2023, Pokemon is part of our life. It’s been around all around us for decades, and even if you’re not a fan you’ll at least know the basic premise.
They are Pokemon! You catch them all! They fight, they faint, they go into a little ball, there are some kids, some of them (the Pokemon, not the kids) look like dinosaurs, some of them look like animals. You would know that so much would be easy be alive in the 21st centurysince you would have been exposed to the series again and again, anywhere from the cinema to the supermarket to the clothing aisle of a department store.
That’s why it’s sometimes extremely fun to look back on the time when we not everyone knows Pokemonand there are few examples that better illustrate this period of human history than this commercial (uploaded by Dinosaur Dracula found it on an old VHS), manufactured for the US market in 1999 for the Pokemon Launch of the trading card game (the first video Games, on the other hand, were not released in the US until late 1998):
How the hell are we going to market this to American kids?you can hear the suits asking across a ’90s boardroom table before someone raises a hand and says tentatively like sports, they know sportsand everyone else cheers and pats each other on the back and says you I just bought myself a raise, Thompson.
It’s not the worst idea! To his credit, the commercial has aged extremely well, helped by the fact Pokemon still has an incredibly active tournament scene, and at no point is she embarrassed or afraid to embrace what she is. OK, maybe the “You got game” part hasn’t aged well, but everything different has.
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Note that this video isn’t new to the internet, but this particular version caught our eye because this is one much Upload in better quality than the first version you can currently find in a YouTube search.
