I grew up with an older brother. I realize that I said that no details of my personal life would ever make it into this blog, but, in order to understand the argument I am making here, it is important to know that I have an older brother. Having an older sibling drastically alters what you are allowed to like and dislike as a kid. If your older sibling makes fun of something, you’re not allowed to like it. If your older sibling liked something but outgrew it, you’re not allowed to like it. If your older sibling watches late night television and then parrots all of David Letterman and/or South Park’s criticisms of something, you’re not allowed to like it. This is not necessarily a bad thing or the fault of the older sibling; it’s just how these things work.
It is with this in mind that we come to Pokémon . . .
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| Ash Ketchum, Pokemon trainer |
I never realized how much of a closet Pokémon nerd I was until about two days ago. I was still at the beach when this exchange took place, but a friend casually asked why Pikachu (the electric Pokémon who was owned by Ash Ketchum, the show’s protagonist) never evolved like the other Pokémon in the TV show. I responded, “Well, actually, Ash had access to a thunderstone at one point, but he realized that Pikachu wasn’t yet ready to evolve since he hadn’t mastered the fundamentals of his first stage of evolution. Ash came to this realization during a battle with another trainer who had an evolved Pikachu (called a Richu), and Ash was able to best him using the basic attacks that the Richu had never been taught before evolving-- particularly the ‘quickstrike’ move.” My friend’s jaw dropped. As a kid, I was secretly into the Pokémon TV show for about a month but never actually bought any cards or games. Even at that tender age, I knew a waste of money when I saw it (unlike my Star Wars toys-- those were an investment). Regardless, the show was surprisingly engrossing to my developing brain, and because of my strange ability to remember cartoons, that month’s worth of episodes is permanently seared into my mind. Of course, I had to watch those episodes in secret, getting up around six in the morning to catch the early showings of the syndicated episodes on UPN (yes, really, UPN). More on that later.
The Plot of Pokémon
Okay, let me see how quickly I can summarize this: money.
Wow, that didn’t take long. Maybe I should unpack that a bit. Created by Nintendo, Pokémon started out as a video game (Pokémon: Red and Green) released for the Gameboy in Japan in 1996. The video games soon evolved into a TV show and card game and took America by storm. The game was all about collecting and training “pocket monsters” (poke-mon, get it?), and then battling them against other Pokémon. The show followed roughly the same concept. There are 150 Pokémon to collect and train, and Ash wants to catch them all (in pocket-sized storage devices called pokéballs) in order to become a master Pokémon trainer. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Ash travels around the countryside with the stereotypical tough guy and girly girl that feature into every TV show ever. While Ash is trying to catch and train anything that moves, Brock (the tough guy) specializes in rock-based Pokémon, and Misty (the girly girl) specializes in . . . um . . . not being a guy. Also, functioning more as comic relief than as villains were “Team Rocket,” two overly-theatrical rival trainers who . . . well, frankly, every second these two were on screen was agonizingly annoying, so I’ve kind of blocked them from my memory, but I do remember that their Pokémon, Meowth, was one of the few interesting characters. Meowth was the only Pokémon who seemed able to talk normally, and talk he did. The wisecracking little twerp never shut up for a second, so he was the most relatable character for me even if he still got on my nerves.
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| Everyone wanted a Charizard. |
As I think I’ve just made clear, the show’s appeal certainly wasn’t in its characters (who were all phenomenally one-dimensional and uninteresting). Hell, I would argue that the show’s appeal wasn’t even in its storyline. Virtually every episode had an utterly inane plot that consisted solely of finding whatever magic macguffin Ash needed to beat the newest challenger or capture the newest Pokémon. No, the appeal of Pokémon rested solely in its subject matter: pocket-sized monsters with crazy superpowers! I mean, what preteen boy doesn’t want a pet dragon? Catching and training a Charizard was a way to live out that fantasy. Of those 150 Pokémon, there were all types. A turtle that could shoot water, a flaming horse, a fox that could fire lightning out of its head, a giant snake made out of boulders, a kickboxing monkey-- whatever sort of crazy imaginary friend you had as a kid, Pokémon probably had some variation of it, and you just had to catch it and train it and pit it against your friends’ imaginary friends. How brilliant is that? This entertainment franchise found a way to play on the nostalgia of children. By making kids think back a few years to the sorts of crazy animals they had dreamed up when they were even younger, Pokémon roped them in. So kids bought the games, bought the cards, watched the TV show, paid to see the movies, all in an attempt to live out a desire that had been implanted in us from the earliest age imaginable: to have the coolest pet on the block. You brought a goldfish to show-and-tell? Dude, I’ve got a giant, genetically-modified, psychic were-cat who I keep in a little ball in my fanny pack. Top that.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Pokémon
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| A "pokeball"-- a prison for Pokemon. |
I had never thought about it before --honestly, I had never even noticed until about a month ago during a conversation with some other div students--, but there’s kind of a weird undertone in Pokémon. What exactly are the Pokémon? I mean, I know that they’re pocket monsters and basically the living embodiments of imaginary friends, but how come some of them are treated like pets and others get treated like slaves? I mean, even Ash, the kindly sympathetic trainer, makes most of his Pokémon live in tiny little balls all day. Sure, Pikachu got to hang out and walk around with the gang all the time like a Japanese Scooby Doo, but Charmander and Squirtle and all the others that Ash caught had to stay cramped up in those tiny little pokéballs all day. I mean, I know that the pokéballs could heal them after fights and stuff, but it’s not like there was a day spa in there. The Pokémon trainers were keeping their Pokémon locked up the vast majority of the time and only bringing them out to train and fight. That’s more than a little twisted. In fact, I’m not sure how you can really differentiate between the “bad guys” and “good guys” in the show since every single character was looking to imprison and control all the Pokémon. In fact, if anything, Ash is kind of a jerk. His goal throughout the series is to catch every Pokémon so that he can become a Pokémon Master. What about your Pokémon themselves, Ash? What will happen to them once you’ve attained that status? Are you going to train all of those things for the rest of your life, Ash? Can you get paid to do that, or will you have to take a lame day job since you dropped out of school to hunt Pokémon all the time? I’m betting that Ash’s Pokémon will probably wind up in his attic somewhere, and twenty years from now, when Ash is living in a rundown apartment in the slums of Saffron City across the street from a methadone clinic, his mom will find a cardboard box with a bunch of tiny balls full of animal skeletons. I’m sure she’ll uncover some of Ash’s other hobbies during her cleaning as well, but I think that the animal skeletons will be the slightly more unsettling find.
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| The original 150 Pokemon |
So, basically, even though Ash and Pikachu are BFF, and the theme song even says, “You’re my best friend,” Ash is imprisoning animals and training them to fight one another so that he can achieve fame and accolades. Call me cynical, but didn’t we rightfully jail Michael Vick for doing exactly the same thing? Also, as I mentioned earlier, the bad guys in the show were looking to do the exact same thing. The only thing that differentiated them was that they were clearly in it for the money, whereas Ash’s ambition was motivated more by the drive to be at the top of the Pokémon food chain. (Incidentally, the concept of a literal Pokémon food chain kind of weirds me out, but how awesome would that have been in a kids’ show? I wonder what eats what in the world of Pokémon, and why does my gut tell me that Snorlax was actually at the top of that food chain?) Anyway, the motivation of the villains always kind of amused me. I always imagined them having a meeting one day and going over their plan with a three-step diagram borrowed from South Park’s phenomenal “underpants gnomes” episode. I picture Meowth even holding a little pointer and explaining their diabolical plan:
Phase 1: Collect Pokémon.
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!
Just FYI, the real “phase two” was to rope children into buying the cards/games/DVDs/etc. and then charge obscene amounts for them, but I think that’s been made abundantly clear already. My question still stands: How is capturing animals and training them to fight one another and keeping them in pokéballs for days on end even remotely acceptable behavior? I mean, if you’re a sociopath like Michael Vick, I kind of get it, but for a kid’s show made in Japan, I just don’t understand. Why didn’t every Pokémon get the same cushy treatment as Pikachu? Hell, even Pikachu had to fight from time to time. Why couldn’t Ash just let the Pokémon run free in their natural environments and maybe photograph them like in Pokémon Snap (which was a surprisingly fun game as long as we’re on that subject)? Also, wasn’t Ash’s mentor a professor? Why couldn’t this guy keep the little animal rights abuser in line and make him release all his imprisoned Pokémon? Was there seriously no one around to tell these people that training magical animals to fight each other is a little messed up? I just don’t get it! PETA, how did you possibly miss the boat on this one?!
Okay, so I don’t actually expect the popularity of Pokémon to lead to a rise in dogfighting, but still, it’s an interesting argument, no?
Addendum: I just did a little research, and apparently, the newest game actually has a bad guy who wants to liberate the Pokémon, but apparently he still abuses them just to establish his status as a bad guy in case the player couldn’t guess. You know, I kind of wonder if Nintendo’s really thought about this. Then again, they’ve had me convinced that plumbers rescue princesses from fire-breathing turtles since the 1980s, so clearly, Nintendo and logic do not necessarily have to go together.
Don’t Knock Japan
You know, one of my biggest problems with Pokémon is that I feel like it poisoned many people against anime --and Japanese culture in general-- for a long time. It seems like, around the time this show came out, I started hearing the word “Japanimation” tossed around as a pejorative for anime (even though Wikipedia informs me that the pejorative connotation is not the word’s intention). There’s something more than a little xenophobic about this, and it worked its way into our culture so insidiously that many people didn’t even see the bias develop. I first became aware of it with the release of Super Smash Brothers on Nintendo 64 (still the best party system ever). The SSB franchise features Nintendo mascot characters beating the tar out of each other, and I was stunned to see that one of the characters included was Pikachu. “Ugh,” I thought in my sixth grade brain, “What is that anime twerp doing in there?” This was before I realized that Nintendo were the primary developers of all things Pokémon-related, and I was frustrated by the inclusion of a character among the ranks of those who I considered to be great American video game characters. Hey, just for kicks, let’s look at some of those characters’ countries of origin:
Mario and Luigi (Super Mario Bros.)- Italy
Link (The Legend of Zelda)- Hyrule (an analogue of Medieval/Renaissance Europe)
Yoshi (Super Mario Bros.)- Mushroom Kingdom
Kirby (Kirby’s Dream Land)- Dream Land
Samus (Metroid)- Outer Space
Captain Falcon (F-Zero)- Outer Space
Star Fox (Star Fox)- Outer Space
Donkey Kong (Donkey Kong)- Donkey Kong Island
Ness (Earthbound)- Eagleland
Yeah, out of all of those characters, only the last one could be interpreted as hailing from America (as “Eagleland” implies a stand-in for the United States). Furthermore, all of them were developed in Japan by Nintendo, so it’s unfair to single out Pikachu against the others. I think Pikachu has just as much a right to be in there as any of them, but cultural biases engrained in my head by mass media and an older sibling had turned me against the little, lightning-shooting fuzzball.
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| Batman: Gotham Knight with its gorgeous animation. |
Yep, there is an engrained cultural bias against anime in this country. Our cartoons have to be American, as if we can’t stand to let all the good animation jobs go overseas. I’m sorry, but compare the animation styles of a traditional American cartoon to a legit Japanese-animated cartoon sometime. Heck, compare a Korean-animated cartoon (which a surprising number of “American” cartoons actually are) to a Japanese-animated cartoon. There is a certain style that emanates from Japan that is just flat-out beautiful, and you’ve probably experienced it a lot more than you think you have. Remember Batman: The Animated Series with its gorgeous film noir visuals, timeless art deco-influenced style, and emotive character designs that were always just staid and subtle enough to fit into that dark and foreboding atmosphere? Yeah, I just found out that the show was animated by a team from Sunrise, a company based out of Tokyo. That used to be my go-to example of good American animation, and it turns out that it was Japanese. Oops. The show later switched to Korean animators, and I think the quality suffered. The far more defined edges and boxier character designs still worked well, but they lost some of the intimacy that the Japanese animators had brought to the show. So yeah, “American cartoons” were being animated in Japan even pre-Pokémon, and anime had been around long before. Now that we’re finally acknowledging how gifted some of these Japanese animators are, we’re seeing a more global approach to cartoons these days, with my favorite examples being projects like Batman: Gotham Knight (pictured above) and the Marvel Hulk Vs. films, which combined traditional American superhero story arcs with Japanese design sensibilities. Seriously, while I realize that outsourcing and globalization are not necessarily positive economic forces, cartoons are one arena where blended is better.
Animayhem
I have a confession to make. Even though I can tell you a lot about where various superhero cartoons were animated, I really don’t know jack about legit anime. Sure, I watched a lot of Dragon Ball Z (pictured) growing up, but when it comes to some of the really intense anime that is geared toward teens and adults, I am really out of my league. I catch Full-Metal Alchemist on Cartoon Network once in a blue moon, I’ve seen at least three Hayao Miyazaki films, and I have the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, but that’s really about it. If you asked me to recommend a really good anime, I wouldn’t have an answer for you because I don’t really know anime. That being said, I still appreciate the genre, and sadly, my appreciation for it reflects --and I can’t believe I’m saying this-- a few serious problems that exist in American cartooning. American cartoons are in a tricky situation because, for some reason, we as a culture decided long ago that cartoons are for kids. As a result, if a cartoon is designed to appeal to adults, the writers typically have to go overboard with the inclusion of sex/cussing/whatever in order to make it clear that their cartoon is intended for mature audiences. Otherwise, you get what I like to call the “Joe Camel Effect,” in which something intended for adults starts to get perceived as a really perverse kids’ show. Think about all the fire that The Simpsons or Family Guy came under for years before being accepted into the mainstream, or think about how far South Park had to push the envelope in order to be accepted as programming for adults only. By contrast, some incredibly intelligent kids’ shows go underappreciated and fall to the wayside because they’re targeted at the wrong audiences. Go back and watch Tiny Toons or Animaniacs sometime and then try to tell me that it’s not some of the most intelligent pop culture satire out there. As kids, all of this stuff went completely over our heads. And then we have cartoons based on comicbooks. The Justice League: Unlimited Cadmus story arc lasted eight episodes and includes some of the most complicated political intrigue ever to make it onto television, and yet this show still had a line of action figures released along with it. Okay, this is getting a little tangential, but what I’m getting at here is that there is a serious problem in our country when an entire storytelling medium is written off as being for children.
Okay, I can’t help myself. One more example. I recently saw a cartoon in which a father with a wife and two children discovered that he had a terminal illness. He grew paranoid about how to take care of his family but soon found a way to do so (though, admittedly, not a very ethical one). Learning that his company was working on a special suit designed to make the wearer indestructible, he signed up to become a human test dummy and sent his family away on an extended vacation so that they could be protected from the media storm that would follow his inevitable death. Donning the suit, the man subjected himself to test after test, hoping that he would die and that his new company-provided insurance policy would sustain his family following his demise. At the last minute, the man’s doctor rushed into the arena where the final battery of tests was taking place to tell him that there had been a mix-up and that he was perfectly healthy. This news arrived just in time for the man to escape certain doom by the skin of his teeth. What was this show that pushed the boundaries of ethics and raised questions about human mortality and what we will do to protect our loved ones? This was an episode of The Jetsons. Seriously. Watch The Jetsons again sometime. It is not a children’s show. I may have to write a post sometime about what a terrifying critique of the human condition that show offered.
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| Princess Mononoke promotional image |
Wow, where was I going with all this? Oh right, cartoons and their intended audiences. I’m not sure why this is, but for some reason, the appeal of Japanese cartoons doesn’t seem to share this dilemma, or if it does, it addresses it in a very different way than American cartoons (which, with a few notable exceptions, seem to cater to the opposite extremes of the mature content spectrum). Most of the anime that I have seen appeared to be aimed at multiple audiences, and I can’t think of a better example than the film Princess Mononoke. (Also, please note that this isn’t hyperbole. I really can’t think of a better example. I’m pretty sure I covered this already: I don’t know nearly as much about anime as someone of my nerdy ilk should.) Princess Mononoke did the eco-fairytale thing long before Wall-E and the Na’vi were even doodles in someone’s sketchpad. The storyline follows Prince Ashitaka, a young man who is cursed while fighting a demon and now has evil tattoos slowly spreading all over his body and gradually turning him into a monster. With only a sword, a bow and arrow, and his trusty pet elk Yakul, Ashitaka must journey to a distant country in order to seek the Forest Spirit --still one of the coolest looking characters ever created-- in the hopes that this mystical creature will cure him. In the process, Ashitaka encounters San (the title character, a princess raised by wolves), but he also becomes closely acquainted with the mostly-peaceful inhabitants of Iron Town, a community that has (for the most part unwittingly) encroached on the local environment through their production of weapons. With the exception of a greedy samurai who doesn’t really show his cards until the movie’s third act, Mononoke lacks a clear villain, and much of the film’s dramatic tension rests in Ashitaka’s decision to support the citizens of Iron Town or protect the mystical ways of the forest and its inhabitants. As far as legitimate character development and a very real moral dilemma, this movie completely blows James Cameron’s Avatar out of the water. Every character is sympathetic, and though there are certainly elements of the film designed to appeal to children (particularly the kodama, which are the cutest thing since . . . ever), there are also some great moral/ethical issues for adults to crunch over. Films like Mononoke blur the line between kids’ and adults’ cartoons, and maybe I’m idealizing the genre a little, but I like to think that this is a staple of anime.
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| Kodama tree spirits. I want one. |
Sure, Pokémon may have been designed to sell video games and cards and all that, but with art like Mononoke out there, we can’t take Pokémon as representative of the entire anime genre, and I think that the Japanese cartoons are doing a far better job of appealing to multiple audiences than the unnatural kid/adult dichotomy into which America tries to pigeonhole our cartoons. The respect given to the anime genre is something which the intelligent and hardworking American cartoon creators deserve as well, and perhaps going ahead and acknowledging that Saturday morning cartoons are a perfectly valid art form might lead to even more innovative cartoons being produced here in America (you know, besides the Bruce Timm comicbook adaptations that I already praise day-in and day-out).
Where Did People Get Their Opinions Before South Park?
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| "Best Friends Forever" |
I’m going to delve deeper into this when I finally get around to bashing Avatar (trust me, that’s coming), but this is becoming more and more of a pet peeve of mine, and it started with Pokémon. Of course, don’t get me wrong. I love South Park, but I’m getting progressively more annoyed with people coopting the show’s ideas. Now in their fifteenth season, South Park is a phenomenal force for social criticism. The intentionally-unpolished animation style enables show creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker to write, record, and animate an entire episode within a few days’ time, meaning that South Park can respond immediately to events that have hit the newsstand within the last week. That sort of production speed is unheard-of for a cartoon and ensures that every episode can reference events that have occurred within the past few days’ news cycle and are still fresh in people’s minds. This was done with particular effectiveness during the Terri Schiavo case, when South Park aired an Emmy-winning episode entitled “Best Friends Forever” in which the boys debated whether to pull the plug on their friend Kenny. With the show’s typical dark humor, this episode addressed the subjects of living wills, appropriate surrogates, and virtually every other end-of-life issue in a way that was funny and irreverent but also thought-provoking. This is the power of South Park, but it can be abused.
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| "Chinpokomon" |
During season 3, South Park released an episode parodying Pokémon entitled “Chinpokomon” in which the kids become obsessed with a cartoon/toy franchise from Japan that clearly possesses an anti-American agenda. As the episode progresses, it becomes clear that the kids are being brainwashed to re-bomb Pearl Harbor and reinstate the largely-depowered Japanese monarchy. Funnier still, Pokémon’s famous “gotta catch ‘em all” tagline was altered to “I’ve got to buy it,” and as the kids become more fixated on Chinpokomon, their eyes, mouths, and voices start to resemble the standard anime style. Best of all, the episode finally resolves itself when the parents do the only thing they can to make their children lose interest in Chinpokomon: taking interest in it themselves. While this ending played on the cultural cliché of children hating anything their parents love, it also sent the message that the only way to control the media that children consume is to be fully engrossed in it ourselves and to bring those adult powers of discernment and self-control over to the kids’ table. Now, this is all hilarious and brilliant commentary, and I love this episode. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and make the blanket statement: even though I don’t always agree with them, I will fight to the death to defend Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s right to offend every human being on earth since their offenses also involve such intelligent satire just beneath the surface. My problem with this episode was that the “I’ve got to buy it” tagline started getting referenced every time anyone anywhere mentioned Pokémon. Just as their “dances with smurfs” meme started to accompany any commentary on Avatar, South Park’s “I’ve got to buy it” catchphrase started popping up so often that it stopped being funny. I really struggle when reruns of that episode air just because I can’t stop my eyes from rolling whenever those words are uttered. I’m going to go ahead and nutshell this in its own paragraph:
Citing a South Park joke every time someone brings up a subject does not make you intelligent. No matter how insightful Matt Stone and Trey Parker might be, you are not them. You can reference them from time to time, but eventually, I expect you to come up with your own jokes and opinions.
Though a bit twisted, Matt and Trey are remarkably intelligent guys, but because of them, when I went through my one-month Pokémon phase, I had to wake up at the butt crack of dawn and watch the show in secret so that I wouldn’t have to hear the “I’ve got to buy it” cliché repeated ad infinitum by my then-teenaged brother who would watch South Park at our pastor’s house and repeat all the jokes later as if they were original material. (Incidentally, I don’t blame him at all for that since this is how the vast majority of teenagers function, and I did the exact same thing once I hit high school. Also, picking at me for my tastes in TV is the natural function of an older brother. It’s still annoying, but it’s not his fault-- just part of the natural order of things. I digress.) This incident is a testament to the amazing dialogue-influencing powers that South Park wields, and in this particular case, I think that the guys unwittingly set the stereotypes about Japanese cartoons (to which the American public was still getting accustomed at the time) back a few decades. While “I’ve got to buy it” might have applied to Pokémon and Digimon and Bakugon and Beyblades, it wasn’t really applicable to all of anime, so when South Park viewers tried to apply it to the larger scope of Japanese animation and use it to justify a larger xenophobic mentality, a grave injustice occurred.
Hasbro Has Dough
Oh, before pressing on ahead, a quick sidebar:
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| Oh, the things I've done for money. |
Speaking of Beyblades (which are spinning, jagged-looking, plastic tops that you can battle in a big bowl), one of the strangest jobs I’ve ever had actually involved working in a Beyblade/Yu-Gi-Oh store during high school, and I frequently entertained myself by making up fake rules for the Beyblade tournaments that we held every Saturday morning. Amazingly, the parents were usually far more intense about it than their kids, so I would frequently have to cite nonexistent authorities in order to avoid physical confrontations with these people. “Listen, sir, we play by East Tokyo rules only here, and that means that a draw is settled by a sudden-death, no-ripcord spin-off. I don’t care what you think the rules are, but we want to keep these matches nice and clean. If you want to come in here with that Kyoto Street Rules garbage, we can bar your son from our tournament, and you can take your business elsewhere. Now stay behind the damn cones!” Hey, I had to pay for my bass amp somehow, and at least I got to mess with people. Amazingly, even though I made a few parents furious during my brief tenure as a Beyblade referee, my bluffs were never called. Back to the matter at hand though . . .
Yes, many cartoons are designed to get kids to buy toys, but this is not a problem endemic to Japan (as the “I’ve got to buy it” crowd would have us believe). In fact, off the top of my head, here’s a list of American cartoon/film franchises that featured significant toy line tie-ins:
Transformers
G.I. Joe
Care Bears
Mighty Max/Polly Pocket
Masters of the Universe
Iron Man
Batman
Star Wars (the very first franchise for which toys were released prior to the film)
Dungeons & Dragons
Gargoyles
Small Soldiers
Hell, even The Tick had a line of action figures!
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| Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots |
Using kids’ shows to push merchandise is not something new. It is not a concept imported from Japan. If anything, we thought of it first! American cartoonists and filmmakers have been doing it for years, so just because Pokémon was less apologetic about it than most series doesn’t mean that they deserve any special spite. Also, at least Pokémon was respectful of their subject matter. For the sake of comparison, look at Transformers. As much as later cartoons and comics have tried to redeem the Transformers, that doesn’t change the fact that, during the show’s original run, new Transformers were introduced on a weekly basis in order to sell more toys. Sure, there were some pretty great storylines (especially after the 1986 Transformers: The Movie when the youthful and inexperienced Hot Rod was leading the Autobots), but that doesn’t change the fact that the writers were constantly coming up with new gimmicks and underdeveloped characters in order to sell toys. When Transformers movie director Michael Bay infuriated franchise loyalists by calling the original cartoons “glorified toy commercials,” he may have been being insensitive and intentionally incendiary toward his film’s desired fan base, but --my utter hatred of Michael Bay aside-- his comment stung the most because it had an uncomfortable ring of truth to it. Incidentally, the Transformers toy line is owned by Hasbro, a good all-American company based in Rhode Island. Hasbro also owns the toy-manufacturing rights to good old-fashioned American toys and games like G.I. Joe, Batman, Lincoln Logs, Lie-Brite, Mr. Potato Head, NERF, Dungeons & Dragons, and even Star Wars.
Having made toys since the 1940s, Hasbro also-- wait a minute. What’s this? Hasbro owns the rights to Pokémon and Beyblades!? This stuff is being manufactured by American companies!? For real!? You mean an American company is profiting from the sale of Japanese products!? You mean the stereotype of the Japanese cartoon selling kids all that garbage is actually a clever cultural meme designed to distract us from the same old American marketing scams!? You mean that South Park’s portrayal of Pokémon as a solely-Japanese endeavor was misinformed!? You mean that spellcheck now acknowledges the interrobang (!?) as a legitimate form of punctuation!?
Sorry, got a little carried away there. In short, by purchasing Pokémon products, you’re not just profiting Nintendo (a Japanese company), you’re profiting Hasbro (an American company), so all that stuff about a shadowy Japanese cartoon industry that’s out to get the money of stupid American children is completely and totally misinformed. If there’s one thing we Americans know how to do well, it’s market things to children. Toys, fast food, cigarettes-- we know how to make kids want it, and now we’ve accomplished the most impressive feat of all: passing the buck to Japan. Nice try, South Park, but you fell for Hasbro’s ploy hook, line, and sinker. Chalk this up as a win for American business.
Please, Catch ‘Em All
As much as we want to prolong the myth that there are good wholesome American cartoons and toys for our white, blond-haired, blue-eyed children to play with, the truth is that children’s entertainment has been a multi-national collaborative effort for decades now. Hell, even the classic “fairy tales” and “nursery rhymes” that have pervaded our culture for centuries were originally imported from Germany and Scandinavia. Sure, we’ve started to introduce kids to genuine, Japan-produced anime at an early age, but American companies are still profiting from the toy sales, and this is a trick we’ve been pulling since Voltron. Pokémon may not have been that great of a show, and the games may have been kind of overrated, but it still represents the start of a more global outlook on cartoons. Perhaps this collaboration on cartoons will lead to collaboration in other cultural arenas. For example, look at the soundtrack to the anime Cowboy Bebop, for which French and Japanese musicians worked together to provide a new spin on traditional African-influenced American jazz for an anime about the American Wild West in space. That’s four continents (and space) coming together for an anime soundtrack! Think of what an epic achievement that is, and it all came about because of a cartoon! Yes, I love the South Park Chinpokomon episode for its witty insights about the relationships between parents and children, but it missed the mark with the marketing side of things. To make fun of Pokémon is to make fun of Transformers or Batman or Masters of the Universe or any of the other toy-minded cartoon franchises that preceded it, and it’s just downright hypocritical of us to criticize Japan for this style of marketing when we practically invented it.
In spite of its strange plot and the possible subtext of animal abuse, Pokémon had a really clever idea in playing on kids’ memories of their imaginary friends in order to sell trading cards and video games. Sure, I don’t really endorse Pokémon because of the lousy storytelling, but at the same time, I don’t deny its incredible cultural significance. It started the influx of overtly Japanese kids’ cartoons (rather than cartoons that were just being written in America and animated in Japan) and got many children legitimately interested in other cultures. The more of that we have, the better, so you know what? Catch ‘em all. Try out a Pokémon game. Take a break from work to watch an anime. Read a manga. Try to incorporate a non-European philosopher into your next paper for school. Do something multicultural because Pokémon stood up to the idea of American cartoons being the sole children’s entertainment force in the impending global monoculture, and Pokémon won that battle. Instead of clinging to the myth of wholesome American cartoons and toys, embrace the new. Embrace the different. Learn about a new culture, because globalization is happening whether we like it or not, and cartoons are one of the media where it’s occurring both the fastest and the most peacefully.
This is an exciting time.
The world is changing.
Run with it.
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