Pikachu in Pictures Chapter 8: Sphealing the Deal

…Look, anyone who knows anything about the Pokémon anime knows this week is gonna be a lot. Let’s just get started.

Episodes reviewed:

806: “The Scuffle of Legends” (October 14, 2004). The conspiracies of Teams Magma and Aqua reach a head as both capture the Blue and Red Orbs necessary for controlling Groudon and Kyogre. But after Pikachu gets possessed by Groudon’s Blue Orb and Aqua leader Archie by the Red, the titans of land and sea rise to fight.
808: “Solid as a Solrock” (October 28, 2004). A uniquely aerial double battle tests not just Ash, but his bickering Gym Leader opponents Tate and Liza. It gets even harder for him when the two fall back in sync, and he, Pikachu, and Swellow have to find a combination attack their foes can’t counter.
811: “A Cacturne for the Worse” (November 18, 2004). May faces trouble when her newest rival, the crafty Harley, decides to go after her both on and off the Contest stage.
817: “Do I Hear a Ralts?” (January 6, 2005). Max discovers a deeply sick Ralts in the woods and becomes instantly attached. He and Ash’s Snorunt take it to the far-off Pokémon Center while avoiding Team Rocket, who’ve disguised themselves as Ralts’ family.
830: “Rhapsody in Drew” (April 7, 2005). After an easy victory against Harley, May loses handily to Drew in the Grand Festival, the event to determine Hoenn’s Top Coordinator. Meanwhile, Snorunt evolves while perfecting Ice Beam with Ash.

Three of four weeks in, the underlying theme of Pokémon the Series: Ruby & Sapphire has been about promise. And now, in Season 8—called “Advance Battle” loudly by the new opening theme, “I’m Unbeatable”—we get the fulfillment of this promise. Lo and behold, it’s kind of a whiff. Contests, touted as a new frontier, were mixed. Ash’s battles had no guarantee of flair after five years of practice. Max failed to endear himself to most of the crowd. And the big story arcs, the ones fans were excited for the most, ended with some degree of ignominy.

Image: The Pokémon Company. Archie has the only fun performance in the big two-parter, and he mostly just stands in place.

The nadir was the two-parter that ended the plot for Teams Magma and Aqua. I didn’t see “Gaining Groudon,” but “The Scuffle of Legends” speaks for itself. The biggest thing is that the animation, which has never been good, is terrible. Fight scenes are almost uniformly static images of Pokémon mid-attack. This is supposed to be the big culmination, and it looks so bad. Even the crude drawings Meowth uses for one comedy bit, which are supposed to be bad, have the same amount of animation and far more charm. But every part is like this. The music is dull, even if that’s a dub issue. The story’s a big nothing. The wild personalities of the villains are largely nonexistent. Lance, the likable but boring Champion from the Johto years, gets to be the big hero instead of one of Hoenn’s more compelling flock. It’s so… deflating.

And if fans found “The Scuffle of Legends” deflating, they’d just have to wait two episodes to find it again. Truthfully, “Solid as a Solrock” is mostly fine; there’s a fun boss fantasy, a unique (if underexplored) arena in the Gym’s planetarium, and some clever beats. But it’s also the Gym Battle that ends with Pikachu violently electrocuting itself and Swellow to give them invincible “thunder armor” that’s never explained, foreshadowed, or used again. It’s far from Ash’s only stupid victory—I’d consider it more interesting than, say, his rematch with Blaine—but this was supposed to be the era that finally “fixed” Gyms. As Ash’s stories petered out, viewers looked to Contests, where the most compelling newcomer was contentious by design.

…Look, Harley’s problematic. He’s a thickly gay-coded bad guy: flamboyant, prissy, vain, androgynous as a joke, an easily dispatched jobber, and more than a few other tropes pop culture uses to belittle queer identity (played, inexplicably, by future A-list Broadway star Andrew Rannells). And he’s a heel who always plays dirty, which plays into that and is a hard sell for a franchise this nice. But I get why there were viewers who liked him, and why I did too despite feeling kinda weird about it. He’s clever and animated, with Rannells giving one of the show’s strongest performances. His Cacturne’s amazing. In fact, over the course of the show Harley builds a roster of creepy yet captivating Pokémon, and from what I can tell he directs them to visually interesting ends. He did in his debut, certainly. Contests are exciting because they can let the show depict Pokémon in stunning ways, and while there were fans who derided that as “cute” and “girly,” here’s a theatrical performer turning the ugliness of Cacturne or Banette into beauty.

Image: The Pokémon Company. Harley having such a distinct look helps him a lot when so many rivals just have “a” jacket or T-shirt.

May, meanwhile, has… Bulbasaur, like Ash. And Squirtle, like Ash. And a damn Munchlax, who eventually got an attack that let it do anything (Skitty also has a similar move). She isn’t a bad character at all, but it’s hard not to view what I’ve seen of her journey as a retread of Ash’s first one. Unsatisfying wins, a bland team, and a lack of real continuity. Her victories over Harley were fair, but I have read up on her other Contests to get a feel, and… I’m not confident they land? They don’t sound compelling. Both then and now, I get the sense that you either loved May and her corner of the franchise or resented her, her hypnotically boring main rival / possible love interest, and the corner itself. A foe who despised her was an easy sell for anyone in the latter camp.

On that note, this has been my first taste of Pokémon Contests, and I’m left disappointed. I love the idea of fights where attacks disrupt your opponents’ flair, but that performative aspect seems largely meaningless. It’s an acceptable strategy to go for a KO, which is completely beside the point. With Harley (who only loses this way) it’s meant to show how weak the “sissy” villain is, which is ultimately the single most offensive aspect of his character, but it’s such a boring way to approach the pageants. It doesn’t help that the “points” system is arbitrary; May can counter most of Drew’s attacks, send Combusken leaping through his Flygon’s Flamethrower like an acrobat without taking damage, and still not lose him points. And, of course, it’s hard to not get the sense that our heroes mostly win with the same Petal Dancing strategies. One guy had his Swalot eat and spit out his Pinsir like a missile! It was so cool! And he lost!

When these episodes were airing, Harley was a lightning rod; he was either a creep who was too mean to the deuteragonist or a jolt of personality Hoenn and its Contests desperately needed (there were also people upset over him being a gay joke, people who liked him as a gay joke, and people who just wanted any queer Pokémon content). May’s fans unsurprisingly hate him. But all sides, as far as I can tell, agreed on at least one point: Hoenn was lacking. Maybe the action wasn’t clean, especially in an era where Western viewers could be enjoying the fisticuffs of Justice League Unlimited, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Maybe the show shouldn’t end its big, world-threatening event with two monsters leisurely shooting lasers back and forth. Maybe we did really need good filler this whole time. Maybe Contests were inherently bad—they’re not, but they were an easy, newer target. Slowly, the promise of the Advanced Generation withered away, a bit at a time.

Image: Bulbapedia. I can’t really find full fault with any episode that features Lord Sir James Jamison and his friends, Koilia and Gardevoir.

That, unfortunately, has become the legacy of the Hoenn years: unfulfilled potential and perfunctory endings. And viewers directed their frustration everywhere, not just Harley, May, or the plot. Innocuous stories like “Do I Hear a Ralts?,” which did give some character development to the terminally obnoxious Max, became symbolic and hated. It has a middling vocal song, there’s a very goofy ending bit where Ralts talks, but I didn’t find it terrible at all. But that didn’t matter. It was doomed to be the episode focusing on the awful character—and Max’s tenure on the show is mostly awful—that wasted the formal debut of fan favorite Gardevoir. Fans were out for blood. I mean, they always are; they’re Pokémon fans. But especially here, where no avenue of the new direction was an unmitigated win.

But it was the myth arc that took the brunt of that resentment, and fairly so. When the reboot started, the threat of Team Magma and Team Aqua was the crown jewel. They made the opening credits, they made consistent appearances, and that mattered. I also do suspect their plot helped bolster the show’s foundation. But in the episode, it was like that very bolstering was used against it. All the supporting characters turned to stick figures. All those big discoveries made meaningless. It smacks of last minute issues, whether timing or some promotional thing related to Pokémon Emerald or… something. But that hardly matters to viewers who watched the death of a deal they felt they had made with the show.

Neither Advance Battle nor the broader Ruby & Sapphire era ended with the Grand Festival and Ash’s requisite Pokémon League. The final episodes started the Battle Frontier filler arc, where Ash came back to his home turf of Kanto. It had plenty of promise of its own, and many failures and successes. But for the Western side of the franchise, and specifically the English speaking contingent, it became the site of an especially heated battle the likes of which the franchise had rarely seen. And it left a mark far greater than Kyogre and Groudon’s loser battle.

Movie reviewed: Pokémon: Lucario & the Mystery of Mew (July 16, 2005)

A sojourn to ancient Cameran Palace turns sour when a local, playful Mew whisks Pikachu and Meowth away to the rock formation called the Tree of Beginnings. Ash’s expedition to rescue his best friend gets help from wealthy daredevil Kidd Summers and Lucario, a long lost Pokémon knight from a past age. As the group approaches the Tree and battles its deadly protectors, they uncover the story of Lucario and the culture hero master who supposedly betrayed it.

There’s a certain prestige Lucario and the Mystery of Mew has among the Ruby & Sapphire pictures. Movie 6 has the fun villain and imaginative pacing, Movie 7 has the kaiju action, Movie 9 has… nothing*, but Movie 8 is definitely the best regarded of the lot. And there’s a reason for that! It’s not quite within spitting distance of Spell of the Unown, but it’s the most overtly cinematic and well put together of this batch. I also can’t imagine it hurt coming right on the heels of Drew, Kyogre, and Groudon.

* Or so I’ve been led to understand by the internet. Obviously I’m hoping that’s not the case.

Image: Amazon Prime. The whole film revolves around the relationship between Lucario and Sir Aaron.

There’s quite a few reasons. The most mechanically interesting one is that like modern Disney movies, there are antagonists (Kidd in the first act, the Legendary Golems Regirock, Regice, and Registeel in the back end) but no real villain. And I think that does impact the other parts; certainly it feels kinder. Everyone’s goals feel fair whether saving their friends, finding the truth, or protecting their home. It fits Lucario’s relationship with the long dead and suspect Sir Aaron, a novel avenue for the show to explore fraught human / Pokémon relations. The movie has plenty of unique environments people want to discover and save, so it’s always eye-catching. Kidd has the same fun energy Annie and Oakley had in Pokémon Heroes, but she gets a bit more depth. There’s a real economy to the storytelling, which is great—especially given how much longer it is than most of these.

I also think having a mystery is good. It’s not a good mystery, but it’s there, with the characters always asking questions about the past. That actually extended out of the film, with Lucario being an enigma for viewers. What Type was it (the unique Fighting / Steel, despite neither often having mystical properties)? Was it a Legendary (it isn’t, though it is rare)? And if it isn’t, then why did it get to star in a movie? We can’t experience that anymore, but it does follow this motif of discovery. And the movie kept the discovery going right into its climax, where we uncover a crazed, primordial land and well expressed character drama.

And this is probably a glib reading, but the picture does follow Advanced’s broader values. Lucario isn’t a full co-lead, but he has more presence and a greater arc than most of the characters in these things. The gang’s Pokémon get a bit more attention, particularly when the humans try to release them as they’re absorbed by the Tree of Beginnings’ immune system (oh, right; the final act involves the heroes being abducted by giant shape-shifting gelatinous bacteria). It also follows the prior three movies in downplaying traditional Trainer-led battling, which I think is more interesting for us and non-fans. Sure, few of them are probably watching these anymore, but the big screen entries should act like they could be.

Image: Bulbapedia. The whole climax is just really strong.

It’s even a bit of a step up in handling its promotional Pokémon. There are still comedy babies, and the Weavile duo that took the already cool Sneasel into overdrive, but they’re better handled than Munchlax. Mime Jr. especially is really cute. This kind of blunt promotion was kind of inevitable once the road to Pokémon Diamond & Pearl got ever-longer and the show had to find ways to work with a number of characters who were getting announced well before their debut (Munchlax, Bonsly, and Mime Jr. all joined the cast, while Weavile had recurring roles that helped it become my favorite Pokémon for some time). The most successful of the lot is, fittingly, Lucario himself, whose wuxia demeanor and Goku / Ryu-esque energy made him an instant mascot. The Pokémon Company knew they had a ready-made icon on their hands.

Anyway, this was a good’un. After Season 8 largely fell apart and Battle Frontier was left righting the ship, Lucario was a real triumph. Unmitigated, you might say. It’s a good example of how these kinds of swampy quagmires for shows don’t have to be purely bad. Consider the movie the “two-parter origin story in The Legend of Korra Season 2” of Pokémon. Obviously it’s nowhere near that good, nor is the regular anime that bad, but my point stands.

Conclusion: Outside of the anime, the Pokémon fandom was in a generally good place in ‘05 and ‘06. The slow leadup to Diamond & Pearl was filled with side games, some of which were even liked (such as the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon crossover series, to the delight of Source Gaming’s Hamada). Several of the new Pokémon, like Weavile and Lucario, got positive attention. The franchise was largely covering for Game Freak’s slow jump to Nintendo DS, but it gave it a nice, long bit of space. It was also rewarded when the Gen IV games finally released to thunderous acclaim. But within the anime, things were rough.

Image: Fandom. If Sneasel rules, Weavile rules just as much. And Game Freak knows; otherwise why would they go out of their way to include it in everything?

I could tell without having ever watched it, because I was there. After jumping back into the series in early 2006, it wasn’t long before I went from reading the official Pokémon website to reading Pokémon fansites, like Serebii. Of course, these dedicated fans kept an eye not just on the English language side of the franchise, but the Japanese one as well. I always knew we got the games later, but this was taking a peak behind the curtain. To me, Weavile and Lucario were originally “Manyula” and “Rukario,” as it was months before they were formally introduced outside Japan. I even remember the mild fan outcry when the latter got its dub name “change.” The engine of Pokémon was so much larger than the façade I had seen as a child.

And when you’re a teenager on the internet, the next place to go are the forums, where I lurked for roughly four or five years. I enjoyed fan-fiction (including neat horror stories about Cacturne and Banette), passive-aggressive debates about competitive play, very silly complaints about the incoming “Physical / Special split” and how it “ruined” Alakazam, and a lot of anime discourse. Learning about Shipping from a fandom like this changes a man. It’s probably also not a small part of why I get hives from phrases like “Gary Stu,” “OP,” and every term invented on TV Tropes, since that’s also when I started falling into a bit of an alternative, mildly counterculture mindset. I wasn’t above it all, I was still lurking on a Pokémon fansite, but I wanted something artsier than the show could give. So I read complaints instead of watching.

This was right as Battle Frontier started. And I gotta say, it is fascinating watching these now, after over fifteen years, after all that time reading comments. I could only know “Solid as a Solrock” as this tremendously dumb deus ex machina (which it is), and not a perfectly average Gym episode. I knew Harley as a jerk (which he is), a cliché (which he is), and possibly a flipped bird towards the nonsense of Contests (which he… might be?), and not a surprisingly charming performance. I knew Max as the most unbelievable pain in the ass ever devised by man or beast (which oh dear god he is), and not the unbelievable pain in the ass with some stories that aren’t awful. Because… that’s what it’s like on the outside. That’s what it’s like when you have fans as your guides.

Image: Bulbapedia. Honestly, it’d be kinda neat if the Thunder Armor became a move in the game. Like a move that only works in Double Battles.

Honestly, the shocking thing isn’t that these episodes are better or blander or more interesting than the fans claimed. They’re fans; they’re egregiously hyperbolic (though I will say that I really didn’t expect “Do I Hear a Ralts” to be quite so inoffensive). What shocks me is that “The Scuffle of Legends” lives down a hundred percent to its reputation. It’s really rare to see something quite so bad, incoherent, and unsatisfying. Despite that, though, I have enjoyed Hoenn. What I experienced lacked the punch of Johto’s best, and I’m suspicious of the many paths the show took, but in the end it does feel truly new. When I watch more episodes after this project is done, there are a few from this era that I’m excited to watch. Not many, but some. A couple even focus on Max! How’s that for surprising?

Errant thoughts:

Seviper Watch: We got our final taste of Michael Sinterniklaas as Sevliper before the voice actor switch. He’s a perfectly good evil poison snake.
Fun 4Kids edit: Harley’s Cacturne gets to appeal to the crowd by engraving a skull and crossbones into the stage, but the skull and crossbones he draws over his picture of May was edited into a frowny face emoji that’s obviously not the same art style.
- There were edits for Lucario, but comparatively fewer and certainly less extreme. It wasn’t 4Kids’ last dub of the property, but it was the last one to come out, so it’s good the production level is stronger, more faithful, and less weird. It comes across as a genuine tribute to what the studio could do at its best.
- Because I am extremely immature, I did chuckle a bit at James’ line about “taking it from behind” in the two-parter. But it is interesting (and perhaps problematic) at how the dub made him and Harley even more exaggerated and stereotypical than they originally were.
- Actually, there is an edit they probably should’ve gone with but didn’t. Harley mocks May by saying she’s about to evolve into an Octillery, which falls in line with an octopus being a particularly unflattering comparison in Japanese. And while you probably shouldn’t call someone an octopus here, it lacks that cultural connotation. Maybe they should have had him call her a Tentacruel, and… oh dear god, am I trying to tell 4Kids to make changes now?
In other localization news, as of last week we are officially out of the Miramax woods! They lost the rights to distributing the Pokémon movies in English after Destiny Deoxys, meaning we don’t have to see any more “special thanks” credits to Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Thank the lord. Tragically, it also makes the four movies harder to track down, and they’ll probably never appear on Pokémon TV, but such as it is.
Lucario and the Mystery of Mew is as far as I got with the movies. I watched the first four roughly when they came out in America, and the next after I got back into the franchise. So it’ll all be new territory when it comes to that side of the project, just as it’s mostly been for the TV show.
Kidd, she of the amazingly out there spandex spy outfit, pronounces “Pidgeot” as “Pidgit.” It’s somewhat odd from a modern perspective, since we’re used to pronouncing Pokémon names phonetically, but that is apparently how Game Freak initially intended to pronounce it. It was even in a Pokémon book I had as a kid. Real blast from the past to hear it in the movie after all this time.
I didn’t really have a way to get into it in the main article, but I found it interesting how Lucario acts as a look back into what Pokémon Training, if you can even call it that, was like in that ancient past. Even Aaron’s staff is just a cruder, crueler Poké Ball. Just another way to explore those kinds of relationships.
This is perhaps less important in the grand scheme of things, but I didn’t like that “The Scuffle of Legends” had Groudon being more overtly “good” and Kyogre more “bad.” I remember being nonplussed years ago when I read the recaps. And I’m still nonplussed.
It’s kind of awesome that the origin of May’s dislike of Pokémon from her very first episode is explained only 102 episodes later, that it’s hilarious, and its reveal is in the form of her being publicly humiliated by her only good rival.
I’ve been down on May this week, and especially her team, so I should counter that a bit by pointing out how fun it is that she has a Combusken. The show clearly gave her Torchic because it evolves into Blaziken, the Hoenn starter they were pushing the most. But instead of having it stay as a precious Torchic or a beautiful but tough Blaziken, it spends the vast majority of the show as their extremely awkward teenage self. Combusken’s ugly and dumb and adorable for it. It’s the only visually dynamic member of her party.
I realize why I don’t like Drew’s design: he looks like one of the child NPCs in Cyberpunk or Aline in Aline, just a normal adult shrunken down. God, that movie…
With my dislike of Sonic the Hedgehog fairly notorious on Source Gaming, I suppose I should point out that Harley shares a Japanese VO, Jun’ichi Kanemaru, with Sonic. And that’s cool.
As this is the last we’ll see of Harley’s Cacturne, this will tragically also be the last we’ll see of Cacturne at all. Other than Jynx (who’s notoriously racist), the Porygon line (who’s associated with the mass seizure incident), and Kadabra (who was banned from media due to a now-rescinded legal complaint by Uri Geller), it’s the only Pokémon from the first three Generations to have never appeared once in any post-Ruby & Sapphire season and has one of the single largest gaps between its last appearance on the show and today. Hopefully it’ll come back in the Scarlet & Violet anime.
- Actually… now I think I kinda wanna train one, too, at some point.
Between the boss fantasy of Chibi Giovanni enjoying the big city nightlife, the Kirlia and Gardevoir costumes, and Meowth’s kindergarten drawings, this was a banner week for Team Rocket’s unbridled imagination.
And let’s give a final big hand to the actors of 4Kids! The studio is such an odd and messy part of anime history, and while its stable wasn’t always the best—remember, voice acting and especially dubbing in the world of American animation was and is rough—they were always game. Real class acts all around.

Next movie: Pokémon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea.

Next episodes:

902: “Sweet Baby James”
912: “Time-Warp Heals All Wounds”
915: “Harley Rides Again”
918: “Cutting the Ties that Bind!”
946: “Once More With Reeling!”

Other movies watched:

Bounty Tracker
Children of the Corn
Friday 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter
Pray for Death

Other television episodes watched:

30 Rock 107, “Tracy Does Conan”
30 Rock 314, “The Funcooker”
30 Rock 316, “Apollo, Apollo”
Cora Kai 205, “All In”
Poker Face 105, “Time of the Monkey”
Poker Face 106, “Exit Stage Death”
Poker Face 107, “The Future of the Sport”
Poorly Drawn Lines 103, “The Museum”
Regular Show 406, “150 Piece Kit”
Regular Show 433, “Blind Trust”
Regular Show 434, “World’s Best Boss”
Smallville 305, “Perry”
Smallville 306, “Relic.” See, this is how you make exquisitely terrible TV, Pokémon. You want an episode that exists, apparently, to badly homage Rebel without a Cause, so you do a flashback story where Superman psychically experiences the time his alien dad was a drifter on Earth and had 1960s-style coitus with Superman’s love interest’s relative. And they’re played by the same terrible actors in period attire! And while we’re at it, you call those stock images of Walrein and Mightyena poor depictions of action? That’s not anything near Tom Welling leisurely hitting someone set to a Staind song!
Smallville 309, “Asylum”
Star Trek 118, “Arena”
Star Trek 119, “Tomorrow is Yesterday”
Star Trek 122, “Space Seed”
Ultra Q 110, “The Underground Super Express Goes West”
Ultra Q 114, “Tokyo Ice Age”
Ultra Q 119, “Challenge from the Year 2020”