Never Too Old for an Adventure (part 1)

Many Phenomenons start off the same they take the world by storm, in the 60's the Beatles started a British Invasion of music in America that is still celebrated today. In the 90's another invasion started in Japan that took the world by storm and gain the hearts of the young people of the 90's, Pokemon. It's now been 20 years since Pokemon took the world by storm and is still going strong in some form. Even those of us who grew up with the phenomenon, our strength in in this realm may grown or change over the years, most will still say that we are never too old for the thrill for a Pokemon Adventure. It all started with these four video games (we in the US didn't get Green Version):

While we didn't get to choose a trainer at this point, it started with the hardest decision of our childhood:

The Grass Pokemon: Bulbasuar, the Fire Pokemon: Charmander, or the Water Pokemon: Squirtle. With our choice, we set off on our adventure to complete our Pokedex and to be the Pokemon Champion. At this point it was defeat the 8 gyms to get your 8 badges and only 151 Pokemon to catch. Then a second generation of Pokemon were created, This is where I started my dive into the adventures of Pokemon: 

These three games are regarded as the best next to their reboot games, which will be coming later. With Gold and Silver our Pokedex numbers jumped to needing 251 Pokemon, we now had two regions to travel across, and with those two regions we now have 16 gyms/badges! And with Crystal we gained the ability to now be female!
    These games might have been the beginning to popular series of video games, but that not all it brought. Those of us who grew up in the 90's remember it all, we had to literally catch them all! We played the video games, we watched the anime/cartoon on Saturday mornings, we collected the trading cards, had as many toys as we did legos, etc.

The anime was different from the video games, as we traveled along Ash, instead of "Red" or whatever we named our trainer in Red/Blue/Yellow, and his Pikachu as they trained to be the Pokemon Master. Each season goes along a set of games with Ash and Pikachu traveling to the region of the newest games, taking on the gyms and battling against the villains of that region. And personally, I got bored with it after awhile, it just seemed to be the same thing over and over in each season.

Along with our school books and binders, almost everyone had a small binder/book of these. We spent our lunches "battling" and trading these like the baseball cards of yesteryear. We OOed and Awed at the holograph, first edition Charizard card our friend had or those rare Japanese cards we found in the Sanrio store. And got all giddied when we found that rare card in our booster pack. These soon became like our other collector item, Beanie Babies, and have not seen a increase of value like most of us older kids thought they might. I had more than 200 cards that I have sold most at yard sales, a whole stack of them for 25 cents, yet not to despair I did keep some of my favorites and most of my holograph and rarer cards for collection only.

If we weren't spending our allowance money on Pokemon cards, it was spent on the next best thing: Pokemon toys for when we weren't allowed to play our gameboys or watch TV. I had quite a collection, again most was sold at yard sales due to growing up, that is now just a few select few on a bookshelf. And some of my cousin's are still being found, or in need of finding, in our grandparents' sandbox.

 Oh the joys of a kid's meal! The Beatles made their first movie, A Hard Day's Night, at the start of the hype of Beatlemaina after they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Likewise, Pokemon did the same. And along with the movie came the slew of kid's meal toys. We all wanted to go to Burger King ever time we were asked to get one of these toys in their own Pokeball. It was just like the Teenie Beanies at McDonalds.

Not only did we travel to Burger King, KFC also had a set of plush Pokemon that we wanted. I didn't get my own, Vulpix (second from the left), till a year ago when my husband and I found on in a Comics/Collectables store.

We also had a Pokemon "virtual pet" Pikachu, that would go great with our Tamagotchi collection, another fad from the 90's which Digimon spun out of (that's for another blog).








Lastly for this blog, we got the spin off games for the big console, the Nintendo 64:
Pokemon Snap- we got to be photographers taking pictures of 63 of the 151 first generation Pokemon that lived on Pokemon Island.
 Pokemon Stadium 1 & 2- These two allowed us to plug our Red/Blue/Yellow games into Stadium 1 and added Gold/Silver/Crystal to Stadium 2. We got to have the first look at what a 3D graphic Pokemon battle would look like, which would later become a reality for the hand held games. There's a small story mode of battling the gym leaders and eilte four of those 6 games and mini games that challenged us using pokemon as the players.

Next in our adventure is the birth of two more generations and a few more treasures.
-FoxCat ya later.