Better Than A Pokemon With A Sharp Stick TV essay, 3/3/99 I like Pokemon, despite (or perhaps partly because of) the awkward way the animated series' episodes seem to have been re-edited from the original anime. I'm intrigued by what the series might or might not be saying about human/animal relations, within its alternate-universe world where most nonhuman animal species belong to this whole other life form with odd superpowers (varying from species to species) but which can be tamed by being weakened in a fight and then forcibly teleported into an egglike "Pokeball." Each episode introduces viewers to at least one previously-unseen species of Pokemon, ranging from superpowered equivalents of everyday Earth animals (birds, bugs, cats, moles) to total bug-eyed monsters and abstract shapes with faces and legs tacked on. (Like I said, it's an incredibly complicated plot, one which grownups are far less likely to comprehend than kids.) It's also a show and a marketing phenomenon with two local connections. The Pokemon name, and the 150 or so different critters in the Pokemon universe, are owned by Nintendo, the Japanese gaming empire whose U.S. division's in Darkest Redmond; while Renton's Wizards of the Coast puts out a role-playing card game based on the show's elaborate fantasy lore. The first Americans heard of Pokemon was when hundreds of Japanese children got epileptic seizures after viewing strobe-like patterns flashed during an episode. (The real irony's that fewer than half the victims watched the episode's original telecast; most were exposed when Japanese evening newscasts excerpted the scene in question.) That scene was cut when the series was redubbed for U.S. consumption. Other changes also seem to have been made; episodes are chopped up, cut to as little as 18 minutes of airtime, and then padded with low-budget extraneous material (such as the daily "Pokerap" song). Or perhaps they're not as heavily altered as they seem. Fans I've corresponded with in the process of writing this piece insist they've seen "Pokerap"-type segments in the original Japanese episodes. They also claim the stories were written presupposing viewer familiarity with the characters and concepts from the original games; and that that's why the plots sometimes seem choppy by the standards of dumbed-down American kidvid. The Pokemon universe began in 1995, when Nintendo released the original "Pocket Monsters" video game in Japan, in three versions. The independent designers who created the game on Nintendo's behalf tried to place cute kid-appeal characters within a long, engaging adventure-game format that would encourage lingering exploration of the game, its fictional world, and its puzzles and secrets. It also encouraged fan dialogue (to successfully complete the game, by capturing and taming all 150 critters, required learning clues scttered across the game's three slightly-different versions). The smashing success of the original game spawned sequel games, Game Boy condensed games, the card game, an animated feature film (not yet here), comics, dolls,and assorted other merchandise; much of which is now showing up Stateside. The expansive, open-ended concept (sequel games now in preparation supposedly will introduce 250 newly "discovered" Pokemon species) means the phenomenon could keep going for years to come, or at least until the next batch of young gamers decides it's dumb and wants something else (a cycle which apparently turns over in Japan even faster than over here). At its best, the kiddie side of Japanese anime (Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z) is an entertainment genre in which soon-all-too-familiar plot and design formulas can collide with moments of utterly-baffling weirdness. Pokemon is kiddie-anime at, or nearly at, its best.

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