Pikachu in Pictures Chapter 4: The Highbrow Art of Toy Commercials

It’s time for Wolfman to take this “Pokémon anime” show-a-movin’! That makes driving through the rough terrain of Johto League Champions, the fourth season. It bedeviled him with a poor pool of possible episodes, harsh Miltank, and certainly an upsetting number of Pidgey. He’ll keep things rolling along, but first: a bit of clarification from last week.

Episodes reviewed:

402: “A Dairy Tale Ending” (August 10, 2000). Gym Leader Whitney invites Ash, who’s flummoxed on how to defeat her unstoppable Miltank, to her family’s dairy farm. A fight with Team Rocket there gives him an idea for their rematch: alter the very terrain of the battlefield to compromise Miltank’s Rollout attack.
403: “Air Time!” (August 17, 2000). After discovering that the station’s prepared shows have been destroyed, Goldenrod Radio’s DJ Mary pulls her latest interviewees—Ash and a disguised Team Rocket—into performing an emergency live drama. But Ash, Misty, Brock and Mary have to act off-script as Jessie and James wantonly rewrite the plot and recreate the best episode of Frasier.
407: “Carrying On!” (September 14, 2000). The grandson of the manager of a “carrier Pidgey” mail service dreams of taking over the family business, unaware that his grandpa intends to close it upon his retirement. He gets his chance to prove himself, though, when Team Rocket abducts their fleet during a shipment of needed medicine.
502: “Fly Me to the Moon” (August 16, 2001). Misty’s desire to catch a Corsola leads the gang to a preserve for Pidgey that are heavy and flightless. One abnormally tiny Pidgey strives to fly higher than any other Pokémon and inspire its colony, and Meowth betrays his comrades to coach the bird into the upper atmosphere.
518: “For Ho-Oh the Bells Toll!” (December 6, 2001). Upon returning to Ecruteak City, Ash discovers Gym Leader Morty and the mysterious fanatic Eusine investigating Tin Tower, where the Legendary Ho-Oh allegedly rests. But when Team Rocket steals the tower’s crystal bells to lure it, the local Pokémon invade the town in a rage.

You may have noticed my last missive showed me having watched a shocking amount of TV owned by Hasbro, the toy conglomerate whose greed is currently deep-sinking the world, brand, and collective art and artists of Dungeons & Dragons. This wasn’t a coincidence. My friends and I wanted to watch some of their things—all in such a way so as not to fill their overstuffed coffers—as a sort of angry “tribute” one night. A company that produced things we liked is trying to exploit nigh-countless artists, and it was a way of enjoying the former, acknowledging the latter, and reminding us that this didn’t happen in a vacuum.

Any night featuring the surreal comedy stylings of G.I. Joe will give at least some enjoyment, but I got something else out of it. See, Hasbro loves brands. They make no art, just properties bolstered by marketing campaigns and constant reboots. The most famous? TV and movies, from Jem and the Holograms to the Transformers flicks. I don’t exactly respect this form of creation, even divorced from my dislike of all of their franchises that don’t feature an inexplicable pastiche of Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail. But they are instructive for “Pikachu in Pictures.” After all, Pokémon is no less mercenary, and the TV show especially so. It exists to support, promote, and occasionally influence the games. Pocket Monsters is a commercial ouroboros whose branches all consume each other. Or maybe it’s a prism.

And that’s… I mean, outside of being a spawn of the dread beast capitalism, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Franchises can create true art; I certainly think of several Pokémon works that deserve to bear the term. I’ve reviewed episodes that are more than just ads. But yeah, this is a narrative commercial, just an insanely long and ambitious one. And I think we should always keep that at the back of our minds. After all, this season alone has to advertise Pokémon‘s second Generation and fill time and try to improve itself. And all five episodes show that practice in a distinct way. *Whisperingly,* this also wasn’t a particularly eventful week.

Image: The Pokémon Company. Morty on the left there is I think the first (non-Misty or Brock) Gym Leader to return after Ash beats them? That’s neat.

“For Ho-Oh the Bells Toll,” for instance? That’s all branding. It’s a somewhat boring episode that mostly exists to fill lore—to finally explain Ash’s patron saint Ho-Oh—and advertise the previous year’s Pokémon Crystal. It has an old character (Morty, who Ash beat in a Gym Battle forty-five episodes ago) and a new one, the weird Crystal NPC Eusine who himself mostly existed to pad out the legend of Suicune. There is fun stuff; it’s always cool to see a returning Gym Leader, and the Pokémon horde is enjoyably reminiscent of William Shatner’s loser film Kingdom of the Spiders. But it doesn’t go anywhere, and Ash doesn’t get anything out of the experience that he wouldn’t have at the local library’s mythology section. Even coming back is part of the branding, since you have to return to Ecruteak in the games. “Ho-Oh” exists less because it had to than because the show needed to do multiple things and simply built a story around them as efficiently as it could.

A lot of this week’s episode had content like this, side stuff from the games of varying degrees of importance that all became the focus of a story. “Carrying On” sort of adapts the guard who lends you his mail carrying Spearow. “Air Time” is set in Goldenrod Radio, the place where you never get that promotional Master Ball. “A Dairy Tale Ending” has the Miltank farm; “Fly Me to the Moon” the Whirl Islands. I suppose you can see these as, to varying degrees of success, using these moments as jumping off points for more committed stories. After all, while Season 4 exists to promote the second Generation of Pokémon, it still wants to also tell unique and compelling twenty minute dramas. It’s just that the way it’s promoted is often odd and sometimes even in apparent self-sabotage. Like the writers for those Hasbro cartoons, this show’s staff works with, around, and against the limitations in ways that can get quite peculiar.

Image: Bulbapedia. Tototidle, a team member with little character work, being integral to a more complex and imaginative Gym battle.

I think Ash’s team is, oddly, one of the season’s weaknesses. He’s got all the Johto starters for ideal promotion, but Bayleef, Cyndaquil, and Totodile don’t even manage the little character shading his last starters got. Noctowl is Shiny and has psychic powers, which is cool and not much else. The boy lacks any of the oddball choices of later years, things like “onigiri Satan hockey mask” or “weird faceless rock” or “goo monster.” His human companions aren’t doing much more; Misty and Brock aren’t necessarily worse—they’re not as bad in these seasons as I had understood—but they really are just sidekicks with no drive. But it’s so much weirder to see the Pokémon, who you’d expect to see full of personality (to make them more attractive captures in the games), with so little presence. I don’t think these aspects are good for storytelling, but it’s not like they were sacrifices for thicker advertising either. I realize they’re not fully representative, but it’s weird I did two episodes that were all about Pidgey, the boring Pokémon I’ve removed from my party at the first opportunity since Blue.

The prevalence of the filler (which I did agree to not talk too much about) is a problem here, too. I didn’t dislike “Carrying On!,” despite having picked it because it’s one of the most hated episodes of the entire Johto era. I actually really liked the older character of the day who didn’t want his extremely niche business to be a burden on his grandson. But it is the exact kind of thing that would anger people who wanted to see, well, anything happen. The list of interesting parts of this era was very small; you didn’t have a lot of changes to the cast, and the biggest arc—the Whirl Islands adventure, featuring “Fly Me to the Moon” and a three-parter with, ugh, Ritchie—was very relaxed. And I imagine people probably resented the good filler, too, either because it was still filler or because it wasn’t a rising tide for every boat. It didn’t help make Cyndaquil or Poliwhirl more developed characters.

And yet, that very filler gave us “Air Time!,” which is probably the best written, plotted, and damn entertaining episode I’ve seen yet. It’s a zany farce filled with metacommentary, great performances, and the kind of comedy writing that well exceeds anything I saw from the Kanto era. “Fly Me to the Moon” is up there with it; it’s got a lovely story and is just filled with so many neat and odd details (like this town with a micro-colony of birds that adapted wildly over just fifty years). These are great. DJ Mary and Orville the Pidgey were more fun as characters of the day than, say, Gary is as a rival. I’ve already talked about how shows like Pokémon need filler like this, but these also have a general level of narrative craftsmanship that the series really should have as a baseline by now.

Image: The Pokémon Company. You can tell the writers and actors had a lot of fun with the radio drama.

I think this is perhaps the problem, that despite going for well over a hundred episodes we haven’t built a consistent foundation for both imaginative, frenetic one-offs (which were still the minority of standalone stories) and more stable serialization. This kind of thing is something that flummoxed the writers of those Hasbro cartoons. The G.I. Joe staff had to build a structure for storytelling—only using a fraction of the cast in every episode and always splitting up the ones who made it in—because the toy owners’ rules were that every toy had to be featured. And it did end up being a good structure, and it did effectively become the standard for American action cartoons for decades, and it did give the show some degree of satisfying structure, but it was still people having to follow demands that ran counter to good plotting.

This week was ultimately better than not. “Air Time!” and “Fly Me to the Moon” were excellent. And “A Dairy Tale Ending” was perfectly fine; it’s kind of a redux of the episodes with Surge and Blaine, but more lighthearted and with the cool focus on alterable terrain. But I’m starting to see something shift. Pokémon isn’t quite what it needs to be as art or as commerce, and the formula it’s constructed is struggling. It’s very easy to see a need for someone who has more going on than Misty or Brock, or some challenge that’s larger and more intriguing. Knowing what I do about the future shows, exploring those avenues didn’t always turn out well. But they definitely need to exist, and sooner than later.

Movie reviewed: Pokémon 4Ever – Celebi: The Voice of the Forest (July 7, 2001).

While exploring a secluded forest, Ash meets an injured Celebi—and a young Trainer it dragged from forty years in the past. They attempt to protect the time traveling forest spirit from Team Rocket’s Iron-Masked Marauder, whose “Dark Balls” turn Pokémon into violent automatons. After he catches Celebi, it’s up to Ash, his new friend Sammy, and the Legendary Beast Suicune to save the Pokémon before it destroys the entire forest.

I liked Voice of the Forest. The forest was very pretty and enchanting. It was fun having a movie where Meowth was the only talking Pokémon. And I love the whole beginning action scene where there’s a poacher trying to steal Celebi, we cut back to modern times, and he’s forty years older and being hassled by a newer, eviler poacher (which is a great upping of the stakes that doesn’t hide the reality that the mistreatment of Pokémon is not something solely of the past or present). But it’s also just a bit of a comedown after Spell of the Unown. While the three prior films had many of its components, and not to diminish its work as a perfectly well told story, I get the sense that this was the one that really zeroed in on what a “Pokémon movie” would be in practice and made a formula.

Image: Bulbapedia. The fun treetop village of Arborville, which we visit two quick times and no more.

Ash and his friends discover a mysterious town of eccentrics, one of whom could be a close friend or theoretical love interest. It has a local guardian deity for both drama and brand promotion; it’s either a “Mythical” Pokémon hidden in the games’ architecture as a bonus character or one from an upcoming game. One stylish and nefarious villain tries to abduct it, often on an fantastical machine and maybe backed by some light backstory work. And everyone learns a lesson about abuse or the environment or being good through a loss: maybe a noble sacrifice, a death (real or faked out), or Ash having to say a permanent farewell to his new friends. Not everyone has quite this, some don’t have human villains, and I’m sure they all have at least some fun ideas, but this movie feels like the one that set it all in stone.

Its actual content is a mixed bag. Ash’s new best friend Sammy is largely a clone of him in the vein of Ritchie two seasons ago, and his big twist—that he will grow up to be Ash’s confidant Professor Oak—is a detail that may help his older self but does nothing to give him personality. The Japanese title for the film is A Timeless Encounter, but neither pre-teen is developed or distinct enough to make their meeting feel special. On the other hand, a year after granting his voice to Entei, go-to 4Kids bad guy Dan Green is no less great as the Iron-Masked Marauder. He’s wonderfully nasty, and I like the beat of him being more dangerous and evil but ultimately no more than the Sixties and / or Seventies poacher he succeeds. This kind of mixed quality even percolates down to the fights, where the one-on-ones are boring but the unstoppable push of the wooden “mecha” is fairly intimidating.

Image: Bulbapedia. One of the best parts is the film’s introduction of Sneasel, who is RAD.

If Entei was a movie that pitched much further and harder than the previous two movies, Celebi reigns things down to a safer speed. That isn’t a bad thing, but it’s maybe a tad bit underwhelming. It’s more pleasant than most episodes of the show and does succeed at being a movie, and not a bad one at that. But yeah, it is sad that the wild upward trajectory we had has stopped, at least for now. I guess I’m seeing it as the franchise, having punched as high as it could, being okay about not trying so hard again. So basically “good, but a bit disappointing” in the final analysis.

Conclusion: I suppose this is the part where I look at Pokémon and those Hasbro cartoons and make a big declaration that one is better than the others. I’ll hold up Larry Hama’s legitimately innovative G.I. Joe comics or the better-written My Little Pony episodes as ways to use franchising for serious ends. Or maybe I point to “Fly Me to the Moon” as a story that could come so easily from the world of Pokémon, one built from the data of video games and not so bound to the mold of a plastic toy. But, that wouldn’t just be beside the point; it’d actively undermine it. And that point is that it is a true challenge being a creator in a property that exists to be far bigger than you or anything you write. As our entertainment becomes even more hyper-franchised, it’s a good thing to remember.

The truth is that it’s an absolute pain in the ass to work as a cog in a pop culture machine. The people who write these toy commercial shows, particularly the ones from the Eighties when the genre peaked, often talk about how tough it is to simply turn those descriptive notes on the back of a toy’s box into a serious character. Many of the people who used to work in the Pokémon franchise have been open about the same. There’s having to promote characters, which means imagining and developing them and having them interact with other characters who need the same thing. There’s adapting “legacy characters” or storylines. And for all of these, there’s a lot, a lot, of weird specific demands. Make sure Ash has the new starters, whether or not you do anything with them. Have baby Togepi, even if it’s stopped adding to the character dynamics dozens of episodes ago. And definitely add that cape guy from Crystal; doesn’t matter where.

Image: The Pokémon Company. “Fly Me to the Moon,” an episode that probably only existed to pad out the Whirl Islands arc, became a triumph.

For all the negativity I’ve shown today, my time this week wasn’t bad or unpleasant at all. The movie was fun despite how boring Professor Oak turned out to be as a kid. Those two episodes were a genuine delight. And I do think things are gonna perk up a bit next week once we actually get to the end of the original series. But I need to point out now that this was not Wolfman’s review of Season 4. It was Wolfman’s review of three episodes and a movie of Season 4, because all of next week’s Season 5 episodes had to be included and Season 4 was straining for anything that sounded important, special, or especially fun. This wasn’t like the second week, where I ignored Orange Islands episodes in favor of fundamentally more important Kanto episodes; this was me struggling to find worthwhile material. That’s how bad things got. It’s why it was easy to spend a week talking about a toy company whose products I’ve pretty much never bought.

Next week we wrap up Johto and presumably talk about the changes it made, the ones it didn’t, and why its successor needed to go much further. That’ll be fun. Because while I’m happy with what I’ve gotten—and to be open, I am planning to visit much more of the show when this project wraps up—it’s for the best that we got a reboot.

Errant thoughts:

For a full explanation, “For Ho-Oh the Bell Tolls” is by far the most extreme fudging of how I picked episodes. It came out six months after Celebi and fits with next week’s batch more than this one. “Fly Me to the Moon” also breaks the rule by a couple months. It really was a challenge to find episodes that I wanted to see, and most of what I did (like “The Fortune Hunters,” the origin of last week’s “James as Moltres” outfit) wasn’t right for what I wanted to cover this week. Johto, especially mid-Johto, was barren.
- I also really wanted to get both episodes in, and there really was just no space for it in next week’s list. I think you’ll agree when you see it.
- “Ho-Oh” is also the first time I watched an episode after the movie. Mostly I forgot that I needed to do it and wanted to get the movie out of the way.
The movie controversy this week is that, for the first (and only?) time in the history of the Pokémon films, the English release actually spent money to add extra scenes. They make the “Sammy is Oak” twist far more explicit. When I heard about the twist years ago I resented it—just another example of dumbing things down for us Americans, right?—but honestly, I don’t mind it in practice. Sammy isn’t compelling at all beyond being a young version of a character we only know as old, and Oak pretty much never gets to do anything dramatic. The scenes give him that, and it puts the drama on him and not someone who struggles to be more than an afterthought. I appreciated and enjoyed that quite a bit.
- I’m less willing to defend the scene that features Team Rocket falling out of the Marauder’s robot for a peach. I have genuinely no idea why that would’ve been added other than to add levity to what’s otherwise a rather dark story.
Maddie Blaustein wrote the dub of “Fly Me to the Moon.” It ain’t bad!
For the benefit of positive Pidgey representation, I should mention that I did train a Mega Pidgeot in Omega Ruby. It’s one of the better Mega Evolutions, both because the design is nice and because it alters Pidgeot’s stats in interesting ways. I got to use a Pidgeot that was good at special attacks! I gave it Heat Wave! That was great.
I suppose the show’s weird use of the Johto Pokémon, which goes so far as to cut them from Celebi’s “welcome to the world of Pokémon” intro, does fall in line with the games’. Gold & Silver, for all their qualities, did often relegate their newbies into lesser tier positions. Morty has a Gengar even though there’s a new Ghost-type (and don’t get me started on Faulkner, Bugsy, or Chuck), many of the new ones can’t even be caught until you hit the credits, and you’re still stuck with a billion Pidgey and Rattata. We’ll probably talk about this more in the next two chapters, but deemphasizing old Pokémon a bit does have creative benefits, not just commercial ones.
The relationship between the show and the games’ mechanics continues to get played with. Eusine’s Alakazam uses Reflect as a barrier only for a Vine Whip (which was a special attacking move back then) to ignore it completely. I’m generally a bit suspicious about adapting the RPG stuff so literally, but a lot of fans seem to like it.
On another note of what fans like, “capture” episodes—when a lead character gets a new Pokémon—are some of the most hyped ones. Which makes sense; they involve a protagonist succeeding and they add to the total cast pool. That’s important in a show where battles and training are so common, and having so little of it in Season 4 does make a sort of excitement dead zone.
Ya know, I wonder if what pushed the Dark-type into being my favorite was that glorious Sneasel slashing rocks and moving gracefully in the movie. Its future evolved form would be my favorite Pokémon for a few Generations.
I don’t know why I didn’t mention it last week, since I was even thinking about it, but there is a second Johto episode I remember: “Wired for Battle.” It’s the one with the kid who trains via a computer program. It’s probably bad, but for whatever reason I’ve remembered it over many years. Maybe because it featured Scizor, who I used to resent for evolving from Scyther, a Pokémon that overshadowed my original favorite Pinsir. Either way, I clearly watched some Johto but retained nothing other than that and Misty’s line about how overpowered Charizard was.
- I know I also “experienced” “A Sappy Ending” and “Roll On, Pokémon!” somewhere, but damned if I know how. Nintendo Power used to have those cheap comic adaptations of the episodes; maybe I read something like that?
On the note of Scizor, and I don’t wanna be the kind of person who complains about using bad type matchups in the anime, since it shouldn’t be as stark as it is in the games, but really, Ash? Fighting one with your Bayleaf??
For all I lauded the show’s gradually improving storytelling, Ash getting a Gym badge by winning a three-on-one fight he didn’t even consider an official battle is some Season 1 nonsense right here.
Eusine was never the most, um, compelling Pokémon side character, but I’ve enjoyed his weird Suicune fixation ever since I played Crystal. It’s a shame the English dub would soon do him dirty by calling him “Eugene” in the thoroughly mediocre Raikou TV special.
I’m realizing I should have called this “A Pokémon anime diary.” That’s on me.

Next movie: Pokémon Heroes: Latios & Latias.

Next episodes:

528: “As Cold as Pryce”
530: “Whichever Way the Wind Blows”
553: “Address Unown!”
560: “Can’t Beat the Heat”
563: “Gotta Catch Ya Later!”

Other movies watched:

Carnosaur
The Celluloid Closet
Eastern Condors
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (note to Future Wolfman once Celebi sends you forward in time: this features perhaps the zaniest soundtrack of any Godzilla movie; make sure to listen to it)
Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III
The Relic
Shakma
Sherlock Holmes: Terror by Night

Other television episodes watched:

Cheers 321, “The Executive’s Executioner”
Cobra Kai 101, “Ace Degenerate”
Cobra Kai 102, “Strike First”
Cobra Kai 103, “Esqueleto”
Cobra Kai 104, “Cobra Kai Never Dies”
Frasier 121, “Travels with Martin”
Frasier 318, “Chess Pains”
Frasier 401, “The Two Mrs. Cranes”
Frasier 506, “Voyage of the Damned”
Regular Show 424, “Limousine Lunchtime”
Regular Show 720, “Donut Factory Holiday” (“And Benson For All was criminally misunderstood!”)
Regular Show 730, “Marvolo the Wizard”
Smallville 213, “Suspect.” Again, I need to stress that this is from a hatewatch and that you should stay as far away from this show as possible unless you have an addition to hilariously bad early-Aughts music. If you’re interested in exploring the Man of Tomorrow, may I suggest the Superman comics of Grant Morrison? Or perhaps the DCAU with capers?
Smallville 215, “Prodigal”
Smallville 217, “Rosetta”
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 222, “The Wire”
The Venture Bros. 710, “The Saphrax Protocol”