In 1998, Nintendo was in the early years of advertising Pokemon while Game Freak’s monster-catching phenomenon made its way west after its success in Japan. Part of that effort involved redesigning 20 Volkswagen Beetles to look like Pikachu, the series’ adorable electric mouse mascot, with pointy ears on the roof, red cheeks under the headlights, and the signature lightning bolt tail poking out of the trunk. These cars were used at events, drove to malls and toy stores, and housed Nintendo 64 consoles for fans to play games on. After the company was done with that, the cars were given away in competitions. Now collectors are looking for the bugs, and archivist Grace Klich has one parked at her Virginia home.
Klich, known on platforms like @mewisme700 tick tock, youtubeAnd Instagramhas collected vintage Pokemon Merch since 2010 when she was in high school. While some fans know Pikachu and all of his friends best from video games or anime, Klich says my city These merch items have always been her greatest connection to the franchise. This was for preservation Pokemonis the forgotten story of Pikachu, which stretches all the way to the Pikachu Volkswagen Beetle.
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This 20 cars (two sets of 10 and two additional vehicles were made by FAO Schwarz, based on Klich’s research) were originally used at promotional events, including one in Topeka, Kansas. Each of them was numbered, and Klich has the seventh. By the time the Pikachu Bug car started circulating in collector circles, it was already being repurposed for promotional purposes Pokemon 3: The Movie. Originally, the cars were given away for the film as part of a Warner Bros. and AOL competition, and the winner of Pikabug #7 lived in Norfolk, Virginia, about two hours from Klich. After some time, the winner gave the car to a family friend.
Klich had heard stories in high school that one of these cars was somewhere in Virginia and even tried calling the DMV to locate it. As it turns out, the car didn’t catch her eye until much later, when she came across a post for it on Facebook in 2019.
“[The previous owner] “I had all these problems with it and just got tired of playing with it and sold it,” she said. “I just thought, ‘I can get it tomorrow. I’ll be there, I’m only two hours away, please let me buy this car.’ He was very interested in it and ended up selling it to me because I was so close and knew the car pretty well myself.”
Klich says Pikabug #7 was in “poor shape” when she first got him because by the time he was listed on Facebook, he had been mostly in a field for several years. She estimates that she’s spent around $6,000 on repairs and registration taxes in the years since she bought it, including at least $1,000 to repair the rear end of the trunk. Recently, however, the car has been given antique license plates, so that there are no longer any costs for the state approval test. After years of repairs, Klich says she’s mostly left with minor body panels, but it took quite a bit of time and money to get there.
“The previous owner had an accident with it. So there’s some very small damage to the rear bumper,” she said. “And then the hood has a dent, but other than that I gutted it completely and replaced the inside. There was a lot of mold damage and it was a mess. I don’t know if you’ve ever sat in a new Beetle, but the inside is awful. They are like cheap plastic garbage. You are terrible. So I had the entire interior replaced. This is an older car. I have to spend a lot of money to keep this thing running. […] Thank god it was a big process. But I am very happy that it is so close to completion.”
The others are probably still out there in one form or another. As such, she has been in touch with a handful of collectors in Kentucky, Mexico and elsewhere in Virginia who own the other parts of the set, while some are still missing. However, she knows of sightings in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
“There was one that belonged to a car dealership in Illinois that had been on display for years. I actually spoke to the dealership and they just use it as a kind of focal point in their parking lot,” Klich said. “I ran the carfax on it. It’s an official Pikachu car and a lot of people on my TikTok will be like, ‘Oh my god, there’s one in Chicago.’ I saw this in Chicago and it’s official.’ It kind of makes me sad that it’s a billboard, but I’m just glad it’s there.”
Despite being in contact with other collectors and knowing the location of other Pikachu cars, Klich says she’s happy with what she has and doesn’t want to buy any of the others. However, she also has a Lugia PT Cruiser that was part of it gold And Silver marketing campaign. At just five examples, these psychic/flying bird themed cars are far rarer. Klich managed to find one through a Facebook group dedicated to New Beetle cars. When she posted a photo of her, someone texted her about the Lugia Cruiser, which led to the sale.
“I made him an offer and had it sent here. I am exceedingly grateful and blessed about it Pokemon “Gods I have it,” Klich said. “But I am fine. No longer Pokemon Cars. Two is enough. I’m just as broke as they are.”
Ever since Klich fixed the bug, he’s been driving to anime conventions. She initially displayed the car at events and allowed people to take photos inside the car for a fee, but now she’s selling it their own goods (often based on old Pokemon items) to fund their work. It has also become a central element of her online platform and community, with social media platforms like TikTok helping her attract vintage Pokemon merch fans. According to Klich, the platform she built was vital for her and others in their quest for new media and commodities to document Pokemonis a lost story. That means finding old promotional materials, footage from the Pokémon Center New York store, or images and videos from original promotional events featuring the Pikachu cars. She hopes her online reach will encourage people to share pieces of history they may not know they have.
“A lot of archiving is a waiting game,” she said. “We’re waiting for people to come up with something because we didn’t have digital media. So I’m sure there are tons of footage on VHS tapes in people’s closets and attics across America. It just depends on people publishing them, digitizing them and uploading them online.”
Klich says she first sparked interest in it Pokemon Archival work due to the now defunct flagship store Pokémon Center New York.
“From there, I started looking at merchandise and realized how lacking the internet was for information about the store. And that was sort of my first archival work that I worked on A website to essentially collect as much information as possible about this defunct shop. Before this website, the store was basically a pastime,” she said.
Because of the emphasis on conservation, a large part of Klich’s collection consists of strange items. Examples are wrappers for Pokemon Popsicles, unused Colgate toothpaste with Pikachu’s face on it, and old promotional cereal boxes.
“I love a good hunt for hard-to-find merchandise,” she said. “That’s why I don’t like maps. I don’t think it’s interesting when I can just buy basically any card I want on eBay. Of course there are some exceptions, such as B. special cards and so on. But in most cases you can just buy any card you want on eBay. And I like things that are a little harder to find, things where people look at my collection and go, ‘Man, I completely forgot about that, you know, things that people didn’t want to keep, you know, things .” who were thrown out.”
But beyond the already elusive candy wrappers and cereal boxes, it’s nearly impossible to preserve much digital media from this period. The demise of Flash, for example, has made it nearly impossible to find viewable images and videos of it Pokemon Events from the 1990s that Klich focuses on using sources such as Wayback machine.
“I know the website listed a lot of footage from the Launch Pokémon event in Topeka, Kansas Topeka Capital Journal,” she said. “It was all archived on the site, but I couldn’t download any of those video footage, which was just devastating because there’s no footage from that event other than a few clips. So yeah, sometimes it will work. I did We’ve done recordings before, but it’s like a dream.”
Klich notes that she prefers the neglected sides of the franchise that aren’t being kept up. In addition to merch, she tries to find information about old promotional events, such as Live action pirate ship show this happened in Australia, documented only by tiny journal articles. Some may have forgotten these events, but they were probably exciting and formative for the young fans in the early days Pokemon. Klich doesn’t want that era of the series to be lost just because we didn’t have the same tools to document those moments as we do now.
“We got to know the history of the greatest franchise of all time and every piece of history, even the weird and obscure events,” she said. “It’s important. At some point, this event brought joy to hundreds of children. That was the pinnacle of their young childhood lives. It’s important to make sure these events are not forgotten. That’s what I, as an archivist, try to do to ensure that this stuff is not forgotten.”
