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Get your ownFree Home PageThe article, written by Julian Barnes and entitled "Pokemon's Market Crash Holds Lessons for Young Traders," is a cute little story comparing the declining value of Pokemon cards to the great Dot Com Deflation of 2000. There are plenty of cute quotes from preteens, and Barnes uses the Dot Com analogy quite well. He does a great job of documenting the disappointment children feel when their favorite TV show is no longer as popular as it used to be.
Or does he? The Pokemon cartoon isn't mentioned at all, only the merchandise. That was precisely my point in The Overmerchandising of Pikachu . As an animated TV show, Pokemon was irrelevant except to introduce new characters and new products. Barnes isn't telling the story of children holding onto their favorite cartoons even though those cartoons aren't hip anymore. He's telling the story of kids who are upset that their collectibles have depreciated. They're disappointed, but not because Pikachu is no longer the top dog in animation. They're disappointed that small foil-covered pieces of cardboard are no longer worth hundreds of dollars.
As I eagerly admit, I haven't followed Pokemon very closely in the second half of 2000, but I'd seen signs that the show's popularity was waning. All of this was anecdotal. An Asian shopkeeper who sold me stuffed Pokemon gifts for Christmas at a steep discount told me that he couldn't give most of his Pokemon merchandise away nowadays if it weren't for the holidays. A comics store (whose name I won't mention because I don't want to provide them with free advertising) had piles of surplus Pokemon comics and costumes at dirt-cheap prices. My favorite Dishonest Comics Dealer stopped selling Pokemon cards altogether. The New York Times usually get their stories correct, and I was glad to see that what they wrote confirmed what I'd already suspected.
This doesn't mean I'm some anti-Pikachu Grinch happily fiddling while Psyduck burns. Pokemon could've been a lasting commodity in the States, not unlike Nintendo's earlier creations The Super Mario Brothers. Instead, Pokemon is the 1990s answer to The Smurfs, which royally fizzled after extreme overexposure. Ironically, aside from some questionable voice talent, I thought that Pokemon was a fairly decent kid's cartoon (see my earlier Pokemon review for details). Pokemon was a very sweet series for children to watch, totally unlike earlier toy-TV tie-ins like My Little Pony or GI Joe. The prosocial messages of Pokemon never came across as insincere in the way that the Hanna-Barbera and Filmation lectures did years ago, and if Pokemon hadn't been an excuse to sell toys, I could imagine it airing alongside Arthur and Dragon Tales on PBS. Now, due to the backlash, enough little kids are soured on the entire Pokemon experience for me to wonder if the show won't vanish from the airwaves in a year or two.
That's a shame. Pokemon was one of the few commercial kids programs of the 1990s that spoke to children on their level. Nintendo didn't try to toss in jokes to appeal to adults, and the writers of the show did a fine job of capturing the logic of childhood games. While I hated the merchandising related to the program, I wished that more children's cartoons could be like Pokemon. Sure, Ash may have been stuck with a Mickey Mouse falsetto and Misty's shorts were the shortest this side of Mariah Carey, but the characters are basically decent kids and this is what's missing from most cartoons nowadays. After Bart Simpson, came Beavis and Butthead, and practically every toon child on commercial TV is sarcastic, smarmy and downright self-satisfied. I realise that this is a reaction against the blandness of the teens on many a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, but this has gone too far. Ash and Misty harkened back to the wholesome kids of the Archie comics, and children seemed to respond well to them.
Hopefully, the Pokemon aftermath will teach many children that toys are toys, no matter how many people will try to convince kids that toys are "investments." They are to be enjoyed, not obsessed over. There's an entire industry out there that is dedicated to canonizing even the most transitory pop culture artifacts as being heirloom-quality, from Wizard Magazine's monthly price guides to the Todd MacFarlane "toys" which are supposed to stay in their boxes forever so they can remain collector's items. Don't fall for it. Plastic and vinyl are only plastic and vinyl, and if you're a kid and want to play with your toys go right ahead. And, should you stay young-at-heart and want to collect animation merchandise, please don't forget the lessons you learned collecting Pokemon cards.
I'll close with a personal story, which might put some of this in perspective. When I was a kid, collecting comic books became a very lucrative field. Comics from the 1940s and 1950s were Big Bucks, naturally, but even newer books were deemed very collectable by the then-new phenomenon of the Comic Book Store. One book singled out in particular was the first issue of The Micronauts. (The 'Nauts were based on the Micronauts toy line, which was in turn an Americanized version of the Japanese Microman toy line, which had a manga series of its own.) Originally published at the late 1970s' cover price of 35 cents, the magazine's worth shot up to over fifty dollars in just a few months. In fact, in the upper corner of the comic's cover, we were shown that The Micronauts cost "still only 35 cents" and the price was framed in a jagged effects balloon. As a little kid I was stupified, and envied a friend who had bought the comic for a measly twenty-five dollars. But time went by, and I eventually came across the issue again almost twenty years later - shrinkwrapped in a discount package with two other Marvel Comics of the era. The price? The three comics cost a dollar altogether, which means I actually paid less than the original cover price. Factor in inflation and, well, let's just say I paid a fair price for a book I only wanted to read. It wasn't great art, and it wasn't great storytelling, and I didn't feel ripped off at the low price. I was able to enjoy the book, and not have to deal with any "collectable" baggage.
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