Hey guys, you saw Pokemon in the title and you clicked it!
And you were right to do so, so now I guess I got to make do on it.
Quick, come up with something!
The large Pokemon's reputation is that it's squeaky, feel-good fun,
and like, the "darkest" thing about it is typically a tired joke about dogfighting,
or like cubone's spooky backstory.
But like any media property that's been around long enough,
Pokemon has persevered through its share of controversies!
Here are five Pokemon controversies that nobody expected.
#5 - While you might expect Pokemon's first major social hurdle to be the swarm of angry parents saying that
"the cards are a form of gambling!",
or "they're exploitative!",
or "they're a challenge to American values!" or something.
It was actually something far more direct, and far more startling.
In 1997, episode 38 of the Pokemon anime was ground-zero
for what became known as "Pokemon Shock".
The episode, "Dennō Senshi Porygon", or "Cyber Soldier Porygon",
featured Ash and the gang on an adventure in the digital frontier to thwart Team Rocket's scheme.
It's a pretty innocuous setup that aims to explain how some of the iffy logic of pokeballs work.
But now it carries a dark legacy.
When Pikachu unloads an electric attack on a bevy of missiles within the computer,
the resulting "cyber-explosion" manifests in the form of
a violent barrage of red and blue strobing lights.
Exactly the type that might trigger epileptic seizures.
The episode, which aired on an unassuming Tuesday evening, caught about 4 million kids in the crossfire.
And while we don't have an exact count on how many kids were actually affected, we do know that
685 kids had reactions so severe that they had to be sent to the hospital.
Disaster also resulted in the show being pulled from the airways for four months,
and the episode has never been rebroadcast!
So now do you think that Pikachu's such a good guy?
Yeah..
he's still pretty cute.
#4 - Look, we have to talk about Pokemon GO sooner or later, so let's just get it over now
so that you don't expect it to be #1.
This was recent enough that I suppose that most of you are probably pretty familiar
with everything that went down, because how could you not be?
But, just in case, let's recap.
Let's see; Pokemon GO was a hyper-addictive alternate reality game for mobile devices
in which players traverse their actual environments to collect Pokemon,
and if you weren't one of the people playing it a little bit or a *lot* of it
for casual fun, maybe you're one of these people.
The guy in Singapore who got fired from his job for calling Singapore a
"f**king piece of shit country" for the game not being available in his region yet,
robbers who use beacons at poke-stops to lure in potential victims,
the other countless robberies of people who blindly followed the game.
The two guys who fell off a cliff while trying to catch some sweet 'mon,
uhh.. the child abandonment, the guy who was attacked in a park with a straight razor
because the stranger thought he was recording him with his phone,
(sounds like maybe he should have been recording him?)
The teens who got shot at by a homeowner who assumes them to be thieves,
the drivers who crashed while playing the game in their cars,
the driver who was arrested for deliberately hitting someone
because they were playing the game [on] the road,
the player who jumped a fence near a zoo's tiger enclosure to catch Pokemon,
the stabbings, shootings, and other deaths that we probably really just shouldn't get into
because they're just.. they're just gonna bum us out.
I mean, too late though! I'm- I'm bummed out.
Let's keep moving.
Number 3!
Israeli stage magician Uri Geller is an.. interesting guy.
Beyond being best friends with Michael Jackson and being a self-proclaimed psychic,
he was also a pioneer of spoon-bending as an illusion.
This trick became so popular, so singularly associated with psychic ability
that if you're not familiar with Uri Geller by name,
you've probably seen his influence in things like The Matrix.
But Geller's other main trick? It's lawsuits, baby! The guy loves 'em.
The only thing he loves more than bending spoons is
bending his wallet when it's stuffed full of lawsuit cash ...
Or I mean, that would be the case if he ever won lawsuits.
Never missing a chance to bring somebody to court, Geller found a great opportunity in 2000 while touring Japan,
when he encountered a certain 'psychic' type named Kadabra.
The Pokemon, Geller claimed, was an unlicensed parody of himself,
designed to appear as an evil Nazi dog monster and turned children against him, of course.
His reasoning was that the Katakana for Kadabra's name, which is Yungerer (ユンゲラー),
is visually similar to a translation of Uri Geller's own name.
This coincidence along with a few other classic 'psychic' symbols
that the Pokemon happened to brandish were enough for the stage magician
to demand 80 million dollars in damages from Pokemon.
Well, this goofy lawsuit went about the way that you'd expect it to,
it's worth noting that since the lawsuit,
Kadabra has appeared in neither the Pokémon anime
nor card game.
So how about that?
Another great thing to come from this though is possibly the greatest sentence
that anyone has ever uttered with a straight face
"Nintendo turned me into an evil occult Pokémon character"
I wish we could all be so lucky, Uri,
I wish we could all be so lucky...
Number Two.
A thing can only become so popular before hordes of religious zealots
rush out from the woodwork to claim that the popular thing is the second coming of little Lord ..
Lucifer Satan man...
Which is his full name
Don't look it up, trust me.
And Pokemon was an extra natural fit as a target for militant Christians in the States
I mean, not only does it feature fighting and monsters or "demons"
But it also prominently features the idea of evolution, *whoa*
It was a regular old panic party in the US when the games and anime hit big in the 90s.
Beyond typical school bannings and religious community calls to eliminate the franchise,
there were all kinds of fevered conspiracy theories that popped up
including that the Pokémon theme song hid a back masked message to teach kids to love Satan.
Some Televangelists even led full crusades against the series.
So, so Pokémon is a game
that teaches children how to enter into the world of witchcraft, how to cast spells -
Pokémon world opens a world of the demonic!
I mean frankly as someone who is always more into 'Magic the Gathering' than Pokémon
this is actually, you know, pretty appealing to me. That sounds pretty good.
I assure you that demons take it quite seriously
Satan takes it quite seriously
Your children need to know those a devil and he hates them and he wants to ruin their life
...and good enough for them -
good enough for me.
And if you think the backlash was big in America, there were some, let's just say
extreme examples worldwide.
In 2001, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia issued a ban on the game at all related merchandise
claiming that the series promoted zionism
freemasonry
evolution and
gambling and you know he may not be entirely wrong about the last one, but still.
While this all might seem like distance-in-the past type of stuff,
recently the clerical body reissued the band
And I wonder what recent super popular Pokemon property could have spurred that on [oh]
And Number One
Guys, if you thought we were only going to talk about Pokemon GO once, well -
That's on me. I did actually lie to you, so I'm sorry for that.
But I couldn't possibly fit everything into just one category.
Can you blame me?
With this face?
We've talked a lot about the individual cases of people playing the popular mobile game,
but that's small mans beans, after all
It's the massive disgustingly huge throngs of people that became the actual problem.
In Sydney, Australia, the courtyard of an apartment complex
infamously became a den of hundreds of Pokemon GO peeps.
some of whom would camp through all hours of the night with food and water stockpiled,
police were called, fines were threatened, players were bombed with water balloons and eggs from disgruntled residents.
In other situations, legal action was taken.
In Detroit, some suburban knights filed a class action lawsuit
Against Pokemon GO developer Niantic
as players began to swarm their neighborhood destroying private property
and verbally threatening residents.
Other lawsuits have popped up all over with varying degrees of legal fallout
due to a different case regarding driving, you can no longer play Pokemon GO while moving over a certain speed.
And lawsuits have gone in the other direction, too.
In the aftermath of Pokemon GO, the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
started requiring permits from AR games in order to cut down on people
trespassing on private property only for the city to be sued by a developer of augmented reality technology.
So if you want the full Pokémon GO experience,
the greatest shit show a mobile game has ever created,
everyone, craft a lawsuit!
Pass it to the person to the left until we're all so sued that we're dead.
Maybe then Uri Geller will finally be friends with us - and he can teach us that cool spoon bending trick