This Week in 90s Nostalgia: Pokemon!

By Alex Thompson

As soon as we hear the words: “I wanna be the very best…”, we all know exactly what the following phrase it. We all remember either getting up early at 6:15 to watch the show before school or flying home at 3:30 to catch the show after. We all remember waiting in lines in front of Toys ‘R Us, or whatever toy store, to get the new game that had just come out. We remember spending copious amounts of money on little packs of cards just in the hopes of getting a hologram. For all of those who are unfortunate enough to not know what I’m talking about, Ill just say it: I’m talking about Pokémon.

That’s right, kids, that 90s craze that hit all of us has comes back to bite us now that the younger generation is being exposed to it. Sadly, back in our day there was only 151 Pokémon and it was possible to catch them all, right now it seems rather impossible and just a little pointless now that they have all these new creatures and suddenly all the first generation ones have new evolutions.

Now that we are all older we now marvel at how Ash Ketchum and his friends have magically not aged a single year. Yep, that boy is still 10 years old, the same age he was over 10 years ago. We also now realize that the show is a liar and that Agility will not beat Lieutenant Surge’s Raichu in the Game Boy Game and that no matter how hard you try to knock off the Fire Sprinklers in Brock’s gym, there is no way for a Pikachu to beat an Onix. Now that we are older, we all suddenly realize how many life lessons that Pokémon teaches you, like getting animals to fight one another will make you some famous trainer, under-aged gambling is perfectly alright if you want to get rare TMs, and breaking and entering into stranger’s houses is completely acceptable because you get free stuff that will help you in a great quest to be the best there ever was.

But besides all this, we all can remember the fond memories we had while either watching the shows, playing the games, or trading the cards, sometimes even dressing up as the characters for Halloween. We all had our good times and it might make some of us happy to reminisce about the days when instead of saving up money for a car or new bike, we saved for Pokémon cards in hopes that we would get that elusive Charizard.

On a closing note, I have found out while writing this article that “Pikachu” is an actual word in the Microsoft dictionary, who knew?