Takeshi Shudo's
Blog Entry
No. 166






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Dogasu's Backpack | Features | Pokémon Shock

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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. 166 "The Theme of Pokémon "Mewtwo Strikes Back!"," 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. 166 "The Theme of Pokémon "Mewtwo Strikes Back!""

Posted December 3rd, 2008
Original Text (Japanese)
Unabridged Translation

The final blog entry Mr. Shudo makes where he talks about the Pokémon Shock incident was posted on December 3rd, 2008.

The "Pokémon" Incident had died down.

But since the show had been off the air for four months that meant all the plans for the series as a whole had to be shifted back four months.

We could work on each episode as-is without changing the contents and just air them in the order we were planning to anyway, that was no problem. But there was an issue involving the movie that was coming out that summer, "Mewtwo Strikes Back!"

I had finished the second draft of the movie's script right before the "Pokémon" Incident but there were also plans to have a tie-in with the TV series as well.

The plan was to have an episode showing Mewtwo's early life and then his meeting with Satoshi…not in battle or anything like that, but just passing by -- that would have aired before the movie came out.
Of course, I was going to be the one to write the episode.

The time it takes to prepare TV animation vs the time it takes for theatrical animation is different.

And so for the episode where we see Mewtwo's early life and its meeting with Satoshi, I would have had to have had the script ready about four months before the movie came out.

"Mewtwo Strikes Back!," meanwhile, was a movie.

It took about a year from the time it was planned all the way up to it was finished.

If we don't have a script for the movie ready about eight months before the movie comes out then things are a bit tight.

That Person had apparently already been planning to make "Pokémon" a movie shortly after the TV series got off the ground.

The rest of this particular blog entry goes into some behind-the-scenes details about the making of Mewtwo Strikes Back! and how he struggled to come up with a theme that he thought would work well both in Japan and overseas.




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