Takeshi Shudo's Blog Entries About the Incident

Dogasu's Backpack | Features | Pokémon Shock

Below is an English translation of How to Craft a Story: Takeshi Shudo, How Anyone Can Become a Screenplay Writer (シナリオえーだば創作術　だれでもできる脚本家　首藤剛志), a blog written by former Pocket Monsters series organizer and head writer Mr. Takeshi Shudo. The following are excerpts taken from Blog Post No. 163 "The One Who Caused the "Pokémon" Animated Series' Dilemma," a blog entry related to the Pokémon Shock incident.

Notes about the translation below

I have two notes about the translations you're about to read.

One, the Japanese version of the blog is written the way a lot of Japanese blogs are written in that the author only types out (roughly) one sentence per one line. To a native English speaker like me this makes the blogs seem weird and choppy but that's just the way a lot of Japanese blogs are written, for some reason. For simplicity's sake I've replicated this one-sentence-per-line writing style in my English translation.

Two, the following translation is a truncated version of a much, much longer blog entry. Mr. Shudo is an absolute treasure trove of behind-the-scenes information you can't get anywhere else but his blogs are, as far as your average Pokémon fan is concerned, about 80% filler. The writer had a tendency to trail off into some very off-topic tangents in his blog and so what I've decided to do is to pick out the parts that actually discuss the Pokémon Shock incident and present that to you on the page below. I hope you will find this abridged presentation a bit easier to read that it would have been otherwise. If you're someone who would prefer to read an unabridged translation, however, I've also got you covered; you can check those out here.

Blog Post No. 163 "The Person who instigated the dilemma faced by the Pokémon animated series"

Posted November 12th, 2008
Original Text (Japanese)	Unabridged Translation

The majority of this blog entry talks about "That Person," someone Mr. Shudo doesn't ever address by name but based on the very obvious bread crumbs he leaves behind the producers is clearly meant to be Masakazu Kubo. The stories he tells don't directly fit in with the Pokémon Shock incident so I would direct you to the unabridged translations I've made for those of you interested.

Toward the very end of the blog entry, he hints that "That Person" is the one who kept pushing to make the show more and more flashy.

That movie was "Mewtwo Strikes Back!"

But for That Person and his philosophy on what makes a hit a hit, he apparently wasn't happy with it.
If he objected to anything I had written I was ready to defend it.

But he didn't have any intention of changing the basic theme of the movie.

And then at that point, the Pokémon Incident happened.

"In regards to this situation making the news right now, we want the stories being told by the production side and the network to be consistent with each other and so if you get a call from any news outlet make sure not to give them any of your personal opinions on the matter."

For the time being we would apologize for the incident and promise to determine a clear root cause.
The mass media, as always, continued its campaign of bashing Pokémon itself.

If you had something to say against Pokémon then they'd throw you up on the news.

But no matter who they got it would always be some random person that was neither involved with the production of the series nor a victim, and they would just point fingers at the people directly involved.

But no matter who they got it would always be some random person that was neither involved with the production of the series nor a victim of the incident, and they would just spend their airtime pointing fingers at the people directly involved. Whether they realized it or not they were trying to find people who had some sort of financial losses from the incident (even though a lot of them ended up making money off this...) to pin the blame on.

"I wish that Pokémon episode hadn't been shown on TV" turned into "If the Pokémon cartoon didn't exist then that episode wouldn't have been broadcast" which then became "I wish Pokémon hadn't been turned into a cartoon in the first place."

So, who wanted to make Pokémon into an animated series then?

I don't think I have to say who was at the center of the Pokémon animated series.

Moreover, in order to make the Pokémon animated series, That Person really wanted it to be really flashy and stand out.

On top of that, That Person didn't realize it but he had his detractors as well.

That includes the big publishing company that That Person worked for.

But I'll get into that next time.

More to the point, the Pokémon Incident existed in this vague area for a few weeks afterward, this strange aftertaste lingering in the air.

It was during this time I saw the people involved with Pokémon, That Person included, in a state so horrible I'll never forget it.