This year marks the 25th anniversary of the first appearance of Pokemon. In the years since we were introduced to these pocket monsters they have invaded every area of pop culture. You can get Pokemon cards, computer games, TV shows, movies, and every sort of collectable. And if that’s not enough they you can always turn to the news and see what controversy they have generated.

Here are ten of the wildest reasons that Pokemon turned into news stories.

10 Pokemon Drawn From Myth And Legend

10 Peta Objections

 

If you break down Pokemon to its most basic level it is a game that involves people, often children, capturing animals and forcing them to participate in brutal battles. Of course the game and tv series show the bonds that develop between Pokemon and their trainers but for some this just makes the exploitation of Pokemon all the more reprehensible. This is where Peta – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – comes in.

Peta has a long history of provocative actions when it comes to getting their pro-animal message across. Comparing eating meat to the Holocaust was a particular low point. When it came to Pokemon Peta knew it had to act to stop the (virtual) cruelty.

In 2012 to protest the release of Pokemon: Black and White they created their own game. Called Pokemon: Black and Blue it was supposed to teach children that instead of ‘catch them all’ they should ‘free them all.’ Unfortunately the game taught children the dangers of playing hastily put together flash games online.

When Pokemon Go came out years later Peta declared that no Pokemon could be caught on their property.^[1]

9 Banned in Saudi Arabia

 

In 2001 the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, on of the nations most powerful figures, issued a Fatwa against a dangerous new foe. The enemy of the country and Islam as a whole was Pokemon. According to the Mufti the game encouraged Zionism. Apparently the cards included “the star of David, which everyone knows is connected to international Zionism and is Israel’s national emblem.” There were also apparently links to Freemasonry that were worrying.

Other aspects of the game that caused concern were its use of words like evolution. “Astonishingly, the children frequently use the word ‘evolution’ inside and outside the game.” Despite having nothing to do with what a scientist would understand as evolution just the mere mention of the word is sufficient to make the game unmentionable.

The ban was mostly forgotten until 2016 however when some Saudis began to download Pokemon Go – bringing Pokemon directly to the streets of Saudi Arabia. The un-Islamic game was banned in Saudi Arabia but some players still found ways to illegally download it.^[2]

8 Jynx

 

Companies have to be incredibly careful when they enter new markets that they don’t make culturally insensitive mistakes. Ford’s Pinto was a flop in Brazil when it turned out pinto meant ‘small penis.’

In 2000 Carole Boston Weatherford wrote an op-ed after seeing an episode of Pokemon. “The character Jynx, Pokémon #124, has decidedly human features: jet-black skin, huge pink lips, gaping eyes, a straight blonde mane and a full figure, complete with cleavage and wiggly hips. Put another way, Jynx resembles an overweight drag queen incarnation of Little Black Sambo, a racist stereotype from a children’s book long ago purged from libraries.”

Whether the appearance of Jynx was intentionally a racially insensitive parody is not known. To avoid causing further offence however Nintendo, the makers of Pokemon, changed Jynx’s skin colour from black to purple.^[3]

7 Uri Geller Sues

 

Uri Geller is one of the most famous psychics in the world. Using what he claims are supernatural powers he has made his fortune from, among other things, showing how with just a waggle of his fingers he can bend a spoon.

Although psychic Uri Geller was unable to foresee that his image would be appropriated for a Pokemon character. Known in English as Kadabra the psychic Pokemon is shown wielding spoons as a sign of its power. This might not have been enough to tip off Geller had Kadabra’s name in Japanese been ‘Yungera’ – very similar to how Geller’s own name is transliterated into Japanese.

Geller filed a $60 million lawsuit against Nintendo claiming they had stolen his identity and turned him into a dark figure. In response Nintendo removed Kadabra from Pokemon cards worldwide. In 2020 Geller finally relented and gave his blessing to Kadabra. It may be the spoon carrying Pokemon will be featuring on cards again soon.^[4]

6 Pokemon Go(es to inappropriate place)

Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game that lets users hunt for Pokemon against the backdrop of the real world. When it launched it was an immediate success and saw players taking billions of extra steps as they roamed their neighbourhoods in search of raw Pokemon. The game encouraged people to discover their local area by turning sites of interest into Pokestops where in-game treats could be picked up.

Unfortunately not all the sites the game picked out were really appropriate for a light-hearted Pokemon battle. Those in Washington DC’s Holocaust Museum could find three Pokestops among the displays about the evils of the Nazi regime. There were also cases of Pokemon popping up where they weren’t wanted there. Koffing, a poison gas Pokemon, was caught in a room describing how people were slaughtered in the gas chambers of concentration camps. The museum looked for ways to be taken out of the game.

Of course perhaps players should take some of the blame. If you are visiting Auschwitz then perhaps you shouldn’t be hunting for Rattata.^[5]

10 Fascinating Real-World Inspirations Behind Pokemon Characters

5 Teaching Evolution

 

Evolution is one of science’s greatest triumphs. Few theories have as much evidence supporting them as evolution does. Hardly any aspect of biology or medicine makes sense unless viewed through the lens of evolutionary theory. That is perhaps why scientists get a bit touchy when people question evolution’s validity.

Pokemon has from its earliest incarnations involved evolution – of a sort. If you train your Pokemon hard enough and get them to the right level then they will “evolve” into a new Pokemon. Really “metamorphose” would be a more accurate word as evolution doesn’t work on individuals but populations but evolution is the word Nintendo chose and that’s what riled up Christian fundamentalists.

Fundamentalist are not as fun as their name suggests (though they may be mental) and some saw Pokemon as a tool being used to teach children evolution. If it was designed for teaching evolution it was not very intelligently designed however as no scientist would call Pikachu turning into Raichu an evolution.^[6]

4 Card Scams

 

In times of crisis certain commodities always go up in value because they are always useful. Gold is usually the go-to purchase for jumpy investors but sometimes it is a much less obvious product they buy into. Recently Pokemon cards have sky rocketed in value – and the number of scams associated with them has blown up too.

Some people collect Pokemon cards because they are cool or they spark a bit of nostalgia but Chris Camillo bought into the cards because he had studied the market and thought there was money to be made. With a single Charizard going for over $200000 there certainly are some cards that can be worth a fortune. So live on YouTube he swapped $375,000 for one unopened box of Pokemon cards that should have been stuffed full of rarities.

Instead the box had already been opened and raided for any cards of value. Camillo was lucky in that he kept his money after the scam was realised but others who are splashing the cash on Squirtles and Blastoises are less lucky.^[7]

3 Satanism

 

What does Pokemon have to do with the Prince of Hell? Nothing, you might think, but certain eagle-eyed Christians have pointed out the myriad ways that Pokemon has links to Satan.

Did you know that Pokemon were specifically designed to look like the demons that were once featured in medieval books used by witches? No? Well, of course they weren’t but that didn’t stop some claiming that Pokemon literally were demons. Why else would they have horns and magical powers? Some pastors thought that Pokemon were a slippery slope that would lead children into researching aspects of the occult.

Urban legends sprang up that supposedly proved the demonic nature of Pokemon. Some said that the spooky music heard in the game when players visited Lavender Town had caused children to commit suicide. Others shared an interview with the creator of Pokemon that stated he made the game in direct opposition to Christianity – though of course this was a complete fabrication.

With the release of Pokemon Go one Pastor thought that “this technology will be used by the enemies of the cross to target, locate, and execute Christians.” Fortunately thus far Satanists have resisted the urge to use Pokemon Go as a means of attacking the holy.^[8]

2 Seizures

On the evening of December 16, 1997 several million children settled down to watch an episode of Pokemon on Japanese TV. The episode “Denno Senshi Porygon” saw the characters on the show transported to a virtual world where they fought a Pokemon called Porygon. At the climax of the battle Pikachu unleashed one of his electrical attacks and the screen lit up with flashing red and blue images – and moments later children began to collapse.

At least that is the story as it was reported. It is undeniable that flashing lights can cause seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy but many people with no form of epilepsy apparently fell victim to the episode. What seems to have happened is that word of some people’s reactions spread and when more children watched the episode the next day they mirrored the seizures.

In what was probably a case of mass hysteria the seizures, though real, had nothing to do with the images on the TV. One follow up study found that most people who had seizures reported no further symptoms up to three years after the episode was aired.^[9]

1 Pokemon Go Deaths

 

Pokemon Go was a huge success. Millions of people downloaded the app and it changed people’s lives. Some people made new friends as they hunted Pokemon together, others found spouses. Some people lost weight as they walked around and some people found it helped with their depression as it gave them a reason to leave the house. But among all the joys the game brought there were a number of tragedies.

The first death attributed to the game was when a man in San Francisco was shot while out playing late at night. Other players were shot at when they broke into private properties to catch super rare Pokemon. It also turns out that walking around with your phone constantly out makes you a target for robbers. A number of players were mugged at gunpoint or found themselves faced with knives.

Many players also chose to ignore the warning in the game that it should never be played while driving. One distracted player had the bad luck to hit a police car while playing behind the wheel. One study of the potential damage caused by the game suggested Pokemon Go may have caused up to $7 billion in damages and caused hundreds of extra deaths. No Pokemon is rare enough to be worth a human life. Unless it is unusually shiny…^[10]

Top 10 Fascinating Facts About Pokemon Go

The Pokemon world is a universe that has captivated the imaginations of countless children, and likely will continue to do so for many decades to come. While the cartoons and games are fun and innocent, at least in terms of presentation, when you look at the nature of the Pokemon universe, there are a lot of disturbing implications about the world in which they live. The Pokemon world is a dangerous and unsettling place, which we will explore below…

10. 11-Year -Old Children Are Routinely Sent Out On Their Own To Do Dangerous Things 

In the Pokemon universe, it is perfectly routine to send small children out on their own to have an adventure and start growing up. According to popular games, your character usually starts out at the tender age of 11, gallivanting all over the region capturing Pokemon, battling some very, very bad people, and just generally riding a ruinous path through the whole area. 

The strange part about this is that no one seems to find this at all strange or inappropriate. In fact, everyone thinks it’s perfectly normal for children who haven’t reached puberty to be, instead of going to school, heading out into the wilds attacking animals and putting them in cages — with no supervision, adult or otherwise. It would seem that either these parents are remarkably foolish, or they simply don’t care that much about the well-being of their kids. While some may suggest it’s simply a different universe where the same rules don’t apply, it is established that there are plenty of very bad people and dangerous situations. 

9. Their Enemies, In Groups Like Team Rocket, Are Actually Also Just Children As Well 

When many people watched the anime, they first assume that Jessie and James are adults, perhaps in their mid-20s, trying to terrorize this kid and steal his Pikachu. We learn in one of the later episodes that they are actually just about 17 (although there is some debate as to their actual ages, most sources suggest they started out with Giovanni as children, whatever age they are when we meet them in the anime), and have been tricked by Team Rocket into doing their dirty work — and there is reason to believe they are not the first underage Pokemon trainers he used for his own purposes. The truth is that Giovanni, the mysterious leader, seems perfectly content using runaways, orphans, and the like, such as Jesse and James, to do the worst of his deeds. 

Giovanni is quick to criticize, but offers little praise, something that is common among abusive fathers. He positions himself as a parental figure to vulnerable teens, and then uses that influence to get them to steal Pokemon for him, so that he can become more powerful. Giovanni is all too happy to use child soldiers, and law enforcement doesn’t seem to have much power to stop him. 

8. The Most Prized Occupation In Their Universe Basically Amounts To Legalized Dog-fighting 

Many people have pointed this out before, but it is still important to bring up anyway. Some people try to explain it away by saying that the Pokemon only faint, and that the nurses are able to revive them later. However, despite this, the Pokemon still go through a lot of pain and suffering to battle for their trainers’ ego, profit, or both. The anime (and all material) glosses it over by simply not mentioning the comparison at all and acting like the whole thing is perfectly normal, but in the real world, the entire thing would be considered insane. 

If Pokemon were real, people would likely keep them as pets, teach them to be guard animals, research them, put them in zoos, and basically do all the other things we do with animals today. However, just like today, our societies around the world would likely not condone pitting animals against each other in combat, and those who wanted to do so would likely have to be underground. In the Pokemon universe this type of cruelty is publicly aspired to, praised, and allowed and encouraged by law. 

7. Trainers In The Game Capture Gods And Guardian Protectors And Stuff Them In A Tiny Ball 

While we can sort of accept a lot of things about the Pokemon universe within their own rules and logic, such as keeping the Pokemon in tiny balls in the first place — they have science fiction technology of course — what can be harder is accepting some of their own story themes, which upend a lot of common sense and logic. In nearly every game, there are legendary Pokemon which guard various important points or shrines. In the many movies, these Pokemon are established as basically being either gods or demigods, and being the creators and guardian protectors of the Pokemon universe. 

And you plow ruinously through their shrines, upend all of their protections, beat them to a pulp, and then force them into a tiny ball, only allowing them out to fight for you. The idea here is just kind of absurd, not only that you could catch a god in the first place, but that the game acts like the entire idea is so commonplace and normal. In fact, in the newest Pokemon games for Nintendo DS you can fly through ultra wormholes, and go hunt for legendary god Pokemon to squash forcibly into a tiny sphere. 

6. Pokemon Were Once Said To Have Sat Down At The Same Table And Ate With Humans 

In one of the more recent Pokemon games, there is a throwaway line that left a lot of people speculating, and that the creators agreed did mean what people thought. Essentially, the line claimed that Pokemon and people once sat down and ate together, more like friends than a master and servant relationship. This brings up some disturbing questions, such as how smart Pokemon were at the time, and where their IQs are now in comparison. 

We know that Pokemon are sentient enough that they are much smarter than animals in the real world, but not generally really that smart — perhaps as smart as very young children. However, if Pokemon were slowly relegated to subhuman status and enslaved over time, and discouraged from human speech if they are capable, would they have slowly lost some of their intelligence, and become more like child slaves, unable to even fully comprehend the horrors they are now forced to live, day in and day out? 

5. Alakazam Has An IQ Of 5,000, But Is Still Expected To Obey An 11-Year-Old Child 

There are a lot of Pokemon where the implications of owning them make little sense at all, but Alakazam in particular really boggles the mind. He is a very slim Pokemon, fragile physically, but incredibly powerful mentally. To this day, even with a mind boggling amount of Pokemon, he is still one of the most powerful psychic Pokemon in the game. However, more to the point, his pokedex entry states that he has an IQ of 5,000. Now, this is just an absolutely insane IQ, and makes us wonder what exactly is going on in the Pokemon world. 

With an IQ like that, Alakazam should be running the entire world, fixing everything and telling people the solutions to their problems. His intelligence is off the charts. Instead, Alakazams routinely end up in the hands of 11-year-old trainers who boss them around, and even end up causing them to get beat up and faint in trainer battles. This Pokemon should be smart enough to understand the indignity it is suffering and do something about it with its awesome psychic powers, but it does not. 

4. The Pokeball Is Basically An Incredibly Tiny Cage, Meaning Pokemon Are Almost Always Crated 

One of the more disturbing things about the Pokemon universe that we don’t think about much of the time, is just how much time Pokemon really have to spend locked inside that pokeball. Now, the creators have said the pokeballs are comfortable, but they have also said the Pokemon are conscious inside. So, even if it is comfortable, they are still in a cage and conscious of that fact. Now, anyone who has ever owned a pet knows how animals get the longer you keep them caged, even if you give them food and water. 

Except for coming out to train, battle, and an occasional bit of fun, Pokemon spend most of their time crated and don’t get much fresh air. From this perspective, Pikachu’s stubbornness makes a lot of sense, as no one wants to spend all their time in a cage. This could also give yet another reason Pokemon like Charizard disobeyed so much in the anime — they felt resentful at not having enough time spent outside, to enjoy the real world and move around freely. Nobody has ever liked being caged long-term, and nobody ever will. To their credit, the game designers state that it would be very comfortable and like a high end hotel room, but it is still a cage — just a very fancy, extremely comfortable cage. To put it in perspective, locking a human in a high end hotel room would still be locking them up in a cage. 

3. Mewtwo Is Smart And Seems To Learn A Valuable Lesson, Then The Idea Is Abandoned

In the first Pokemon movie, Mewtwo steals a bunch of Pokemon from trainers, makes clones, and then makes them fight each other… to death. In the end they don’t actually die, but only because Mewtwo learns a valuable lesson. Mewtwo learns the values of love, peace, friendship and not beating each other to a pulp for no reason, and frees everyone from his psychic control and goes off to live in Mewtwo peace. However, the entire plot of the movie looks incredibly silly in hindsight considering the anime and game creators have completely stomped over that entire message. 

The message of the movie was basically that Pokemon fighting was ridiculous and wrong, and then the movie ends. This would be fine if they intended to end Pokemon forever, but obviously with its popularity that was not in the cards. This means that Pokemon has continued on since, with Ash and the gang being there for Mewtwo’s dramatic actions and speech. And they learned… nothing. Well, we suppose this shouldn’t be too surprising. Humans do not seem to respect Pokemon much in this universe, so the fact they don’t seem to care what Mewtwo had to say is just par for the course. 

2. The Healing Systems Are Seemingly Godly, But People Still Age And Die 

In the Pokemon universe, someone needs to answer for their incredibly godly medical technology. Even in the anime, where things are a little more “realistic” than in the video games, your Pokemon are healed almost effortlessly after getting beat up pretty bad. Pokemon can be near death and summoned back to full health before you know it. However, while Nurse Joy and her Blissy can seemingly fix anything that has happened to a Pokemon, the anime and game don’t really seem to get in depth as to whether humans have it as good or not. 

Part of the question would lie in how the technology is supposed to work. It could be that it simply uses some kind of advanced sci-fi healing ray, but it could also be using some kind of digital technology. Some explanations say the Pokemon are turned into data when they go into a pokeball, so perhaps the nurse simply returns the Pokemon to the pokeball, and restores all of their data. This would raise the question of if you could keep your Pokemon alive almost forever in that manner, and whether a pokeball could potentially be used to digitize a human. 

1. Was There A Genetic Bottleneck Somewhere? Why Are There So Many Joys And Jennys? 

We learn that the reason there are just Officer Jennys and Nurse Joys isn’t because they are the same person, but because they are all distant cousins of some kind. Now, we know in real life that the real reason behind all of this is that the artists wanted to make things really simple, and they were just being silly. However, if we take it seriously in universe it has disturbing implications. For starters, it seems that this family must be some kind of powerful cult, because it has a stranglehold on two very important professions. We see seemingly nothing but the two of them working in law enforcement and the medical field, so why is no one else in those fields? 

The possibility is that there simply aren’t that many people to fill the jobs, so an influx of people who all knew each other and had similar backgrounds good for the job helped fill things up nicely. However, that would suggest that at some point, there was a mass extinction event where a lot of people died, and people had to inbreed in order to survive, creating so many almost identical Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny cousins. This could also perhaps explain how the Pokemon became enslaved. Perhaps many of the Pokemon died, and a lot of the rest went into hiding. In that environment, many humans may have forgotten how the two used to live together, and eventually things became the way they are in the Pokemon universe today.