Pokemon in the Late 90's
Sept 22, 2018 12:03:41 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Sept 22, 2018 12:03:41 GMT -5
Sometime around 1998, Pokemon exploded in the US. To my surprise, it's still popular today. However I don't think it's as red-hot now as it was in the late 90's. In retrospect, I see it as a three-pronged multimedia campaign. These three prongs were: the card game, the video games, and the TV show.
The Pokemon Card Game
My reasons for getting into Pokemon as a youngster are actually kind of depressing. Kids are jerks, so they'd pick on me. My memory isn't the clearest on this but I think it was mostly verbal name-calling kind of stuff. Point is, I don't think I was beat up or anything, but I still wasn't treated the best by my peers. Then Pokemon cards got popular, everyone began bringing them to school, and whoever had the rarest cards was treated with reverence. So, I thought if I got good cards I'd become cool or something. One kid had a holographic Blastoise with a horrific crease through the middle. We didn't care. We practically worshipped him. Then somehow I traded for it and it was mine. Everyone acted like I was hot stuff for because I had this rare card, even though it looked like someone's origami practice. Then one morning the principal announced over the intercom, "Attention students, starting tomorrow Pokemon cards are off-limits on the school premises." There was a chorus of groans and then it didn't really matter which cards any of us had.
I would beg my Dad to take me to the Pokemon League. It was held at a Books A Million 12 miles from my house. A bunch of kids would show up with binders full of cards. There was this tubby Samoan looking guy in his 20's who was like the referee or something. He'd give "gym badges" to the kids who won X number of games and settle disputes over the rules. I couldn't have earned more than 2 badges, and I mostly lost, but I still had fun. It was just hard as a 10 year old to show up consistently or buy enough cards to really build anything viable. What finally killed my interest in TCG's was when I got the Pokemon Card Game for Gameboy. It was cool because you could play with really rare and expensive cards without spending hundreds of dollars on booster packs. But it only contained the first 3 sets of cards. I thought, "Shoot, why was I ever buying cards? I'll just wait for them to make Pokemon TCG 2 on the Gameboy Advance." Ha.
The Pokemon Video Games
I couldn't get enough of the video games. In 1998 my grandparents got me a bright yellow Gameboy Color along with Pokemon Blue Version. In my late 20's I can tell this basically just a kiddie RPG set to easy mode. You have to be brain dead not to win, but everyone in the game heaps you with praise anyway. (NPC: "Wow! I can't believe you beat my entire team of fire Pokemon with a water Pokemon! How the heck did you do that, kid?") This isn't an unfair assessment, but it overlooks a few things:
1) Giga pets had just exploded a year or two before this game came out, and you could hardly interact with those things. They'd just yell at you to feed them and clean up after them. But this overlooks how kids like to incorporate imagination into their play, even with video games. So I think the idea was for kids to imagine that their Pokemon had personalities and they were all on an adventure together. I mean, if you want to blast through the game with the most powerful monsters, I guess you can do that. But I think the idea is more to pick a favorite based on your feelings. ("That one's the cutest." "Oh, I like that one's wings." "That one's got a cool design, I like him!"). I think it was a step toward the personalization that we see in modern games today.
2) Kids like to pretend that they're grownup, or at least that they have grownup autonomy. This was part of the reason I loved Zelda: Ocarina of Time so much at age 9. Turning into adult link was a huge fantasy fulfillment at an age where I relied on my parents for everything. Pokemon Blue Version was like mainlining this feeling. ("Oh, you're 10 years old? OK, time to leave the house forever and go on a quest to tame magical animals.") I even asked for Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Stadium, two N64 games I can see now are pretty brazen cash-ins. But again, it made sense according to late 90's, 10-year-old logic, since half the fun was just seeing Pokemon running around doing Pokemon stuff.
The only aspect of the Pokemon games I think has aged really well is the soundtrack of the RPG's on Gameboy. It's got the same same infectiously catchy quality as Banjo Kazooie. I could go decades without hearing these tunes and I'd still remember them. In more recent Pokemon, they'll include classic music, but they change all the instrumentation so it sounds more modern. I think it loses something in translation. Something about those otherworldly, machine-generated chip tunes just makes them sound right.
The Pokemon TV Show
This is the part I remember the least distinctly. I had one VHS tape with two or three episodes on it. Sometimes I'd catch it on TV. Anyway I don't think the particulars are important because it was basically a commercial for the games and cards. Today I can see it's a dreadfully cliched shounen anime about a boy trying to be the best at whatever magical thing people do in his world, failing at it, persevering, trying again, then succeeding. See? I can't even remember anything specific, that's how bland it was.
However, I would argue that this show pioneered something important: introducing the US to anime. Before 1998 anime wasn't widely available or talked about. I've heard stories of fans passing around bootleg, fan-subbed VHS tapes containing episodes of their favorite shows, or unwittingly running into hentai because there wasn't a rating system for any of it. But now you can just go to an ordinary retail place and buy anime DVD's and so forth. And I'm convinced Pokemon had something to do with that.
In summary, Pokemon doesn't really doesn't mean the same thing to me that it did in 4th grade. I do feel a little warm nostalgia glow from Pokemon merchandise and fan art because of how it elicits memories of simpler times, but today I can't sit down and enjoy Pokemon Blue the same way I can Zelda: Ocarina of Time. But this doesn't diminish the role Pokemon played in introducing a generation of kids to TCG's, JRPG's, and anime. I think those three things were on their way to mainstream American acceptance anyway, but that process wouldn't be as far along as it is today without Pokemon.
The Pokemon Card Game
My reasons for getting into Pokemon as a youngster are actually kind of depressing. Kids are jerks, so they'd pick on me. My memory isn't the clearest on this but I think it was mostly verbal name-calling kind of stuff. Point is, I don't think I was beat up or anything, but I still wasn't treated the best by my peers. Then Pokemon cards got popular, everyone began bringing them to school, and whoever had the rarest cards was treated with reverence. So, I thought if I got good cards I'd become cool or something. One kid had a holographic Blastoise with a horrific crease through the middle. We didn't care. We practically worshipped him. Then somehow I traded for it and it was mine. Everyone acted like I was hot stuff for because I had this rare card, even though it looked like someone's origami practice. Then one morning the principal announced over the intercom, "Attention students, starting tomorrow Pokemon cards are off-limits on the school premises." There was a chorus of groans and then it didn't really matter which cards any of us had.
I would beg my Dad to take me to the Pokemon League. It was held at a Books A Million 12 miles from my house. A bunch of kids would show up with binders full of cards. There was this tubby Samoan looking guy in his 20's who was like the referee or something. He'd give "gym badges" to the kids who won X number of games and settle disputes over the rules. I couldn't have earned more than 2 badges, and I mostly lost, but I still had fun. It was just hard as a 10 year old to show up consistently or buy enough cards to really build anything viable. What finally killed my interest in TCG's was when I got the Pokemon Card Game for Gameboy. It was cool because you could play with really rare and expensive cards without spending hundreds of dollars on booster packs. But it only contained the first 3 sets of cards. I thought, "Shoot, why was I ever buying cards? I'll just wait for them to make Pokemon TCG 2 on the Gameboy Advance." Ha.
The Pokemon Video Games
I couldn't get enough of the video games. In 1998 my grandparents got me a bright yellow Gameboy Color along with Pokemon Blue Version. In my late 20's I can tell this basically just a kiddie RPG set to easy mode. You have to be brain dead not to win, but everyone in the game heaps you with praise anyway. (NPC: "Wow! I can't believe you beat my entire team of fire Pokemon with a water Pokemon! How the heck did you do that, kid?") This isn't an unfair assessment, but it overlooks a few things:
1) Giga pets had just exploded a year or two before this game came out, and you could hardly interact with those things. They'd just yell at you to feed them and clean up after them. But this overlooks how kids like to incorporate imagination into their play, even with video games. So I think the idea was for kids to imagine that their Pokemon had personalities and they were all on an adventure together. I mean, if you want to blast through the game with the most powerful monsters, I guess you can do that. But I think the idea is more to pick a favorite based on your feelings. ("That one's the cutest." "Oh, I like that one's wings." "That one's got a cool design, I like him!"). I think it was a step toward the personalization that we see in modern games today.
2) Kids like to pretend that they're grownup, or at least that they have grownup autonomy. This was part of the reason I loved Zelda: Ocarina of Time so much at age 9. Turning into adult link was a huge fantasy fulfillment at an age where I relied on my parents for everything. Pokemon Blue Version was like mainlining this feeling. ("Oh, you're 10 years old? OK, time to leave the house forever and go on a quest to tame magical animals.") I even asked for Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Stadium, two N64 games I can see now are pretty brazen cash-ins. But again, it made sense according to late 90's, 10-year-old logic, since half the fun was just seeing Pokemon running around doing Pokemon stuff.
The only aspect of the Pokemon games I think has aged really well is the soundtrack of the RPG's on Gameboy. It's got the same same infectiously catchy quality as Banjo Kazooie. I could go decades without hearing these tunes and I'd still remember them. In more recent Pokemon, they'll include classic music, but they change all the instrumentation so it sounds more modern. I think it loses something in translation. Something about those otherworldly, machine-generated chip tunes just makes them sound right.
The Pokemon TV Show
This is the part I remember the least distinctly. I had one VHS tape with two or three episodes on it. Sometimes I'd catch it on TV. Anyway I don't think the particulars are important because it was basically a commercial for the games and cards. Today I can see it's a dreadfully cliched shounen anime about a boy trying to be the best at whatever magical thing people do in his world, failing at it, persevering, trying again, then succeeding. See? I can't even remember anything specific, that's how bland it was.
However, I would argue that this show pioneered something important: introducing the US to anime. Before 1998 anime wasn't widely available or talked about. I've heard stories of fans passing around bootleg, fan-subbed VHS tapes containing episodes of their favorite shows, or unwittingly running into hentai because there wasn't a rating system for any of it. But now you can just go to an ordinary retail place and buy anime DVD's and so forth. And I'm convinced Pokemon had something to do with that.
In summary, Pokemon doesn't really doesn't mean the same thing to me that it did in 4th grade. I do feel a little warm nostalgia glow from Pokemon merchandise and fan art because of how it elicits memories of simpler times, but today I can't sit down and enjoy Pokemon Blue the same way I can Zelda: Ocarina of Time. But this doesn't diminish the role Pokemon played in introducing a generation of kids to TCG's, JRPG's, and anime. I think those three things were on their way to mainstream American acceptance anyway, but that process wouldn't be as far along as it is today without Pokemon.