The insane Pokémon episode that was banned after injuring 685 children
For a multimedia monolith initially geared towards young children before becoming a full-blown international cultural phenomenon across gaming and TV, Pokémon was hardly a property that caused widespread panic, outrage, or mass casualties.
However, one episode ended up being pulled from the airwaves, placed under a global ban, and never shown again. This happened after hundreds of kids suffered shared symptoms in the wake of watching the titular monsters battle in an early evening weekday cartoon.
The work in question is the 38th episode of the Pokémon anime’s first season, ‘Dennō Senshi Porygon’ or ‘Electric Soldier Porygon’ to international audiences who dared try to track it down. It follows baseball cap-wearing protagonist Ash Ketchum as he attempts to uncover why the local Pokémon Centre is experiencing transmission issues.
As it turns out, a rogue Porygon is to blame. Still, the manifestation of the creature’s electrical powers led to over 600 children suffering from symptoms linked to photosensitive epileptic seizures. This caused widespread outrage and instigated a four-month sabbatical from screens as the team responsible for the animated favourite combed through any upcoming footage to ensure the incident wouldn’t be repeated.
During the climactic action sequence, Pikachu blows up a bunch of missiles, with the animators using a rapid strobe technique to flash red and blue lights onto the screen. The second the scene unfolded, young audience members began feeling dizzy, experiencing blurred vision, getting nauseous, and in some cases, even passing out, suffering seizures, and incurring temporary blindness.
Reports indicated that 685 children required ambulance treatment in the aftermath, but the real number could be even higher. The phenomena even gathered the name ‘Pokémon Shock’ and placed the series under intense scrutiny for the foreseeable future.
Not only has ‘Electric Soldier Porygon’ never been broadcast again in any country, even in edited form, but the titular Pokémon never appeared ever again. This is presumably because the creative team wanted to distance themselves as far away from the character closely associated with the incident as possible.
In typically capitalist fashion, a spokesman shared in an official statement that it wasn’t expected to affect Nintendo’s bottom line. “We don’t expect the incident will have any immediate impact on our business in the Christmas season since the television program and game are different,” in a reassuring way of telling parents that they were encouraged to splurge on the latest Pokémon merchandise regardless of whether or not their children had suffered from a medical ailment watching the show.
What makes the party line even more galling is that ‘Electric Soldier Porygon’ aired for the one and only time on December 16th, 1997. It’s just cynical that the first thing on Nintendo’s mind was to try and make it as clear as possible that Christmastime shopping and spending habits need not be altered by a mass event that afflicted upwards of 600 people.
