Episode Stats:

Japanese Episode 025:  "Don't Get Mad, Okorizaru!"
American Episode 124:  "Primeape Goes Bananas"
Pokémon Dare Da?  Okorizaru
Japanese Air Date:  September 16th, 1997
American Air Date:  October 9th, 1998

Orchid-Hakase receives a phone call from Satoshi telling him that the young trainer has just gotten his fourth Gym Badge!  The professor responds by telling him that Shigeru and all his other rivals have already gotten five, causing Satoshi to become fired up once again.  The young trainer decides that the best way to catch up is to develop a well-rounded team filled with many different types of pokemon, so when a wild Mankey appears, Satoshi seizes the chance to try to capture it.  Unfortunately, the only thing he succeeds at is getting his hat stolen.  The Rocket-Dan eventually show up and manage to anger Mankey enough to make it evolve into Okorizaru, a pokemon whose temper is much worse than its unevolved form.  The pokemon begins to chase our heroes into a canyon until Satoshi decides to fight back.  As his pokemon attack Okorizaru, one by one, his Hitokage learns the Rage technique and is able to use it to weaken its opponent.  Satoshi throws a Monster Ball and captures Okorizaru, finally putting an end to the monkey pokemon's rampage.  Before long, everyone notices that they've already arrived at Tamamushi City and decides that they have Okorizaru to thank for helping them get there faster.  With a new pokemon friend by his side, Satoshi enters the city so he can challenge the Gym Leader for his fifth badge.

---

Thoughts
Y'know what?  I really, really like monkeys.  I think primates rank up there as some of my favorite group of animals ever, so naturally, a pokemon based on a monkey is going to pique my interest.  So when Satoshi caught one, I was pretty damn excited.

Of course, knowing what will ultimately happen to the little guy is upsetting, but let's not think about that now.

Other than that, though, this episode doesn't have that much going for it, in my opinion.  The hat stuff is amusing and the onigiri stuff is fun (though that's mainly due to the dub), but other than that this is just one of those standard capture episodes that we'll get so many more of as time goes on.  I suppose the fact that it's a Kanto episode and is therefore allowed to be more violent helps things out a bit, but at the end of the day, I can't really say that this is one of my favorites. 

This is the episode where 4Kids tries their hardest to convince us that the food that everyone enjoys so much is really "donuts."  Which is a completely ridiculous lie that's not even the tiniest bit convincing.  But, y'know...it could be worse.

Both Mankey (whose name in Japanese is pronounced more like the English word "monkey" than it is in the dub) and Okorizaru keep their Japanese voices.

Paint Edit
During Professor Oak's poem, the kanji for "long life" (寿, or kotobuki) is displayed in the upper left-hand corner.  This is erased from the dub because, otherwise, you'd think this show was Japanese. 

Click on each image to view a larger version.

Also, the poem in Japanese, for those of you who are curious, was "Pokémon to youkan tabete a~oishii" which as far as I can tell means "Eating youkan with pokemon is really nice," with youkan being the of bean-based jellied dessert that Crab's holding.  The youkan is called "cake" in the dub (something that the games will kind of emulate with the youkan item in Diamond & Pearl), so at least 4Kids made an effort with this one.

Side Note
Here's an amusing goof that's present in both versions; in this episode, Orchid-Hakase states that Shigeru's caught 30 pokemon so far.  Yet back in "Masaki's Lighthouse," he tells Satoshi that he's caught 45 pokemon!

So either Shigeru released a bunch of pokemon since then or the writers just forgot how many pokemon they said he has.  I'm betting on the latter more than the former, personally.

Dialogue Edit
And now we get to the infamous jelly filled donuts line.

Japanese (original)	Japanese (translated)	English Dub
カスミ　「まっおにぎり食べて元気出せば？」	Kasumi:  "Well, how about a rice ball? That'll perk you up."	Misty:  "Have a donut! That always cheers me up!"
ピカチュウ　「ピカピカ」	Pikachu:  "Pika Pika"	Pikachu:  "Pika Pika"
タケシ　「丸いのは梅干し、三角のは昆布だぞ。いい昆布が手に入ったからなあ」	Takeshi:  "There are pickled plums in the round ones, and I used this really nice kelp I was able to get for the the triangle shaped ones."	Brock:  "These donuts are great! Jelly filled are my favorite. Nothing beats a jelly filled donut!"

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I can absolutely understand and appreciate the localizers' justification for changing our heroes' rice balls here to something a little bit more familiar to the show's new target audience. If you lived in the U.S. in the late 1990s and didn't happen to reside in a big city with a significant Japanese American population then chances are you've probably never seen a rice ball in real life. I, personally, never came across one myself until my first trip to Japan! Back in 1998 the general American public was still struggling with terms like "anime" and "manga" and so knowing something as "advanced" as onigiri (or even "rice balls") was considered well, well beyond what was standard for American children. It was a different time, and this change was very much made in that context.

On the other hand, changing a Japanese food to a more Western one to avoid confusing American audiences seems a bit pointless when you consider literally everything else about this show. After all, Pokémon is a series about a group of tweens traveling around the countryside with little baseball sized orbs that can be used to summon all sorts of fantastical creatures. This boy over here has a fire breathing dragon and a rabbit-eared mouse who can bring thunderbolts raining down from the heavens, and this other guy over here has a floating rock with a face and arms and also a nearly 30 foot tall snake made out of boulders, and this girl over here has a sentient starfish who can shoot an endless stream of water out its body and a duck who can't swim and is usually pretty useless but then when it gets a really bad headache it's able to move objects around with its mind, for some reason. And these young kids travel from city to city to have their pets fight other people's pets in order to earn a metal badge, and then when they collect enough of these metal badges they're able to enter this big sports tournament where their creatures fight even more creatures in order to win a trophy.

American kids were expected to swallow all that nonsense without a second thought. But then the second the guy with no eyes and Lisa Simpson hair takes out a rice ball, that's when the localizing team steps in. Literally everything else about this show is weird and wacky and is super confusing to the uninitiated, and yet this one food item being left alone is what the localizers decided was going to be what breaks immersion. It's a very, very odd place to draw a line in the sand.

In any case, the English dub fully commits to the bit, as this video helps illustrate.

Later, after Brock points out the path leading to Celadon City:

This part originally had Satoshi remembering Orchid-Hakase's words about receiving phone from Tamamushi City from his other rivals.  My guess is that 4Kids mistook Orchid-Hakase's voice for the narrator's (they're both voiced by the same voice actor in the Japanese version), but it's really hard to know for sure why this change was made.

Later, we lose a joke because of the onigiri to donut cover-up.  Originally, before throwing the onigiri at Mankey in order to calm it down, Takeshi says "Monster Ball, go!" (行け！モンスターボール！).  This much is kept in the dub.  Then, when he realizes his mistake, he corrects himself and says "Rice Ball, go!" (行け！ライスボール！).  With the words "rice ball" being said in English.  But, since 4Kids changed onigiri into donuts instead of just translating it to rice ball, the perfectly translatable Monster Ball / Rice Ball joke is lost. 

Further on in the episode, Ash states that he had to send in "about a million postcards."  In the Japanese version, Satoshi says he sent in a thousand. 

Brock's response to this ("Poor Ash...losing an official hat is like losing your best friend!") is a bit different from Takeshi's response in which he says that boys really care a lot about silly things like their hats.

Side Note
The Monster Ball during the commercial for Satoshi's hat says "POCKEMON LEAG" on it, written in English letters.  This isn't corrected in the dub, surprisingly. 

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