The Movie 3 promotion's over and so now we're back to the regular Dr. Ookido Pokémon Lectures! The segment's still only focusing on Kanto Pokémon, for some reason.

The voice credits have a few mistakes:

- Kosaburou is misspelled (it should be コサブロウ, not コサブロー)
- Kasumi's Koduck is credited despite not appearing in the episode. Rikako Aikawa voices Utsubot, who *does* appear, so this was probably a case of them just typing out the wrong Pokémon name.

Rougela was black during the original airing but the animation was updated to her purple design sometime around 2017.

All the streaming sites that play this ending theme today use the updated purple version.

めざせポケモンマスター『タケシのパラダイス』 YouTube video by りひシュウ

From this episode the show's ending theme's been updated to one of the show's most iconic ending themes, "Takeshi no Paradise!"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=COpi...

The rest of the scene has Musashi comparing Kojirou to Sachiko Kobayashi, a reference I explained in this series of posts from about a year ago:

bsky.app/profile/doga...

Kojirou's "the heavens call to me, the Earth calls to me, the wind calls to me..." line when he first appears as "Fire Kojirou" is a reference to the phrase Kamen Rider Stronger would use whenever he arrived on the scene.

The original line from Kamen Rider:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP6b...

Sakaki makes his debut in Johto! One nice touch about this is how Sakaki's the only person in the show (other than Yamato) to call Kosaburou by his actual name.

Kasumi's "Let's see...where's Satoshi's birthday...ah, here it is" line tells us the fortune telling book's divided by, well, birthdays. It also tells us that everybody in each group (heroes and villains) knows when their friends were born.

Back in Kanto, Yamato and Kosaburou were allowed to have actual Japanese writing on the front of their daycare.

Now that we're in Johto, however, they have to settle for a dick and balls logo.

The "Pokémon fortune-telling" craze that's the central plot point of this episode's based on an animal fortune-telling fad that was all the rage in Japan when this episode came out back in 2000.

And so, Mr. Shudo stepped down from the Series Construction role.

He would write five more episodes in Johto before leaving the series altogether, though I'll talk about that another time.

One day, one of the show's producers suggested he take a break for a year or two to refresh, to focus on his health, etc.

Mr. Shudo wonders if that was a signal that Pokémon had fallen into such a predictable Mad Libs-type pattern that a Series Construction role was now considered redundant.

He also says he doesn't think he really fulfilled his duties for Series Construction.

He barely ever gave notes on other writers' scripts, for example.

He also actively avoided writing battle-centric episodes, which is a bit odd since Pokémon is, for all intents and purposes, a battle anime.

By this point, Mr. Shudo had fallen into a bit of a rut with Pokémon. He couldn't come up with any decent ideas for Movie 4, for example, and he wasn't a fan of how Pokémon had become this massive beast that was never going to be allowed to ever have a proper ending.

www.style.fm/as/05_column...

From this episode onward, the "Series Construction: Takeshi Shudo" (シリーズコンストラクション 首藤剛志) credit is removed from the show's opening.

The show will continue without anyone assigned to the "Series Construction" role all the way up until Pocket Monsters Diamond & Pearl.

There was no new episode on TV-Tokyo July 20th, the week between Episodes 156 and 157. Instead, it looks like the network aired the televised debut of 1999's "Pikachu's Exploration Party," according to this site:

movie.zashiki.com/calendar/gw/...

Episode 157 "Pokémon Fortune Telling!? The Great Melee!"

Yamato, & Kosaburou make their Johto debuts. Funny little comedy episodes like these that show off the cast's personalities are some of my favorite in the series.

#DogasuWatchesJohto

I haven't actually seen Johto all the way through (that's why I'm doing this rewatch in the first place!) so I guess we're going to be finding out together!

(To be fair, American companies are also really really bad about this. A good 90% of the Japanese you hear in Hollywood productions is just actors awkwardly stumbling their way through their dialogue because studios can't be bothered to hire Japanese language coaches)

Speaking from experience...I'm the only native English speaker in my team at work and yet almost nobody ever asks me to proofread the English language e-mails, etc. I think it's equal parts "we want to show we're self-sufficient" and "we don't want to bother you because we know you're busy."

You wouldn't even have to go that far; just have Kojirou's Grass-Type use its Sleep Powder on the Pokémon and call it a day!

These are new arrangements. That bass line in the back of this version isn't in the TV version, for example.

No, I think it's just that this text was on-screen for less than a second and so nobody really cared enough to change it.

Now it’s been three.

The third movie's already out at this point, but Dr. Ookido's Pokémon Lecture segment's still going to be used to promote it for the time being. This week: All about Mii and her Pokémon.

The future the Rocket trio sees for itself.

One big plot hole that bothers me about this episode is how it establishes Casey's love of using Teleport to go wherever it wants, and yet once it gets caught by the Rocket trio it just...kind of stops? And has to wait to be rescued by Pikachu before it starts Teleport-ing again?

I hope you like this one shot of Gangar's left eye getting hit by Psychic-Type attacks because it'll get used over and over again.

【公式】ロケット団団歌　プロモーションビデオ YouTube video by ポケモン公式YouTubeチャンネル

This line will eventually be incorporated into "Rocket-Dan Danka," a song released during the Pocket Monsters XY&Z era.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEAJ...

As the Rocket trio's pedaling away they sing "Roketto-Dan no 'ro' no ji wa 'roman' no 'ro'," (ロケッ ト団のロの字はロマンのロ), or "The 'ro' in 'Roketto-Dan' stands for 'romanticism'."

This is the second time in the series they've sung this, with the first being during an Orange Islands episode.