Episode Stats:

Japanese Episode 44: "Paras and Parasect"
American Episode 42:  "The Problem with Paras"
Pokemon Dare Da?  Paras
Japanese Air Date:  May 14th, 1998
American Air Date:  February 13th, 1999
Important Characters:  Kiyomi (Cassandra), Kiyomi's Grandma (Cassandra's Grandma)
Important Places:  Matsumo Town (Mossgreen Village)

Satoshi-tachi arrive in Matsumo Town, a small town which invites our heroes to stock up on potions and other medicinal items.  As Satoshi and his friends find the medicine shop, the Rocket-Dan plan their next attempt to capture Pikachu.  However, they notice that Nyasu has become sick with a fever!  Musashi and Kojirou are about to abandon the pokemon when Kiyomi, a medicine woman, appears and prepares a potion that relieves Nyasu of its illness.  Later, Kiyomi arrives at the medicine shop where Satoshi and the others are and reveals that she runs the store with her grandma.  Kiyomi dreams of making a miracle potion that is able to cure any illness, but in order to make it she'll need her Paras to evolve into Parasect.  The problem is that Paras is such a weakling that it can't gain enough experience to evolve!  Satoshi decides to help out, so he attempts to throw battle after battle to help the pokemon gain experience.  Unfortunately, Satoshi's Lizard manages to scare the mushroom pokemon off, leading it right into the clutches of the Rocket-Dan!  The trio hatches a plan to help Paras evolve so they can earn Kiyomi's gratitude, enabling them to take over as her business managers and rake in all the money!  Thanks to Matadogasu's and Arbok's uncanny ability to constantly lose, the pokemon finally gains enough experience to evolve and even manages to take out Satoshi's Lizard!  Now that Kiyomi's pokemon is a Parasect, our heroes leave to continue their journey to Satoshi's next gym.  

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Thoughts
You know how there are some episodes in which certain pokemon get the shaft?  Like Paras, for example.  Now I know that in the games, the pokemon's not exactly one you'd call "powerful" or "popular" or "worth having on your team," but the anime just makes the pokemon look like an absolute wuss.  I mean, if I was a Paras, I'd certainly be pissed at the way I was represented in the anime.

This is the first episode to be dubbed since Kids' WB! picked the series up.  Now that the show is out of syndication, fans were hopeful that the editing would loosen up, but as we will see over the next handful of years, the opposite's true.  The dubbed version of this particular episode gives us the usual Japanese text / culture cover-ups, so it's not that unusual, but before long we'll see that Kids' WB! can be a real wuss about some things.  While I'm not a fan of the voice the dub gives Cassandra's Grandma (partly because she doesn't even sound like a woman), the rest is alright.

Dialogue Edit
In the dub, Ash and Misty want to eat a "cheeseburger" and "at a nice restaurant."  In the original, Satoshi wants hamburger curry while Kasumi wants katsudon.

Later, the "snakeroot" that Cassandra's grandma offers our heroes is really the whiskers of a Koiking in the Japanese version.  While the dub has the young trainers disgusted at the idea of a medicine that makes you grow hair on your tongue, the Japanese version shows them disgusted at how creepy it is to have old fish whiskers lying around a store.

Paint Edit
The kanji for kusuri ("medicine") is painted away from the front of the shop, as are the words kanpo -something- (something about "Chinese medicine"...the quality of my copy of the Japanese episode isn't that great).  This edit occurs about nine times in this episode.

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