In this post, nostalgic memories of the Indigo League and the anime’s steady decline thereafter. Time to nerd it up a notch!

Note: I will use the English dub names for convenience. If you want to be a weaboo about it, just pretend I’m saying the Japanese names instead.

An overdue admission, I’ve long been a closet fan of the Pokemon franchise ever since the release of the original Gameboy games and the subsequent anime hit syndication. Even though the first generation was released well over a decade ago, I remember it like it was yesterday. Catching Pikachu for the first time back in Viridian Forest, foiling Team Rocket’s plans at every step along the way, and finally becoming the league champion after knocking your smug rival (Gary) off his high horse. Good memories.

Likewise, the anime that accompanied the games was, dare I say, pretty damn good. It might be nostalgia speaking, but nearly every episode of the ‘original season’ that covered Ash’s journey through the Indigo League along with Pikachu, Brock, Misty, and Team Rocket was pretty damn good. Yes, even the massive amounts of filler that outweighed the story episodes by a fair margin and resulted in more one-episode characters than I care to count were fun to watch. It was just fun to follow Ash and company on his journey be it fighting gym leaders, battling Team Rocket (back when they were halfway competent), helping an episodic character with a problem, or dealing with a recurring Jigglypuff that just couldn’t take a hint. I really, truly can’t think of anything bad to say about the original series because it was good with plenty of action, drama and comdy. I might be exaggerating a bit, but I stand by my word that the first season was good all around.

Eventually Pokemon lost its way along the line somewhere along the line. The quality of the show as a whole dipped in the ’second season’ in the Orange Islands arc with the arrival of newcomer Tracy temporarily replacing Brock to shake up the roster. While The Orange Islands was a significant dip, it was still watchable. If I had to place my finger on when the show became crap, it had to definitely be somewhere near the beginning of Johto, going through all of Johto and Advanced Generation (Hoenn) and spanning a time period of six years from 2000-2006. During this time period rampant, boring filler was the norm, Team Rocket gradually became nothing more than a running gag, and even the once vaunted gym and league conference battles lost their glory. Quite frankly, the anime was crap. While its purpose was always, first and foremost, to entertain children, it wasn’t very good but apparently did well enough to keep chugging along.

For the most part, Johto and Hoenn were unwatchable to me. Maybe part of the reason was growing up, but I did catch episodes here and there to see if it was still crap — And it was. The point was the show had lost its magic though. What made the first season so fun was sorely missing from the newer seasons. Post-Indigo League, the show degenerated into a cycle of repetition, mostly involving Team Rocket trying to kidnap Pikachu with lame scheme after lame scheme. I continued to play the games through this time period while mostly avoiding the anime.

When Diamond and Pearl were announced, I decided to give the anime another shot while going through the accompanying game. Surprise, surprise. The Diamond and Pearl anime was actually halfway decent. It was still nowhere near the first season, but at least it became fun to watch again. Some semblance of drama returned to the show with the introduction of a badass new rival, Paul, whose views and morals totally clashed with Ash’s. The point of a rival is to be a total prick, and Paul has the part down pat. The new baddies of the show, Team Galactic, have actually made their presence felt as well. It’s refreshing to have competent villains back in the show. A good villain is something you take for granted when you have nothing but Team Rocket to deal with for years on end. Yeah, Team Rocket is still around, but their antics are more bearable. D/P does have some excruciating filler, but as a whole is a drastic improvement from the previous years of crap. It must be doing something right though, because I do make time to watch it at least.

Bonus round. I think the Pokemon anime as a whole could stand to benefit from a complete reboot by following its manga adaptation, Pokemon Special. It’s friggin’ awesome with a much darker and violent story that more closely follows the games. Pikachu blowing Brock’s Onix to bits and Charmeleon slicing Arbok in half FTW. Best of all, there are more protagonists than just Ash. Seriously, the series needs a new protagonist every now and then to stay fresh. If you think Pokemon is too kiddy, go try the manga. You could easily find scanlations at one of those manga sites out there.

Well, that’s enough nerding out for one day. I don’t know why, but I just wanted to talk about Pokemon for some reason. It was fun to reminisce. Now that I got that off my chest, I’ll return to talking about moe moe girls and the usual stuff, whatever that may be.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Anime, Articles, Rants.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.