Breath of the Wild must’ve changed their mind, though. Just the other day, I was watching a buddy of mine live-steam a Pokémon game and it was an open world 3D map to explore, so I guess Nintendo got there eventually. But video games have progressed a ton in the past decade and it’s not that impressive anymore, so I’m still not that interested in playing it.
I have been a fan of anime in general since I lived in Japan for a few years in my late teens/early 20s. It was my lifelong goal to find a complete collection of Pokémon episodes in its original Japanese, since I don’t like English dubs. It always loses some of its original culture and context when it’s translated into another language. However, Pokémon is the one anime series that’s eluded me all these years.
I couldn’t figure out why this show didn’t have an easy-to-find original. Turns out, it was dubbed in the era of 4Kids, when they didn’t care about preserving the original show’s story and instead made up their own American-specific dubs to appeal to American audiences. As well as arranging the events in each episode to match their new dub, so you couldn’t just play the original Japanese audio over it. Finding the original show in America is pretty much impossible, thanks to the 4Kids version being extremely popular in its day and dominating the US market.
I just recently found the original show in high(ish) quality on Japan’s Amazon Prime. So at 40 years old, I can finally watch Pokémon in its original Japanese format and not the butchered American version that changes everyone’s (and every Pokémon’s) names, removes Japanese cultural references, and mixes up the plot and whatnot. I’m already a handful of episodes in and it’s excellent!
Even though I have the reverse perspective on the games (I do like open world games, but I like the old formula you speak of better for Pokémon), we probably share an opinion subs over dubs. Interesting read, thanks for typing all that out! This is the kind of response I was really hoping to get to my question, and I am really enjoying the answers everyone put here.