Pikachu in Pictures Chapter 7: Chronicles, Crystals, and Kenneth Parcell

Depression! Adultery! Shedinja! Moving sidewalks! A much less exciting, Rayquaza-devoid original header image! All these things and so much more confronted Wolfman Jew in “Pikachu in Pictures” Chapter 7!

Episodes reviewed:

640: “Watt’s with Wattson?” (August 28, 2003). Ash takes Mauville City by storm, knocking each member of Gym Leader Wattson’s team out with a single hit! It turns out Pikachu had been supercharged by one of the Gym’s electric traps, but Wattson finds himself despondent after the match and makes plans to quit.
Pokémon Chronicles Episode 13: “Training Daze” (September 30, 2003). Team Rocket reminisces about the time they met as villainous trainees. Jessie was a bad teammate, James was a greenhorn, Meowth had no self-control, but they found in each other a team that heroically loses every week.
704: “A Togepi Mirage!” (October 2, 2003). A returning Misty and the gang find themselves embroiled in a plot by the villainous Colonel Hanson, who plans to seize Misty’s Togepi—and the Mirage Kingdom from which it came. Togepi evolves, saves the day, and stays behind as the protector of the kingdom’s interdimensional Togepi Paradise.
726: “Exploud and Clear!” (March 4, 2004). A friendly battle seems just the thing to recenter Ash’s aloof Treecko and a Trainer’s violent Loudred. But both Pokémon evolve at the same time into the even more rebellious Grovyle and Exploud, and Grovyle goes off on its own to chase down its rampaging rival.
729: “Love, Petalburg Style!” (March 25, 2004). Ash returns to Petalburg City to challenge May’s father Norman, but he and his friends wind up in a domestic crisis as Norman’s wife Caroline suspects infidelity.

If Season 6 of Pokémon the Series: Ruby & Sapphire was building up to grander, more expansive storytelling, the collection here (the Season 6 finale, three episodes from Season 7, and one unrelated spin-off) suggests it’s comfortable with the new direction. There’s an episode that tackles adult domestic problems, if obliquely. There’s an episode where Ash’s Treecko disobeys him not out of generic disrespect but personal priorities. There’s a Gym Battle that uses an easy win as the impetus for drama, not the dismissal of it. There’s a back end of a two-parter that sent off Togepi, who had spent two hundred episodes doing nothing during its tenure. And there’s an origin story that happily contradicts so much Team Rocket backstory.

Image: The Pokémon Company. Poor Wattson just gets utterly crushed, like so many of the Gym Leaders I’ve steamrolled over the years.

Are they good? Well, they’re mixed. “Watt’s with Wattson?,” the episode that pits Ash against Mauville City’s Gym Leader, is viscerally hated by fans (it features Pikachu sweeping Wattson’s team with no effort, thus depriving us of a thrilling battle), but I ended up enjoying it quite a lot. I like the gimmick of an easy Gym battle, and I like mining that for drama far more. It works much better than “A Togepi Mirage,” which apparently exists just to offload a character who had bored audiences for years by the time it and Misty left. “Love, Petalburg Style!” struggles to tell a story that’s fundamentally too mature for the target demo—especially in the English dub, which was insanely indirect about Caroline’s fear that Norman is cheating on her—but it does swing for it in a plot about our co-lead’s parents of all people.

The weirdest is “Training Daze,” less for its canon-breaking plot than its place as an actual, honest to goodness spinoff. It’s part of Pokémon Chronicles, a series of loose TV specials that aired alongside Pokémon Advance. The gimmick was that they, naturally, featured everyone except Ash; you’d get to see Misty taking the reins of the Cerulean Gym or Gary starting out as a Pokémon researcher. I suppose you can see it as a continuation of what the show’s doing with May, where it’s finding space that isn’t dominated by our hero’s quest. “Training Daze” isn’t particularly noteworthy beyond the inherent fun of an episode that’s all about Jessie, James, and Meowth, but the fact that it is all about them is itself noteworthy.

Also noteworthy is that the other four ones I saw all have explicit connections to past or future episodes. “Love” brings back May’s family, one of whom is of course a Gym Leader and a major foe for Ash. “Togepi” has two old companions. “Exploud” explores and builds on the personality Treecko had since its capture, and it references a Loudred who had appeared in several episodes. This is what Season 6 had promised: more serialization, more plots, and more converging. In fact, “Watt’s with Wattson?” would itself get a Season 7 sequel in this vein with a more equitable rematch between Ash and the head of Mauville Gym. “Advanced Challenge,” the official name for the season, went out of its way to pay off setups and lay more down.

Image: Bulbapedia. And in the case of Chronicles, episodes are made just to flesh out preexisting characters.

This is decently satisfying. I don’t really care about whatever bad experience Team Rocket had with Loudred (in fact, I didn’t even realize until final edits that it was in one of the episodes I did last week); I don’t really care about how well Ash cleaned up in his rematch with Norman. And thanks to an extensive “previously on” segment I know I don’t need to care about the episode that led into the boring “A Togepi Mirage!” So the serialization isn’t forced, nor is it onerous. It had to be. This is a kids’ show made in the years before Netflix, when viewers could just miss a week because they weren’t there or weren’t interested. You know, sometimes I kinda miss those days. When everything wasn’t a shared multiverse and you weren’t expected to be a fully throated fan. Eh, c’est la vie.

Movie reviewed: Pokémon: Destiny Deoxys (July 17, 2004)

Futuristic LaRousse City falls under siege by the extraterrestrial Pokémon Deoxys, who captures its populace and shuts off its copious machinery. It turns out it’s looking for another Deoxys, currently an inert crystal under observation by the city’s head scientist. Ash and a cadre of Trainers, local Pokémon, and the scientist’s PTSD-afflicted son Tory stage a daring rescue, but they’re up against many dangers: Deoxys’ clones, a rampaging Rayquaza whose habitat the alien inadvertently intruded on, and LaRousse’s malfunctioning security systems.

And here is when I reentered the franchise. It was September 22, 2005… maybe. My memory is hazy, but here’s what I recall: Shigeru Miyamoto had come to New York’s Nintendo World store to sign autographs. I was way too far in line for that, but I left with a Nintendo DS Lite and not a DS game, but Pokémon Emerald. Except that’s impossible; the DSL launched in 2006. Most likely I’m conflating two trips. Either way, while I had already come back into gaming, this was what got me back into Pokémon. The game being great certainly helped. And while it would be a year or two before I watched Movie 7, it was iconic just by having Emerald’s leading Legendary as a villain. Rayquaza is great for its own serpentine self, but it’s hard to not passively think of it as the one that brought me home. Home to games like Emerald and, eventually, films like this.

Image: Fancaps. The appeal of the slugfest between Deoxys and Rayquaza was a huge selling point, so much so that a decade later Pokémon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire would redo it.

The stupidly-titled Pokémon: Destiny Deoxys is a bona fide movie-ass movie. It’s got the biggest sense of scale so far, probably because it draws so much from blockbuster film genres that the show rarely appropriated. Structurally, it’s a disaster movie through and through where the heroes are bedeviled as much by failed electronics and a lack of food as they are by Deoxys’ doppelgängers. The clones also make it akin to a zombie movie; they break down the windows and pick off the cast one by one. Mostly, though, it’s a kaiju flick. Especially so by the end, once the mammoth Rayquaza and bizarre Deoxys have their city-destroying battle, but it’s there even in the parts where the alien is the only threat. A city whose size and scale is now a danger.

Film’s also filled with a lot of stuff, mostly very good. I quite liked Tory, the film’s main character, and found his fear of Pokémon a surprisingly sensitive depiction of child trauma. The setting of this city of the future is great. The effortless genre and sequence hopping (Escape sequences! Rescues! Doomed heroes desperately holding off the tide!) is really smart. It also doesn’t hurt that we’ve got a great pair of marquee Pokémon. The crystal alien virus Deoxys is beautifully disquieting; it shapeshifts like the Martian Manhunter, regenerates like Wolverine, and sees and speaks in electrical signals. Rayquaza, meanwhile, is visually stunning, even if it has no personality beyond territorial aggression. And it’s nice that their fight is the biggest one; there’s refreshingly little traditional Pokémon battling. Most of the Pokémon don’t even have a role thanks to the citywide shutdown sealing their Poké Balls shut, which is a neat way to organically up the stakes and add worldbuilding.

However, I don’t think Destiny Deoxys is particularly great as a whole, mainly because it’s not great at synthesizing all those good bits. There are way too many characters for the film’s length, and almost none of them land. The final setpiece where Ash, Tory, and Pikachu have to ride a way of malfunctioning robotic cubes comes out of nowhere. The bigger problem, though, is with the debut of a new comedy character, Munchlax. It’s a baby form of the iconic Snorlax and would formally join the games two years later in Pokémon Diamond & Pearl. Every Pokémon movie has at least one character like this, someone who promotes an upcoming game or feature—Deoxys also counts; it was hidden inside the data for Ruby, Sapphire, and the then-upcoming Emerald—but I do think the movies have been decent at making them not seem entirely mercenary. Munchlax sticks out, though, thanks to its unfunny schtick and eagerness to break the tone even at its most intense.

Image: IMDb. Not even all of movie’s giant, underused cast.

Other than the even blunter than usual cross-promotion, Movie 7 is rather ambitious. All its other flaws come from it biting off far more than it can chew. The delightful excesses of the Deoxys / Rayquaza fight, where one belligerent repeatedly blows off the other’s limbs only for them to grow back, is way cooler and gnarlier than anything Mewtwo did. The attempt to build a massive cast didn’t work, but it’s quite the flex. The writing for Tory evokes Molly, the movies’ best human character thus far, and not to its detriment. It’s an accomplishment, and genuinely really fun to boot. I just wish it was a more cohesive one.

Conclusion: Many years ago, I read a salient argument that writing for 30 Rock, which I believe was nearing the end of its run, must have been much harder than writing for other comedies. For those who haven’t watched the hyper-meta Tina Fey NBC comedy about NBC comedies, it’s extremely light on things like character development or narratives. It’s all about the jokes, which came out at a far faster clip than pretty much any TV comedy before. The challenge isn’t just that it’s hard to write really good and consistent humor, but that there’s nothing you can fall back on. Not when all of your characters are caricatures. I mean, one of the five leads is a evangelical hick TV fanatic pollyanna who’s also an explicit immortal demon.

Probably unintentionally, Pokémon: The Series operated sort of like this at the start. Not with its comedy, nor with its pacing. I mean in the sense that it had the understanding to have one thing that really stuck with you, like a zany Team Rocket scheme or an impressive evolution, and little else. You didn’t have any introspection or character development or continuity, just the one moment. If it worked for you as a kid, then it really worked and whatever flaws came with it were unimportant. The analogy probably sounds insane, but it’s on my mind grapes and I can’t get it out. Anyway, I don’t think that’s an inherently bad way to write stories. So far, Pokémon at its best isn’t that unlike 30 Rock: zany and slightly surreal comedy (though obviously it could never reach the heights of God Cop and “how do you do, fellow kids?”). But you probably do need to move into something more substantial over time, whether or not you’re interested in retaining your audience.

Image: The Pokémon Company. A family drama this emotionally intense seems utterly alien to the first two seasons. Also, why does the meat look so different from everything else? Is that Pokémon meat??

But what’s weird is that the ostensibly less ambitious direction can be just as hard as the more advanced, elaborate serialization the show is trying now. That’s crazy, right? I mean, there’s so much more work involved. But, that stuff acts as a buttress. “Exploud and Clear!” may not have been great television, but if you like Treecko—and as far as I can tell everyone liked him—then you get an episode that’s just as much about him as it is Ash. And being the one where he evolves gives the events some bonus weight, too. This is a kind of a safety net you can build out of things like serialization or more substantial storytelling. Mediocre episodes can get a boost by being “important,” good ones often feel even better, and connecting two or more creates a web of greater impact. Without that, every individual story has to work a lot harder to make an impact.

This is not to say that serialization is something every show should strive for. It isn’t. Most importantly, it’s also not to say that it’s the only thing you need; Pokémon still needs better writing, better animation, and the greater continuity does not keep those from being its two worst and most consistent flaws. But between the movie (which wasn’t amazing altogether but was filled with a lot of fun, innovative parts) and the season (the same), it’s clear the show is making a greater investment in its many individual facets. So even if I’ve not yet seen a Hoenn episode that’s matched the heights I saw in Johto, the general structure and baseline are better. The floor is improving. Now we just need a higher ceiling.

Though to be honest, I can’t deny that my thoughts this week were turned more to the future. Next week we’ve got two very hated episodes, one of whom capped off the Team Magma and Aqua arc and effectively defined what serialization meant in Hoenn. Then after that it’s Battle Frontier, where I’ll be discussing the voice actor switch. Then it’s the Diamond & Pearl years, with which I have absolutely no personal history. This week felt a bit quiet, but largely because it’s right before a lot of big stuff. But hey, quiet isn’t always bad. At least, it really wasn’t this week.

Image: Bulbapedia. And hey! My good friend Rayquaza was as fantastic as ever.

Errant thoughts:

Seviper Watch: heard Seviper! Though it was hard to clearly hear the voice.
Time for the weird 4Kids dub corner! Here’s the craziest edit they did: “Training Daze” originally ends with Jessie, James, Meowth, Cassidy, and Butch, and their utterly boring Raticate all graduating into full Team Rocket agents. But the English cut decided to only have our main characters succeed and their rivals be stuck as probationaries because… I guess they wanted Jessie, James, and Meowth to have an unmitigated win. So they changed the ending, and then cut a shot of Cassidy and Butch celebrating. It’s so incredibly needless. The episode is full of dub rewrites, but that one took so much effort for so little.
- Of course, it’s 4Kids; there was plenty of other weird edits. Giovanni’s red wine was recolored to look like water, for instance.
There were also quite a few cuts to the film, though—literally; the initial Cartoon Network edit trimmed the film from 100 to 87 minutes to add in commercial breaks. Unfortunately, that’s the one I saw. But that was on CN’s head.
But 4Kids’ biggest Season 7 addition (in that it affected every episode until they lost control of the property) was “Trainer’s Choice,” the segment that replaced “Who’s that Pokémon?” in America. Ash would ask you to pick which of three Pokémon fit a criterion, typically “which is best against X?” It was… not well received. There were mistakes a plenty; “correct” answers were frequently wrong, Pokémon names were misspelled or outright misapplied, and questions were basic. After a while, they did commit to improving it with fewer errors and more interesting questions, but the damage was done. For fans, this was the clearest evidence that the studio ostensibly “didn’t care.”
Last week I suspected that there might be a legal issue as to why the dub regularly replaces the original Japanese score; turns out I was right. Cart Boy sent my way this interview with late series director Masamitsu Hidaka, who explained (among other things, like the history of the GS Ball) that there are financial costs to bringing over the original score in its entirety. I do think The Pokémon Company should spend more for the full music, but I’m not surprised at all that 4Kids wouldn’t.
I’m continuing to be less satisfied with Eric Stuart’s James performance—it’s gotten quite too broad—but saying “no one’s carried me since my mamma!” in the exact inflection a line that big and dumb deserves was kinda great.
The Japanese version of “Training Daze” features a song called “Team Rocket Forever,” an insert song sung by Jessie, James, and Meowth that had occasionally been localized for the English version. But in the dub, they replace it with “Double Trouble,” an exceptionally stupid number from the 1999 album Pokémon 2.B.A. Master (which graced the home of a young and impressionable Wolfman Jew). If you want to know what Pokémon was like as a fad, check it out on YouTube or Spotify… or don’t.

The song also made it impossible to watch without shouting “Meowthity! The Napoleon of crime! He’s broken every Poké law!”
The episode also has a surprisingly suggestive shot of Jessie and James heavily breathing while facing each other. I guess it’s part of the whole deal where they’re more for the older viewers.
Max drove me crazy in “Love, Petalburg Style!,” always angrily defending his dad and keeping the plot from moving. The little nerdlinger deserves to get his nonexistent books dumped.
A much better form of promotion in the movie was the Battle Tower, a facility in several of the games (including Emerald, which the picture was advertising most). It’s quick, does its job for showing a normal battle, and leaves.
I’ve always liked Wattson. He carries himself and dresses like some wily old communist, incredibly affable but with a scary intensity. His backstory in the games of building this futuristic utopia, not unlike the city from the movie, that utterly destroyed itself is also great. I’m happy I liked his episode so much, even if most fans didn’t.
Norman, on the other hand, is boring. I suppose it fits his role as an expert in the jack of all trades Normal-type, but Whitney, Lenora, and Larry are also Normal-type Gym Leaders and they’re all interesting. Especially Larry, the poor dope.
One thing I forgot to mention last time is that the title cards for Hoenn all show a map of the region, where the main cities are, and where Ash is or is going. It’s pretty neat. Makes it more like an adventure.
I knew that of Ash’s main Hoenn team, Torkoal was the “saddest” one; it had virtually no notable victories and cried a lot. It did live up to that a bit in the limited time I saw it. Poor thing can’t even carry a pom pom.
- I guess I should add some context to that. The most you get out of the team’s party in the movie is a very silly montage where they play in a park as a way to make Tory more comfortable around Pokémon. It’s kind of dumb, as is the song that covers it, but I liked it well enough. Again, I’m finding myself most compelled by the aspects of Pokémon life that exist apart from battles.
I was shocked watching “A Togepi Mirage!” and feeling confident that I’d get nothing out of the first half of the two-parter, “The Princess and the Togepi.” Misty has her new outfit, there’d be some exposition as to why the villain got Jessie, James, and Meowth to support him, but I didn’t feel like I missed anything. As a rule, I think it’s good for individual episodes in mini-arcs to feel at least somewhat self-contained, but there should be a… something to make you want to watch each one in full.

Next movie: Pokémon: Lucario & the Mystery of Mew.

Next episodes:

806: “The Scuffle of Legends”
808: “Solid as a Solrock”
811: “A Cacturne for the Worse”
817: “Do I Hear a Ralts?”
830: “Rhapsody in Drew”

Other movies watched:

Aline
The Blackcoat’s Daughter
Dick Tracy Special: Tracy Zooms In. I hate to play the “I read hyper-complicated Grant Morrison comics; I know weird” card too often, but this is actually too weird and too “internet,” even for me. Like, Aline was WEIRD, way too weird, too, but the Dick Tracy thing was WEIRD.
A Gnome Named Gnorm (hey, don’t judge me)
Some Like It Hot