Shees, I was already post-college in 1999. The benefit of being a manchild like Blink-182 then is that I got to experience all these things in my 20's, and I remember vividly how much Pokemon just dominated pop culture. I don't think this story does justice to how big it got, I mean you had people fighting over them (I saw one inside Burger King), you had millions and millions of kids like you (and younger I'm sure) just eating up every bit of this craze.
I would say it was Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, rurouni Kenshin (samurai x) and Gundam Wing which brought Anime to the "mainstream" in the west. To me it feels as if Pokemon normalized having extreme marketing and campaigns focused on kids to earn gigantic amounts of money.
Rugrats In Paris felt like a bigger jump in quality from the TV show. That said, Pokemon movie 2 and afterwards have better animation than the first one.
probably because Nintendo decided that would never be Westernized and shown to an American audience. I think Nintendo Japan probably wanted to sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened.
To be fair, the second movie had already been released in Japan, and the third was in development so it was a no brainer that both of them would also get American releases. It was actually quite a safe bet to title it The First Movie, whereas every other cartoon franchise that tries it (or even gets *marketed* as such) fails to deliver, at least theatrically - direct to video is a whole different can of worms 😂
Sadly ALL passes but ALL those moments we lived with Pokémon are always the strenght we demand to face nowadays bitter empty days crying bitter nostalgia tears at least life was good once in our lives! 2023 december
