Hacker Cinema
Pokémon
ポケットモンスター
1997 · TV series · 25 seasons
AnimationActionAdventureScience FictionFantasy
Join Ash accompanied by his partner Pikachu, as he travels through many regions, meets new friends and faces new challenges on his quest to become a Pokémon Master.
3 positive4 negative1 mixed16 neutralfrom 24 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
24 comments on Hacker News
The streaming services have fractured and taken so many movies off their service so much that it is too hard for most people to figure out where that show/movie can be found.
From a link above to the story on darknetdiaries:
> For Pokemon, there is a website that tells you how to watch this. You start off on Netflix, then swap over to the Pokemon streaming service, which is the only place that has Season 2, then swap over to Prime Video for Seasons 3 through 5, swap to Freevee, then Hoopla. Season 13 is only on Amazon, though. Then swap to Tubi, then Hulu, then Roku channel, and then finally back to the Pokemon streaming, and then Netflix. Easy.
That's 8 different streaming services to view one series.
I'll share my secret. Rather than trying to initiate a conversation with others, make it easy to initiate a conversation with you.
I started wearing hats outdoors to keep the sun off my balding head (I've had a sunburn up there, and I don't want another one), and the hat I had around to wear was from when I went as Ash Ketchum for Halloween.
Nearly everywhere I go with that hat, I'll get someone saying nice hat, or professing their love for Pokemon, or asking me if I've caught them all.
This provides an opportunity for conversation and a shared interest. I can ask them if they're into the show, the books, the card game, the video games. How did they get started? What Pokemon is their favorite? Who's the best trainer? When did they start liking Jesse and James? Do they like old stuff or new stuff (I've got the OG hat from season 1).
It takes almost no effort to wear a hat and it helps me use my social skills when I'm out and about. And keeps the sun off my face a bit, and is handy for napping at conventions. You don't have to be Ash Ketchum, any character hat will do.
Also, bonus secret. When I'm sleep deprived, I get chatty... You may or may not, but if you do, use it for practice when it happens... and if you say something embarassing, you can always blame the lack of sleep. I was just at First Robotics worlds and the setup is harsh for sleep hygiene, but I had a ton of nice conversations with random robot people. Shared interest, opportunities and sleep deprivation combined. Otoh, much fewer notices of my hat at the convention center than I expected.
From the paper, it seems like that the blood flow changes and the seizures are both caused by the increased processing load in the visual cortex; with the seizures also resulting from some faulty wiring in localizing that increased load to only the visual cortex. So, more like A->B and A->C instead of A->B->C. But I'd bet this visual stimuli is even more effective at causing seizures in vulnerable people than an unfortunate pokemon episode.
Pokemon is an anime. Video games and the card game are derivatives of the anime.
I linked to the anime as an example of the writing to prove you wrong. The anime is childish and the games reflect that in the writing.
Maybe you're too young to know this. The anime just had its last episode 2023. It's been around for 25 years. Or maybe you're trolling. Pikachu is literally in that video. The information is quite obvious.
In my early-40's, I've found that the massive gap between youth culture and adult culture has, thankfully, shrunk. While it's still the case that no 16-year-olds are going to want to hang out with us, their language and activities and perspectives don't feel as foreign as Boomers purported to feel about, well, everything. Because unlike previous generations, who fetishized leaving behind childish things and creating stark barriers between kid world and adult world, many of us have continued to do what we like as we've grown older. And it turns out, the reason kids like to do things like play video games or obsess over anime or take drugs is because these things are fun. And because we're still "in the game", so to speak, we don't balk and criticize and feign outrage like previous generations. That leaves a tremendous amount of space for connections, because we all play games and have niche interests and like our weird TV shows, even if the specifics vary greatly (and more than ever before).
I recently bought my nephew a box of Pokémon cards. I don't play Pokémon, I have no interest in it and frankly it seems kind of dumb. But I would never say that because all I wanted at age 12 were boxes of comic book cards and Magic the Gathering cards. Equally dumb, at least! So I 'get' it, unlike my mother who, though sometimes obliging, thought all of these hobbies were incomprehensible nonsense.
This doesn't seem to be a passing phenomenon. Once you've established a perspective that respects and expects change, there's no law of nature that will magically revert that. That doesn't mean it will be frictionless. And it does require some conscious effort to keep up. I have TikTok on my phone. I rarely use it, but I'm familiar with it and it's not foreign to me. I see it as my task to refuse to let changes in technology or culture become foreign to me. And that task seems vastly easier today compared to the pre-internet era of scarce information, overwhelming monoculture and insular, defensive subcultures.
My sons are both (well one more than the other) heavily into Pokémon, and will quite happily flit between episodes from the first season and the latest ones without missing a beat. The sheer number of episodes across the whole series means it'll be years before they even see every episode once... and they haven't even got into the RPG yet!
I feel the exact same way; I'm not epileptic but I avoid media that knowingly contains rapid flashing lights out of precaution, and I look away or scroll down whenever I do come across rapid flashing lights.
I'm glad that Apple has made flashing light detection and auto-dimming technologies more available. It's amazing, in a sad way, how so many people are still unaware of the dangers of certain flashing light patterns, which leads to incidents continuing to occur. I personally only know about such dangers because I'm a long-time Pokémon fan since the English dub started airing in 1998; to this day the only episode of the Indigo League era I haven't watched is the infamous Porygon episode (only aired once in Japan) that had a flashy battle scene that sent about 700 people to the hospital. Yet even with this high-profile incident, I've heard some people say the incident was an urban legend until I told them otherwise, and there have been incidents in other media. There needs to be more awareness about the dangers of flashing lights so that way media creators and broadcasters can avoid them or mitigate their risks.
I am incredibly impressed with this post and with the novel results of Stable Diffusion already.
The result for Ivory Coast looks like the latest+ dark n edgy brooding Pokemon for ash and company to love on and teach that life is not all grimdark after all, some 5 or so episodes after Ash gets to a new region and re learns type matchups for the Nth time.
+next in line after Mewtwo and Lucario
I did professional research on DBMS technology and still only got 67% right :-( Maybe it's because I've only ever watched 2 Pokemon episodes.
I'd be somewhat surprised if literally nobody knew about Ghost in the Shell, but I bet you didn't use the Japanese title (攻殻機動隊, Koukaku Kidoutai). However, only big anime fans around here would have heard of that title (of which you're likely to find a bunch at Sony, though, but certainly not everyone).
The US puts late night anime on a pedestal, stuff that fans focus on. That's a big market in Japan, but not ubiquitous by any stretch if the imagination - and the names that become popular in the US are often very different to the names popular here, and often only after they've fallen out in Japan. Takeda-san doesn't know about FLCL.
Anime is part of daily culture in Japan and everyone knows about it, but for household names you need to go to long-running, popular shows that run in kid-friendly slots. Stuff like Pokemon, Precure, Detective Conan, etc. It is those long-running shows that become part of the collective consciousness, because everyone watched some of that when they were kids. Same with Ghibli movies and anything by Shinkai Makoto (Your Name, Weathering with You, etc). That, and truly impactful stuff like Evangelion, the Gundam franchise, Naruto, etc.
Then there's the fads. Everyone in Japan knows about Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer) right now because they're doing tie-ups with seemingly every shop and business under the sun. Walk into any convenience store and they'll have branded snacks. Whether that series will survive to become something that people remember or not, time will tell.
The poor woman played a secondary character in the 8th of 23 Pokemon movies.
She deserves better than this. Okae hosted a morning show on a major network for 18 years and it gets a passing mention.
>Honestly, reading this article was the first time I saw a documented case of strobes causing seizures
It's been common knowledge at least since the Porygon episode of Pokemon[0] in the late 90s.
>It's possible (and this is purely speculation) that the attacker sent the strobe to give some comedic punch to the statement "you deserve a seizure" not expecting or hoping that it would actually cause a seizure.
It's possible but knowing people and the internet, it's more likely they were hoping an actual seizure would be the "comedic punch."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Senshi_Porygon
Same for me with the Pokemon anime. A few years ago, I re-watched the first two episodes and GOOD LORD was that horrible. Some childhood memories should better be left in the past...
> What made Magic the Gathering and Pokemon so big compared to Baseball Cards?
I grew up with Pokemon and I might have some answer for that.
Before Pokemon I had a binder of basketball cards. I collected them but I never had a lot of them. Some of them were cool and shiny, some were split into three parts so they were three smaller cards in one and I liked those as well. Additionally I had a favorite team; the Chicago Bulls and of course those cards were special to me as well. Still though there wasn't much you could really do with the basketball cards and I think probably the same goes with baseball cards right? I had my binder, I'd sit down and flip through the binder, I'd trade cards with others now and then.
When Pokemon came, it took our school by storm. We were all watching the Pokemon anime on TV, we were playing Pokemon on our Gameboy Color units, and we played Pokemon the trading card game (TCG).
Pokemon the TV series told the story of a boy that was about our age. He went on a grand adventure, he was considerate towards his Pokemons and towards others. But most importantly, he was on a mission to catch them all and to become the very best. This idea; catch them all and become the very best is repeated pretty much non-stop throughout the whole TV series and the movies.
So Ash Ketchum (the main character of the first series) becomes an idol for us kids and we want to be like him. We want to become Pokemon masters.
We play the Gameboy game day out and day in when we are at home. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Battling. Grinding. Advancing in the game. The school did not allow us to bring our Gameboys though. However we played the Pokemon TCG a lot during recess. We also played the Pokemon TCG at home because it was fun -- it wasn't just a substitute for the Gameboy game, but nonetheless I think the fact that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school made us play the TCG even more at school than we would have otherwise. But I think it was good that we were not allowed to bring our Gameboys to school. Playing the TCG was a much more social activity IMO.
So we play the TCG and we all want to be the very best. How do you become best? You build the best deck. But there is no single best deck. The strength of your deck depends on what your opponent has in his/her deck. Also the best cards are more rare than the others of course. Additionally the drawings on the cards were awesome and everyone wanted shiny cards which were also rare.
It was a perfect storm. Very very clever marketing.
I think Pokemon contributed a lot to my childhood though and I am happy that Nintendo made Pokemon.
F2P apps that use dark patterns and psychological tricks to extract money from their userbase might actually be closer in nature to Pokemon than I'd like to admit but still it feels fundamentally different. You might argue that in a way the Pokemon TCG was "pay to win" and in a way I would agree but at the same time the TCG still depended on being able to balance your deck correctly and there was always a strong element of randomness that no amount of money could get rid of for you.
In conclusion, with the Pokemon TCG you had both the prettiness of the cards (some kids collected only and never played even) but you also have the utility of the cards in playing a game combined with the best cards being rare, causing many of us to buy as many of them as we could get money for from our parents so that we could build better decks than our friends had and beat them and also so that we could show off our rarest cards to one-another.
Speaking of rarity; I know there are some baseball cards that are more rare than others. I don't know if the same goes for basketball cards but when we collected basketball cards there was never any talk about rarity. Perhaps likewise rarity of baseball cards was not something that kids "knew about"? With Pokemon cards you knew for example that shiny cards were rare because you could tell from the fact that you usually did not get any of them in the booster packs and the full decks contained like one of them or so, so it was immediately obvious that the shiny cards were "special". The Pokemon cards also had various markings that we attributed value to.
Furthermore, with Pokemon you knew the Pokemons from the show and everyone had their favorite Pokemon. For many of the Pokemons, multiple different cards existed, so there were more than just one card to collect for each of the Pokemons that you liked among the 151 Pokemons. Additionally, there were other types of cards that were needed for the game, including "trainer cards" that gave special powers or other advantages and there were "potions" and there were "energy colors" that you needed for attacks. The energy cards were the least valuable because they were so common. Some rare kinds of energy cards existed as well of course but everyone had way more energy cards than they needed. There were some trainers and potions that were very common as well, and some Pokemons that were too. But sometimes you'd find that other kids wanted the cards that you didn't want and you'd trade with them. For example I once traded a common Pikachu card with a kid that was obsessed with Pikachu and he gave me a card that in my eyes was much better, so we both ended up very happy from that trade.
I also remember there was a series of Pokemon cards that were not the TCG type cards. Neither me nor anyone I knew liked those cards, exactly because you couldn't do anything with them other than to just look at them whereas with the TCG cards you could both look at them and play with them. So definitely the being able to play with them aspect was hugely important.
Pokemon have had the games and 20 years worth of TV series that are pretty much extended ads.
For IAP: Instant gratification coupled with tons of analytics. Being able to tweak the balance until you get just enough valuable items to continue even if you don't get the item you really badly want. Making it into a weapons race or status race with other players (I once used about $200 on buying boosts in a niche online strategy game because another player pissed me off enough that I "bankrolled" an entire alliance just to see him lose; I subsequently closed my account and never played the game again, as I realized how easy it'd be to keep throwing money at it - it felt worth it for the satisfaction that once, but it'd have been a really bad habit to get into).
I basically agree, but I do think it's possible to make a narrative from a game. The pokemon tv show and movies were very successful and widely enjoyed by the audience.
Transformers, G.I. Joe, Strawberry Shortcake, He-Man, My Little Pony... all either toys first or simultaneously created as toys. Usuaslly a good giveaway is when Hasbro or Mattel is mysteriously the creator of the show.
Of course this isn't just a Western phenomenon, the video game/anime/movie/card game/merchandise extravaganza that is and always was Pokemon being probably the best single example.
It’s still conjecture but the chances are good that photosensitive epilepsy[0] as triggered for example by the famous Pokemon episode[1] is conceptually similar to the unstable responses that adversarial attacks produce in computational neural networks (and yes while there is some debate about the total number of seizures triggered by the broadcasting of that episode there is no debate as to whether the medical condition exists and is an real risk factor for a surprisingly high fraction of the population, particularly males and children[2])
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosensitive_epilepsy
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennō_Senshi_Porygon
[2]https://www.epilepsysociety.org.uk/photosensitive-epilepsy
Seems like the best solution to me would be an accessibility option on the device that prevents this type of flashing. May seem hard, but compare that against stopping people from being immature/malicious on the internet.
The added upside would be that it would prevent completely accidental cases of exposure to flashes (e.g. watching an episode of Pokemon).
While this entire thread is probably not considered relevant, "pika pika" or "pika-pi" are common quotes from Pikachu[1], arguably the most popular Pokemon.
The grandparent's comment is "relevant" because a pikachu is an Electric-type Pokemon. It can attract/store large quantities of electrons, and also repel/release large quantities of electrons.
While pikachus do eat other food, fruits/Poke-food/etc, it is unclear if they need a source of electrons to sustain themselves. They may just pull the needed electrons out of the their surroundings. However, I seem to recall an episode where Pikachu was sick due to a prolonged lack of access to a large current source.
[1] http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pikachu_(Pok%C3%A9mon)
She's just being treated as a bro. Dudes are just immature like that. The touching is different though but I won't address that. Anyway to give my explanation more color, let me tell you about one of my "bro" friends.
We go to college together and we always make fun of each other for our differing tastes in TV shows. He likes pokemon, which I think is for little kids or adults with developmental problems while I like game of thrones, which he thinks is a show only liked by people who enjoy watching penises on television as the show periodically flashes one into your face for no reason. We make fun of each other about this all the time because we're bros, in manspeak this means we're just close friends.
I've had worse pranks played on me by said bro. One day I left my computer unattended and unlocked. He took control of my computer, changed the background to a giant wet penis; Took a screenshot of the page; made that screenshot the background then proceeded to hide all the icons and menu bars on my desktop. The end result was essentially what appeared to be a frozen computer screen with the background replaced by a huge penis. I thought it was some crazy virus as even restarting my computer didn't work. I spent the next ten minutes trying to debug the situation all the while staring at a giant penis. Funniest thing ever, we both got a good laugh out of it.
I mean this prank could be interpreted as inappropriate depending on the situation and person, but the point is neither me nor my friend would be willing to treat each other so "inappropriately" if we didn't feel close.
So in short, both sides have made social errors. Their actions were immature and they failed take into regard your discomfort as a woman, while the OP misinterpreted their intentions as sexist.
The resolution to this situation is easy. Ask him to stop... or join in on the fun. Openly declare their tastes in baseball as stupid and mindless. How could any sport be more boring? Everyone would've definitely got a good laugh if you were the one who pulled off that remote control prank.
You must also keep in mind that you are still in a situation where majority rules and you must honor that situation as you're the only person who wants to watch friends, it would be disproportionately unfair if they catered to your tastes instead of the majority.
Whatever the OP chooses to do I honestly believe that her coworkers actions were not intentionally discriminatory.
Iunno, I'm pretty sure most people know what Pokémon is and a large portion of those know it had a TV show. Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Cardcaptor Sakura all seem to be pretty well known among the younger generations and by extension the older generations who raise and take care of them.
And anime/manga is becoming more and more mainstream. Sure it's not like you'll walk in on your boss catching up on the latest episode of Attack on Titan but it's getting there.
>I think piracy + netflix have probably irreversibly changed people's willingness to sit through commercials, wait for the scheduled time slot, and put up with the other inconveniences associated with the whole process.
I was telling my 7yo about this yesterday. How in the old days, you couldn't just watch videos on YouTube or download whole seasons of Pokemon. No, there were only three channels, and things were shown at one time, and you had to be watching then or you'd miss it, and you couldn't watch it again. And it was horrible!
(Called my dad today, he was most amused too.)
This was provoked by having to explain to her that we couldn't just get all of Season 17 X and Y, because it hasn't all been broadcast yet, that there's just a new one every week. And of course it's unavailable in the UK ... except on the net.
She watches lots of CBeebies/CBBC. So I pay for a TV licence even though we don't have a TV. Because the BBC is worth it.
I babysit a lot of my friend's kids (lacking kids of my own, I'm available for this) so I get to watch A LOT of children's TV. Perhaps its just an "in my day..." sort of bias but I do feel like the 90s were of higher quality than content of today.
Most hit shows of the '00s till today are invariantly tied up in trying to peddle toys of some kind. Certainly older shows were used for merchandizing but it seems like today the toy comes first and the show is developed around it. Plot development is optional and stories need not build off one another or refer back to past episodes. Out of those the early seasons of Pokemon and Digimon weren't bad and there are certainly a few neat shows on Disney & Nickelodeon (The Fairly Odd Parents and Sponge Bob come to mind).
Aside from that it seems like a lot of shows lack the complex story telling of shows like Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, Spiderman, Beastwars, Reboot, XMen, and the others mentioned in the article. While not really a kids show (seriously - watch this as an adult and its 10 times funnier), Freakazoid outdoes most content peddled to adult audiences.
Another thing I've observed that seems to be detrimental to animated shows is the rise of cheap soap opera style live animation in place of cartoons. Probably the biggest example is Miley Cyrus' early career (Hannah Montana, etc). These shows let companies monetize in more ways since you can create concert movies and albums and the fanbase will follow the actor/actress to multiple shows. Benda Song[1] has spent nearly a decade jumping between various TV shows on the Disney channel (and playing a pretty good 'crazy girlfriend' in the Social Network IMO). I'm sure there are many other examples (all the faces seem to look the same between Disney's shows) but she stands out to me since she's seemingly the only cast member my age in shows filled with 12-16 year olds.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Song