In the new Pokemon movie, Pikachu speaks. By that we don’t mean just saying his own name a lot like the Pokemon in the anime do; we mean that he speaks full-on English sentences, or Japanese sentences if you were watching the original version of the movie. That is really, really weird. In the anime, viewers eventually saw an episode where the Pokemon-speak was translated into human language in subtitles and some psychic Pokemon have been shown to be able to communicate with human beings, but Pikachu has never spoken like this before.
In honor of this travesty, here is a list of five other strange things that have happened in the Pokemon series:
Weird Pokemon Moments: Pikachu Speaks
In Pokemon: I Choose You! the unthinkable happens when Pikachu, the adorable rodent mascot of the series known for squeaking variations of his own name, tells Ash: “It’s because I always want to be with you.”
The moment comes out of nowhere, as evidence by the audience reaction to it in the hilarious video below:
Hi, I am just learning that Pikachu speaks English in the new Pokemon movie and, yes, it is extremely fucking weird pic.twitter.com/k5hm5lyW7Y
— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) November 13, 2017
In the Pokemon universe, very few pocket monsters are able to speak English, with Meowth being the most famous example. As evidenced by the above video, it should absolutely remain this way and we never want to hear Pikachu speak every again.
Weird Pokemon Moments: Missingno and Glitch City
MissingnNo, short for “missing number,” is a glitch found in early Pokemon games. Basically, when the game’s programming gets scrambled up, it pits the player against MissingNo instead of an actual Pokemon. Most commonly appearing as a backwards ‘L’ shape made out of a bunch of jumbled up pixels, Missingno has been known to mess with save data and cause a number of other glitches to become possible, such as item duplication, breaking other graphics in the game, and crashing the game entirely. Oddly, it can actually be caught with a Poke Ball and trained like other Pokemon even though its existence has been confirmed to be purely accidental.
The map equivalent of MissingNo is called “Glitch City” and it also appears in earlier Pokemon games. After taking a variety of contrived steps depending on the version being played, the player can end up in a seriously unsettling mess of a world in which the usual game rules don’t apply, and once again this can actually cause the game itself to crash.
It’s easy to see why both of these bizarre mistakes have lead to their own series of creepy rumors surrounding their existence, with some fans speculating that MissingNo is what happens when a Pokemon remains in its Poke Ball for too long and is scrambled into unintelligible data, while Glitch City is said to be an alternate, infinitely creepier version of the Pokemon universe, similar to Stranger Things‘ Upside Down.
Weird Pokemon Moments: Epilepsy episode
Watching Pokemon on television can’t kill you, right? Well, most of the time, anyways. There was actually one episode that caused almost 700 children to be hospitalized due to health issues that came from flashing lights caused by Pikachu blowing up some virtual missiles.
Some passed out, some went nearly blind temporarily, and a select few others actual got diagnosed with epilepsy after having seizures as a response to the episode’s animation. Obviously, this episode has not been aired since in the Japanese region due to the health risks, but apparently a toned-down, safer version of the episode has been broadcast elsewhere.
Weird Pokemon Moments: Man horrifically fused with Pokemon
Once upon a time there was a man in the Pokemon world who wanted to experiment with teleportation, and so he did. Unfortunately, the experiment went all The Fly on him and he got stuck as a part-pokemon, part-humanoid abomination. That story sound familiar to you? Well, if you’ve played the original Pokemon games it should, because that actually happened. Yep, players were tasked with helping a guy separate his body from an animal that he accidentally fused himself with. How’s that for a quest?
Weird Pokemon Moments: Entai has a human child, sort of
This one comes from the movie Pokemon 3: The Movie. This one was sort of like the other Pokemon movies, except its main villain was a god pokemon imprinted upon by a sad little girl with a bunch of ancient beings at her disposal whose parents were gone in an effort to live a fake happy life with her by using said pokemon to kidnap and hypnotize someone else’s mother so that the little girl could pretend that she was her mother. It was… bizarre honestly, and kind of complicated. Apparently this was an effort to teach the children watching that being in deep denial of life’s tragedies is bad no matter how terrible life gets, which was good because it was probably tempting for most young viewers to live in denial of ever having seen something so messed up in a Pokemon movie.
Weird Pokemon Moments: Dirty jokes
It might be surprising if you’re an outsider to the series, but for something aimed at kids, Pokemon has never shied away from making some seriously inappropriate nods to some seriously child-inappropriate behaviors and objects. Take, for instance, the boyfriend and girlfriend duo in the early games that appeared using a cloyster and an onix respectively- two pokemon who, for those not in the know, are shaped suspiciously like female and male anatomy. Sometimes it got even more blatant though, with the first game featuring a man sitting outside a gym of young women and looking in through a window at them. So basically an outright peeping tom, in a pokemon game. Prostitution double entendres, hiding balls inside of bras and discussing broken swimsuits, making ball puns, and so on all appear in the games. Sometimes it’s subtle and sometimes it’s decidedly not, but the Pokemon series shies away from surprisingly little.
So yeah, the Pokemon series can be a really weird thing sometimes. Funny thing is, this list doesn’t even cover the half of it. Maybe if we ever do a sequel to this article, we’ll be able to talk about that time Ash died in the original movie, the time Jessie got possessed by a ghost that made people fall in love with her, the pokemon that is known for kidnapping children, all the times Team Rocket has made use of gag boobs, the episode where the main characters got stuck in a psychic’s freaky dollhouse, and that time a bunch of giant pokemon stomped all over an island.
