History of Pokémon Surprisingly Vulgar, Dangerous & Embarrassing

In this 2016 article from Screen Rant, they tell some quite embarrassing details about how Pokémon cast member ‘Misty’ was handled in the famous cartoon series based on the franchise co-developed by Nintendo:

Many episodes of the Pokémon anime had to be censored in order to be shown on American television. The most notorious of these was “Electric Soldier Porygon”, as it made international news (before Pokémon was even being considered for a Western release). This was due to a sequence of flashing lights during the episode, that caused children across Japan to suffer epileptic seizures.

Outside of “Electric Soldier Porygon”, the most famous of the banned episodes was “Beauty and the Beach”. When clips of this episode leaked online in the early days of the Internet, a lot of fans thought they were fake. During the episode, a beauty contest is held on the beach for girls. James of Team Rocket enters, and he wears a suit with a set of inflatable breasts. Of all of the banned episodes, “Beauty and the Beach” did eventually see an English release. The episode was heavily censored, and the run-time had to be cut down considerably.

During the English dub of the episode, Misty is accosted by a creepy old man, who claims that he wishes Misty was his granddaughter. In the original Japanese version of the episode, he tells her that he was thinking about “having fun” with her in eight years time. This old man is the first in a long line of creepy men who lust after the 10 year old Misty on this list.

I don’t support censorship, but this is awfully tasteless, and disgusting how they put in something so monumentally embarrassing as an old geezer telling something like that to a girl who’s supposed to be just 10 years of age, and he’s apparently not the only one. If anything, it makes you wonder what’s the use of adapting something for broadcasting to children’s audiences overseas if it’s that morally vulgar? (On the other hand, wonder if SJWs today would despise that the baddie team’s member had dressed in drag?)

And it seems that, over the years, Misty was later dropped from the cast as a regular, and producer Masamatsu Hidaka had no interest in bringing her back on a regular basis:

So, will Misty ever return to the show? His answer was a flat out no – not as a main character, anyway. If she is to ever return to the show, it will only be in a minor role as something like as a rival for a tournament, similar to May returning for a few Diamond and Pearl episodes. But no, “Kasumi-san” would never return as a main character again, unfortunately. I heard him mention “Pokemon Contests” in his response to my question, but the translator did not tell me what he meant.

As explained here and here, he didn’t seem to have much care for the character, and if he couldn’t do for her what he could do for the crooked Team Rocket, it’s disappointing. I’ve been familiar with absurd positions taken by writers in USA comicdom in the past who act as though the villains are what matters, and pretend it’s impossible to give any organic depth to the heroes. I must fully disagree with this, and besides, what should really matter is the entertainment value anyway, not whether you can make the heroes compelling in all aspects of personality. Such failures are exactly why mainstream superheroes wound up becoming stagnant.

For all the advantages Japanimation does have in terms of ability to deal with more complicated subjects, in contrast to US animation, where they dumb it down often in their refusal to market it to more than just children (except as deliberate LGBT/political propaganda, as seen in recent years), Japan still unfortunately has a problem with understanding why cheap sensationalism of this sort is crude, and decidedly insulting to the intellect. I honestly wish they could refrain from this kind of stuff that’s just skin-crawling.

Originally published here.