All of this Pokémon Go craziness has me nostalgic for a time when Pokémon was everywhere. In the early 2000s, Nintendo realized it had a monster hit on its hands and went crazy with the merchandising. There was a time when you couldn’t walk through a supermarket without seeing Pikachu staring you right in the face.
I remember waking up on Saturday morning, putting on my Squirtle T-shirt, throwing an Eggo waffle with Poliwrath’s face on it into the toaster and gluing myself to the couch to watch the newest episode of the Pokémon television show with my Gameboy and Pokémon Red by my side. I grew up in a strict Jewish home where we had to go to temple on Saturday mornings. My mom learned after weeks of dealing with my screaming fits that it’s best to just watch let me watch rather than have me scream during the Rabbi’s sermon.
Ash was everything I wanted to be and more. A 10-year-old boy with the freedom to travel the world and encounter beasts of tremendous power. In hindsight, I’m glad I never actually followed through on my plans to leave home and start my Pokémonjourney; 10-year-old me didn’t even know what a bus looked like. Still, I dreamed of flying on the back of a Charizard, getting my hat stolen by a Mankey and even getting drawn on by a pissed off Jigglypuff .
My favorite piece of Pokémon merchandise, without a doubt, was the original “Pokémon 2 B.A. Master” cassette tape. To most of you those words might as well be written in Unown, so let me explain. In 1999, the Pokémon Company released a 13-song cassette tape featuring songs from the anime series along with some of the weirdest official music ever tied to a video game. I listened to this tape non-stop, playing it on my boombox that I had ripped off the antennae to.
I went back and listened to all the songs, and I just couldn’t stop myself from singing along. Though the lyrics are extremely dated and every song sounds like it came out of a synth machine put on random, I can’t help but still love it. I don’t remember some of these lyrics being as…. Inappropriate though. Here’s part of the chorus from “What Kind of Pokémon Are You?” which was a rap (there were lots of raps) about Pokémon types:
What kind of Pokémon are you?
How do you do the things you do?
Share with me your secrets deep inside, (yeah, what kind, what kind)
“2 B.A. Master” is a product of it’s era, a time when it was still “radical” to replace words with letters. The whole album had to have been thought up by a clueless CEO who saw that rap and Pokémon were popular, so why not combine them. The same thing can be said about Pokémon Pop Tarts or freaking ketchup.
Pokémon has changed a lot since I was a kid, there are 721 different pocket monsters made of keys, swords and chandeliers. The world might be bigger, but one thing will never change: 10 year-olds still want to be Pokémon masters.
