Pokemon versus Nostalgia

The year was 1998, when I first  heard of Pokemon, and needless to say, I caught the bug. Back then, there were two Pokemon games: Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue. I asked for the Red version because it impressed me more. The generation that was first introduced to Pokemon is all grown up now, facing the world, building the future, so many of us feel nostalgic for old Pokemania. Even today, the first generation is still held up in high regard, still talked about. It is the first generation that has the most famous Pokemon creepypastas (creepy stories that are spread through the Internet), including the story Jessica (about a Pikachu from Pokemon Yellow that becomes sapient), the Lavender Town Syndrome (about how the background theme to a town in Pokemon caused dozens of children to commit suicide) and even the original Pokemon Black (about a haunted game cartridge where the Pokemon were murdered by a mysterious entity known as Ghost, that the player controlled). Yet, why? Why all this nostalgia?

No feels, please

I remember Pokemania like it was yesterday. The time period of 1999 to mid 2000, that was the height of Pokemon's popularity. For a lot of people, Pokemania this was the franchise that defined their childhoods. Me? I was 13 at the time, so my childhood already came and went. I was discovering girls back then (but thanks to my hormones, my taste in women was towards the fake, ultra plastic California beach babes like Pamela Anderson, Jaime Bergman, and Victoria Silvstedt) and my taste in games was changing as well. No longer could I enjoy a game like Super Mario, no, I needed something deeper. I craved adventures, like Final Fantasy or Suikoden. Yet, Pokemon was right up my alley, too. It was challenging, it was deep, and most importantly, it was fun.

It's very hard for those that came after this time to really appreciate what made Pokemon so HUGE back then. I think that Pokemania is best explained as being the result of several factors. Back then, anime was becoming more mainstream, and several cartoon channels were demanding more Japanese animation. I remember that, before Pokemon, Kids WB, the programming block that hosted Pokemon back then, didn't have much in the way of anime. Their programming, however, would actually allow for an action oriented show like Pokemon to feel right at home. Back then, Kids WB had the Men in Black cartoon, Superman, Batman, and a few comedies. The Pokemon anime was an action-comedy, suitable for children but unique enough to be enjoyed by a wide audience.

The 90's were also a decade where collecting was THE big thing. There were these bean bag toys, Beanie Babies, that people collected because, well, they thought they'd be valuable in the future (Spoiler: they wouldn't be). Another big franchise that had swept kids back during that decade were pogs (tazos in my natibe tongue), plastic disks that you could collect. So, a video game about collecting 150 unique looking monsters? Yeah, it'd fit right in.

However, it is important to also know that no one had ever seen something like Pokemon before. This was a video game franchise that was also a toy franchise, an anime franchise, a comic book franchise, and then a movie franchise! Pokemon was everywhere by mid 1999! An official card game, action figures, a successful anime, best selling video games that revived the Game Boy, Burger King toys, an official Manga adaptation, a breakfast cereal, a movie that broke the box office record for a time, canned spaghetti, candies, clothing, etc! When I said Pokemon was everywhere, I was not kidding!

No, I was not kidding about the breakfast cereal.

When the movie came out, back in November of 1999, I remember everyone I knew was excited. My family and I went to see it. The theater was packed! Not one empty seat in the house! People cheered, children laughed, I saw some women cry at the sad parts, a great time was had by all.

By mid 2000, when the second movie came out... half the seats were empty. The anime was becoming boring and tedious, the clothes were becoming kitsch, and half the merchandise that was so high in demand the previous year was now being sold off with discounts. Pokemania was dying. By 2001, Pokemania was a thing of the past.

What happened? There were still new Pokemon games being released, and most of them were excellent. Pokemon Gold and Silver, which introduced 100 new Pokemon, is still seen as one of the greatest games ever made by critics and consumers. So, why isn't Pokemon still an entertainment juggernaut?

Well, while the games were growing in quality, everything else about Pokemon WASN'T. The anime, as I mentioned earlier, was becoming boring. Why? Because Ash, the main character, stopped growing as a character. His quest, which started back in 1998, is nowhere near complete. There are now over six hundred Pokemon. Ash has less than a hundred. Ash was ten years old in 1998. In 2013, Ash is still officially ten. He has made no progress, at all, in his journey. But we, the audience? We did. We grew up, and Ash didn't.

We outgrew the toys, the clothes. The spaghetti is no longer enough for our adult stomachs, the cereal is not what we need anymore. We are adults now, facing the world, building the future. Some of us have kids of our own, even.

So, why are we nostalgic about Pokemon? For some of us, Pokemon represents a simpler time, a happier moment in our lives. Some of us identify our innocence with Pokemon, our spent youth, our time when the future seemed so much brighter. Perhaps some of us have grown weary of our present, and our past seems so much brighter compared to our bleak future.

Some of us choose to cling to Pokemon. This is manifested in the Gen 1 purists, those who say the first generation of Pokemon was the best and that everything that came after it is crap. The insane number of Pokemon rumors and creepypastas is also testimony to our refusal to let go of Pokemon.

When I really take a look at each creepypasta, there is one central theme present: nostalgia. How many Pokemon creepypastas start off with "I hadn't played Pokemon for a long time, so I..."? Several, and to name but a few: Pokemon Lost Silver, Jessica, Pokemon Black. Pokemon creepypastas, save for but a few, always have one of two typical plots: either the player plays the game again after God knows how long, only to discover something new, or the player purchases a copy of one of the older games for the sake of nostalgia and finds it's been supernaturally tampered with. The central theme to both plots, however, is still nostalgia, even if it's nostalgia rewarded (like Jessica) or nostalgia punished (like Lost Silver)

Sometimes our past seems so shiny and bright, and we are so focused on the darkness in front of us, that we forget the darkness we left behind.

Pokemon, to me personally, represents the twilight of my innocence, and of a simpler era. To me, Pokemon was the swan song of the 90's, the decade of my childhood.

Pokemon nostalgia is evidence of our deepest insecurity: that the world keeps going without us. We are nostalgic for something that came and went, of a time that once was and no longer is. We miss it dearly, and the fact that we now have many netizens who are old enough to have their own memories, yet are too young to have lived this special time, is evidence of the grim reality that time keeps on going.

Many kids must have thought back then that Pokemon would be popular forever. But look, nothing lasts forever. Crazes come and go. We have seen the Power Rangers craze come and go. We have witnessed Potter-mania's rise and fall. We have seen the Twilight craze light up like a bonfire in the night, only to fizzle out afterward. And The Hunger Games? Same thing will happen. Things come, things go. Nothing is eternal.

Not everything about the Pokemon craze was good. Religious fundamentalists used this franchise to further their agendas, like that priest who stabbed a Pikachu doll with a sword and then lit it on fire. The original games themselves, while fun, were also glitchy, and honestly, not very balanced. Psychic type Pokemon reigned supreme, and it was not until the Second Generation of Pokemon that the balanced was restored with the addition of the Dark and Steel types. And let's not forget the many controversies that erupted from these games: childhood gambling, theft (some kids took to stealing from other kid's, I once heard of a girl have all her Pokemon cards stolen because she took her eyes off them for a few minutes), bullying, video game addiction (some kids neglected their school work to play Pokemon), among others.

Memories are nice, but that's all they are. It's sad that the time that meant so much to you has come and gone, and that every day it seems that that time just keeps getting further and further away from you. Sharing memories is nice, but we should also take care to live TODAY, in the present, and look forward to the future. To quote Kung Fu Panda "yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present".