We all know Satoshi's very first Pokémon was Pikachu, but did you know his starter was originally going to be Pippi instead? That's what everybody on the Internet keeps telling us, anyway, but is there actually any truth to this claim?

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The claim

The Wikipedia page for the TV episode "Pokémon I Choose You!" provides what is probably the most concise version of the rumor on the Internet. From the "Production" section of that episode's article:

When the production staff started on the anime, they wanted a specific character to focus on. At first, Clefairy was intended to be Ash's starter. Due to a last-minute adjustment, Pikachu got the role because it was relatively popular compared with the other Pokémon and the staff thought that "potentially both boys and girls would like it". [3]

So the claim here is that Pippi ("Clefairy") was intended to be Satoshi's ("Ash's") partner, not Pikachu. The "due to a last-minute adjustment" part of this can be interpreted any number of ways depending on what you consider "last-minute." Is there any production artwork featuring Satoshi and Pippi? Was the script for the first episode written with Pippi as Satoshi's starter, but then changed to Pikachu later on? Did the show get all the way up to the animation stage before somebody made the switch?

If we click on the citation for this portion of the Wikipedia article we're taken to an archived version of a 1999 Time Asia interview with Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of the Pokémon franchise itself. That seems promising -- this information must have come from Mr. Satoshi Tajiri himself, right? Well, not exactly. If you actually bother to scroll through the interview you'll soon find the part being cited by the Wikipedia article:

TIME: Pikachu is sort of marginal in the game. But it's now the best-known character. How'd that happen? Tajiri: When they did the anime, they wanted a specific character to focus on. Pikachu was relatively popular compared with the others and potentially both boys and girls would like it. They heard a lot of opinions about this. It wasn't my idea.

The "they wanted a specific character to focus on" and "potentially both boys and girls would like it" parts from Wikipedia are here, sure, but there's absolutely nothing in any of this about Pippi (Clefairy) being the intended starter, nor is there anything about there being any "last-minute adjustment." The Pikachu-as-a-replacement-for-Pippi idea, in other words, is not actually mentioned anywhere in Wikipedia's cited source.

Regardless of where the idea it originated, the claim has been repeated on any number of news sites over the years, most of which more or less repeat some variation of the information presented above. Sometimes sites throw in a few extra sentences about Nyorozo ("Poliwhirl") being on the cover of Time Magazine back in 1999, implying the choice was actually between Pippi and Nyorozo before finally settling on Pikachu, but other than that there isn't really much more information to go on here other than what's presented above.

The road to creating the Pocket Monsters animated series

Before we can really dig into the validity of these claims we need to go over the events leading up to the animated series' creation.

The Pocket Monsters Red & Green video games, as we all know, were released on February 27th, 1996.

At the time, the Japanese kids' magazine CoroCoro Comics was pretty much the only media publication in the world that would even bother giving Pokémon the time of day. In an article entitled "Pikachu Wandering the World" (世界を徘徊する和製モンスター「ピカチュ ウ」), printed in a special supplemental issue of the magazine Bungei Shunjuu (文藝春秋) in the year 2000, CoroCoro Comics editor-in-chief and animated series producer Masakazu Kubo gives his theory on why that was the case. This is from Page 342:

Even though Pocket Monsters sounded interesting, the truth is that nobody other than CoroCoro had any intention of ever covering it. That's because of the development of new video game hardware commonly referred to as the next generation console wars. 話を聞くと大変おもしろそうなのに、実はポケモンを積極的に扱おうというメディアはコロコロ以外にはありませんでした。その理由は当時、「次世代ゲームマ シン」 とよばれていたゲームハードの開発状況にありました。 When you think back to 1996 and 1997, SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment) had released the Playstation, Nintendo had announced the Nintendo 64, and Sega Enterprises had countered all that with the Sega Saturn. And so pretty much everyone else was focusing on all that shiny new hardware. But at the time the Playstation had an MSRP of about 39,800 Japanese yen and so no matter how hot a topic it became it was still going to be too expensive for CoroCoro Comics' elementary school aged readers. The average New Year's gift at the time was only around 26,000 yen, you see, and so we thought children weren't going to buy something that'd require them to use up all their New Year's money (and then some!). 九六年から九七年というのは、SCE (ソニー・コンピューター・エンタテインメント) がプレイステーションを発売した頃で、任天堂も 「ニンテンドウ64」 を発表し、セガ・エンタープライゼスも 「セガサターン」 で対抗していました。そして、僕ら以外の殆どのメディアはこちらの方を向いていたのです。当時のプレイステーションは定価で三万九千八百円ほどしましたか ら、いくら話題はホットでも、コロコロ読者の小学生には高嶺の花でした。なぜならば彼らのお年玉は平均二万六千円だったからです。お年玉をつぎ込んでも手 が届かないものを子供たちは買わないと私たちは考えました。

Because of this CoroCoro Comics more or less had a monopoly on all things Pokémon, giving the magazine an unbelievable amount of power when it came to shaping how the franchise would be perceived among the general public.

Kousaku Anakubo's "Pocket Monsters"

One of the first things CoroCoro Comics did with this newfound power was to get a Pocket Monsters themed comic series in the pages of its magazines. That's where Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters manga enters the picture.


Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters manga series got its start in the April 1996 issue of CoroCoro Special (one of CoroCoro Comics' sister magazines), which went on sale February 29th, 1996. That's literally only two days after the release of the Pocket Monsters Red & Green video games! The manga tells the "story" of a young boy named Red and his partner Pokémon, a Pippi who's able to speak human language and is depicted as a crude loudmouth. I put "story" there in quotation marks because the comic is mostly a series of one-shot gag adventures where nothing is ever taken seriously. A Pikachu would be added to the team a few chapters into the first volume but it was Pippi, not Pikachu, who acted as the series mascot.

In a 2017 interview with NicoNico News Original, an English translation of which can be found here, Mr. Anakubo reveals why Pippi was chosen as the starter for his particular manga:

Nasu:  "It must have been difficult to decide which of those five should be used as the main character." 那須：　どのキャラクターを主人公にするかも難しかったのではないですか。 Anakubo:  "One of the people in charge thought "Pippi would be good," though I personally liked Pikachu better myself. But, I worried that if I pushed back and said "Well actually I like Pikachu for that role" then that would have caused a lot of headaches (laughs). So I caved, and that's how Pippi got chosen as the main character. 穴久保：　担当者が「ピッピがいい」といったんです。でも自分はピカチュウが好きだったんです。「ピカチュウがいい」といったら、結構揉めました（笑）。 そこで私が負けてピッピになったんです。

Once the series started, Red and Pippi would get thrown front and center for a good chunk of the promotional material for all things Pocket Monsters. Remember, this was a time when Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters manga was pretty much the only non-video game piece of Pocket Monsters media in existence. The Trading Card Game wouldn't go on sale until October 1996, the Pocket Monsters Special manga wouldn't start until March 1997, the TV series wouldn't go on the air until April 1997, etc. And so if you wanted to do a write-up about Pocket Monsters your choices of artwork were pretty much limited to A) Ken Sugimori's watercolors for the games, and B) drawings taken from Kousaku Anakubo's gag manga. Accordingly, art from Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters manga started showing up everywhere.

Pippi provides the sole representation for the Pocket Monsters franchise in this ad for the August 1996 issue of CoroCoro Comics. Ads for other issues also tended to prominently feature Red & Pippi in some form.	This ad for Bandai's "Pokémon Jumbo Cardass Chip Shooters," a series of Pog-like cardboard discs, features Red and Pippi in the upper right. From the August 1996 issue.
This two-page introduction to the then-upcoming Pokémon Trading Card Game features Red, Pippi, and Pikachu in the bottom left-hand corner. From the August 1996 issue.
This ad for Pokémon stickers, featured in the September 1996 issue, shows Red and Pippi in the bottom right-hand corner.	Red, Pippi, and Pikachu can be seen in this feature on a series of Gashapon toys in the October 1996 issue.
The cover for the November 1996 issue of CoroCoro Comics features both Pippi and the box art for the newest video game, with the former being significantly larger than the latter.	A general "Pokémon Hobby Special!!" from the December 1996 issue features news on Pocket Monsters Blue and the Pokémon Trading Card Game, among others.
"Pockemon Club," a series of articles giving readers hints on playing the Pocket Monsters video games, features the Kousaku Anakubo Pippi in its logo.

This is actually only the tip of the iceberg. It's pretty much impossible to overstate just how much Kousaku Anakubo's Pippi was in everybody's face during that first year and so, due to the manga's extreme popularity and the ubiquity of its main character, Pippi basically became the de facto mascot of the Pocket Monsters franchise.

The animated series enters production

So we have a super popular Pocket Monsters manga featuring a Pippi as its mascot in the roughly year or so leading up to the debut of the animated series. But when would production of the TV series have started? And at what point would it have been decided who Satoshi's partner Pokémon would be?

According to the book Pokémon Story (ポケモンストーリー), written by Kenji Hatakeyama and Masakazu Kubo, production of the Pocket Monsters animated series was greenlit on September 26th, 1996. The book goes rather in-depth into the meetings that took place that day so I'll only present the relevant excerpts:


From Page 283:

The presentation of their proposal took place on Thursday, September 26th, the same day written on the proposal itself. It was made in Conference Room #1 in the main building of the Nintendo Headquarters in Kyoto. 企画書のプレゼンテーションは、企画書の日付と同じ9月26日木曜日、京都の任天堂 本社本館第一会議室で行われました。

Page 284:

The reason Shogakukan set the presentation date for late September was because of the tight deadlines they were under. They were aware Nintendo was unlikely to provide a yes or no answer by the end of the day, Shogakukan told them, but stressed that any delay in making a decision would cause problems for them. Because even if Nintendo does agree to move forward, they explained, if their "yes" comes too late then today's presentation would have been all for nothing. They'll need to start production in October if they're going to make the April debut proposed by Kubo, you see, and a delayed response would mean they won't be able to make that deadline. 小学館が9月も末のこの日にプレゼンを設定したのは、時間的な制約があったからでし た。第１回目のプレゼン後、この日まで任天堂は回答していなかったわけですが、それでは困る、と小学館側が言い来たのがこのプレゼンだったのです。たとえ 返事がイエスになるのであっても、これ以上返事が送れることになれば、プレゼンをした意味がなくなるのです。久保が企図していたアニメ番組の4月スタート に間に合わせるためには、10月には制作を開始する必要がありました。間に合わなくなるのです。

Page 285:

The three men left Nintendo and headed straight for Kyoto station, where they got on the Tokaido Shinkansen Nozomi train a little after 5:00 PM to head back to Tokyo. 3人は任天堂から真っ直ぐ京都駅に向かい、午後５時過ぎの東海道新幹線のぞみで帰京 の途につきました。

Page 286:

The Nozomi train carrying the three men from Shogakukan was just approaching Lake Hamana in Shizuoka Prefecture when Kubo's mobile phone rang. It was from Nintendo. The person on the other line was (Shinji) Hatano, the head of the Operations Department and the person who would be in charge of the animated series in the event the company had agreed to greenlight it. その頃、小学館側の３人を乗せたのぞみは、ちょうど静岡県の浜名湖にさしかかってい ました。そこで久保の携帯電話が鳴りました。任天堂からでした。電話の主は、アニメ化が決まれば担当部署になる業務部の部長渡多野でした。 "Mr. Kubo, Nintendo has decided to sponsor the Pokémon animated series. The decision came down just now. (Nintendo) President Yamauchi asked that we call you and inform you right away, and since I knew you'd still be on the train I decided to call you on your cell." 「久保さん、任天堂は、ポケモンのアニメ番組のスポンサーになることを決めました。いま決まりました。山内社長が、すぐに電話でお知らせするようにとのこ とでしたので、まだ移動中とは思いましたがお電話しました」

So if the show is greenlit on September 26th, 1996, and eventually debuts on April 1st, 1997, then that gives OLM an approximately six month window to actually make the thing.

CoroCoro Comics started promoting the show to the public in its January 1997 issue, which would have gone on sale December 15th, 1996. The issue is, as far as I know, the first time the TV series was ever promoted in print.


The article is broken down into a number of exclusive "scoops," but the one most relevant to this discussion is "Scoop 2."

The main character is Red!? What monster will he bring along with him......!? 主人公はレッド⁉連れていくモン スターは……⁉ It seems like Red will be the main character of the animated series, just like in the video games and comics. And it seems like candidates to be his first traveling companion will be one of these five!! ゲームやマンガと同様に、テレビアニメでもレッドが主人公になるらしい。また、一緒 に旅をするポケモンは下の５匹が候補だぞ‼ Will he choose one of these three like in the video games? ゲーム同様この３匹なのか？ Or... それとも… Is there any chance it'll be a Pokémon like Pippi or Pikachu? ピッピやピカチュウの可能性も⁉

Here, CoroCoro Comics is speculating about which Pokémon "Red" (not Satoshi!) will choose as his starter, floating out the manga's mascot as one of the possibilities. The key word here is speculating; there are no definitive statements here saying that Pippi will definitely be the starter.

The following month, the February 1997 issue went on sale (January 15th, 1997) and showed off Satoshi and Pikachu together for the first time.


Let's zoom in a bit:

The main character is Satoshi! Pikachu will appear too!! 主人公はサトシ！ピカチュウも登 場‼ The name of the main character of this story has been decided to be Satoshi! In addition Pikachu, the most popular of the 151 Pokémon, will appear as well!! お話の主人公の名前は、サトシに決定！また、ポケモン151ぴきの中で、ダントツ一番人気のピカチュウも登場する ぞ‼

"Pikachu will appear too!!" isn't quite the same thing as "Pikachu will be Satoshi's first Pokémon," though the positioning of the two characters in relation to one another implies as much. I also want to point out Satoshi's hat here, which has a lightning bolt symbol on it instead of the L-like symbol it would have in the final version. A lightning bolt hat for the show's main human character certainly points to him having the Electric-Type Pikachu as his partner, doesn't it?


In the March 1997 issue, which went on sale February 15th, 1997, the fact that Pikachu is indeed Satoshi's partner is confirmed once and for all.

Pikachu ピカチュウ Satoshi's Pokémon. Those of you who've played the game are already familiar with it. サトシのポケモン。ゲームをやっ た人達にはおなじみだよね。

So here's the timeline we'd be looking at if Pippi was indeed going to be chosen as Satoshi's starter. The show gets greenlit on September 26th, 1996. On January 15th, 1997 -- so a little over three months later -- the February 1997 issue of CoroCoro Comics comes out and very heavily implies that the show'll be about the duo Satoshi and Pikachu, not Satoshi and Pippi. Deadlines for submissions to CoroCoro Comics would have likely have had to be made well in advance of its January 15th newsstand date, and so we can probably round that number down to about three months. This all means the decision to make Satoshi's partner a Pikachu would have had to have been finalized by the end of December 1996 or, at the absolute latest, the first week or so of January 1997.

Why Pikachu was chosen

Let's look at the book Pokémon Story (ポケモンストーリー) again, which also includes series director Kunihiko Yuyama explaining why they ended up going with Pikachu. This is from a bit later on in the book, from pages 332 - 333:

Yuyama had this to say about when they chose Pikachu as the main character for Pokémon 湯山は、ピカチュウをポケ モンのメインキャラクターとして選び出したときのことにつ いてこう話しています。 "We thought that if we made the animated series just like the video games and chose one out of only the first three Pokémon -- Hitokage, Fushigidane, or Zenigame -- then the children at home who chose one of the other two would feel left out. You know how I have three children myself, right? Well, if I were to choose only one of them for anything then the other two would feel left out. So we thought it'd be best to avoid that type of situation altogether. We then had the idea to choose a Pokémon completely different from those first three. Pokémon like Purin or Pippi would have been fine, for example, but Pokémon like that who're too unique wouldn't have fit in with the world we were trying to build with our show. And then when you think of cute Pokémon who aren't all that common then, well, Pikachu's the obvious choice. Another big factor was a popularity contest CoroCoro Comics had done at the time in which Pikachu won first place. Pikachu was very popular and it was just the right size for it to be able to walk along its Trainer without it feeling weird, and so we went with Pikachu. It looks like a regular mouse but has a tail the shape of a lightning bolt, and so this blend of reality and fantasy was the perfect fit for the world of Pokémon we were trying to create." 「ゲームと同じように、最初に出てくるヒトカ ゲ、フシギダ ネ、ゼニガメのなかから１匹選んでしまってアニメにしたら、ゲームで他のポケモンを選んだ子どもたちが、淋しい思いをするんじゃないかなと思ったんです よ。ぼくは３人子どもがいるじゃないですか。だから、どれか選んでもあとの２人がかわいそうだなって思って。それは避けた方がいいだろうっていうことが あったんです。だとしたら、最初にもらえる３匹とは全然違うやつを選べばいいだろうと。たとえば、プリンでもピッピでもよかったんですけれども、あんまり 非日常的なポケモンは、世界観にそぐわないし、日常的にいそうでほんとはいないような、かわいいポケモンということで考えると、ピカチュウ。まあ、大き かったのは、その頃『コロコロコミック』でやった人気投票でピカチュウが一番だったということですね。人気もあって、そばにいてもおかしくないポケモンと いうことで、ピカチュウになりました。形はねずみなんですけど、尻尾だけはイナヅマになっているという、現実とファンタジーの中間にあるというのも、ポケ モンの世界観に合ってたんですよ

While both Pippi and Purin are mentioned here, there's no indication the pink Pokémon were ever actually seriously considered for the role of Satoshi's starter. The two were simply brought up as an example of "cute" Pokémon without anything else being said about them or their chances of being the show's mascot.

The man who actually wrote that first episode of Pocket Monsters, Takeshi Shudo, backs this all up on his own blog 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). This is from Entry #143 "'Pokémon' Episodes 1 & 2 Air":

A little further down:

This Pokémon was chosen (as Satoshi's partner) because it was the most popular in a poll. このポケモンが選ばれたのは、投票で最も人気があったからである。 There are also some who say it was so popular because the yellow color of its body makes it stand out. 体が黄色いのが目立つから人気が高かったという意見もある。 In any case, Satoshi eventually got Hitokage and the other starters, making things fair for all the players of the video game. さらにサトシは、やがて最初にプレーヤーの選べるヒトカゲ他の３匹を入れたモンスターボールを持つようになり、 ゲームのそれぞれのプレーヤーに公平になる ようにした。

It's worth noting that Mr. Shudo's blog does not mention "Pippi" by name at any point, either in this entry or anywhere else in his blog. Which, in and of itself, is a pretty huge big deal given how forthright Mr. Shudo usually is with pretty much every other aspect of the franchise. Let's think about it, if Mr. Shudo had written a story about Satoshi and Pippi, but then got told by some higher ups that nope, we're changing it to Pikachu now, you can be absolutely sure the writer would have spent multiple blog entries complaining about unreasonable requests and unrealistic deadlines and horrible bosses and all the rest. And yet...not a peep.

Both Kubo and Shudo mention a popularity contest that ran in CoroCoro Comics as being one of the deciding factors in choosing Pikachu. Now, I actually do own every issue of CoroCoro Comics from this era and so I looked through them to try to see which issue this contest would have taken place in, but so far no luck. It's entirely possible the text is actually tucked away on some random page somewhere I just haven't noticed, or that the 25 year old used copies of the issues I own are actually missing the relevant pages, or that the contest was something CoroCoro Comics accepted entries for but then never actually published the results of for whatever reason. Either way, I unfortunately have not been able to find the popularity poll they're talking about here.

Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon

One thing I haven't brought up yet is the book Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, published in February 2004. In "The Pokémon Supersystem" section of Chapter 4, there's an article entitled "How "Japanese" is Pokémon?" by Koichi Iwabuchi that talks about choosing Pikachu as the mascot.

Within this multiple product, multimedia business, Pokémon constantly reinvented itself. For example, for the creation of the comics and the TV cartoon, Pippi and Pikachu were chosen as the main Pokémon characters, respectively. Neither Pippi nor Pikachu was a main character in the original Game Boy software. Pippi (in English, Clefairy) was selected as the main Pokémon character to make the comic book series more "engaging." However, in order to attract younger and female viewers as well as their mothers, Pikachu replaced Pippi as the central character when the Pokémon TV series was introduced in 1997. The pink Pippi was replaced by the yellow, cuddlier Pikachu, whom the producers believed would seem like a more familiar and intimate pet to child viewers. There were other reasons as well for the producers' choice of yellow. Because yellow is one of the three basic colors, it is easy for children to recognize Pikachu even from a distance. Furthermore, the only competing yellow character is Winnie the Pooh (Kubo 2000a; 2000b)

Here, the phrase "The pink Pippi was replaced by the yellow, cuddlier Pikachu, whom the producers believed would seem like a more familiar and intimate pet to child viewers" is probably one of the phrases that helped spark the idea of Pikachu being a replacement mascot in the first place. But I'll talk about that a bit later.

First, let's look up the two citations (Kubo 2000a and 2000b) in the chapter's WORKS CITED section of the chapter so we can track down the original sources being cited here.

Kubo Masakazu. 2000a. "Pokemon wa naze beikoku de seikō shitaka" (Why Pokémon Succeeded in the US). Ronza (February), 78-86   ------. 2000b. "Sekai wo haikaisuru wasei monsutā Pikachū" (Pikachu Wandering over the World). Bungei Shunjū special issue: Dōduru? Dōnaru? Watasitachi no 21 seiki: 340-49.

The first one, "2000a," refers to an article entitled "Why Pokémon Succeeded in the US" (「ポケモン」はなぜ米国で成功したか) published on pages 78-86 of the February 2000 issue of the magazine Ronza (論座).  The second one, "2000b," refers to an article entitled "Pikachu Wandering over the World" (世界 を徘徊する和製モンスター「ピカチュウ」), published on pages 340 - 349 of the June 2000 issue of the magazine Bungei Shunjuu (文藝春秋).

The "Pikachu's Global Adventure" paragraph quoted from above is actually a general summary combining elements from both these sources. First, let's look at the relevant section in "Why Pokémon Succeeded in the US," from Page 86 of Ronza:

Those of you who've played the video games probably already know this, but Pikachu isn't really all that useful in the games. But, it was the perfect choice to be the main character of the animated series. ゲーム版をやっとことのある人ならご存じだと思いますが、ピカチュウというのはゲームではあまり役に立たないキャ ラクターです。でも、アニメの主人公には ぴったりだった。 First of all, it has a certain cuteness to it that can help draw girls in. That's the strength of its strong character design. まず、女の人なら誰でもひかれるようなかわいさがある。これはキャラクターデザインの勝利です。 Next, its yellow coloration is extremely advantageous. That's because the color yellow sticks out to us humans. It's one of the three primary colors, after all, and can be found in something even as common as a traffic light. 次に、黄色、というのが非常にいい。人間にとっては黄色は非常に目立つ色です。色の三原色ですし、信号の色でもあ ります。 Speaking of traffic lights, the color yellow means "pay attention!" and I think this sort of thing is subconsciously imprinted in all of our brains. So for those reasons it tends to be very good to have characters that are either red or yellow. 信号では注意せよ、という意味です。こういうことは誰しも無意識のうちに刷り込まれているはずなんですね。ですか ら赤色、黄色のキャラクターというのは非 常にいい。 One advantage that yellow has over red is the lack of competition. Of all the famous characters our there, I think maybe Winnie the Pooh is the only one who's completely yellow. そして赤より黄色がいいのは、コンペティター (競争者) があまりいないことです。有名なキャラクターとしては、たぶん 「クマのプーさん」 くらいじゃないでしょうか。 This means that if you're looking at a Pikachu from far away, the only other character you might mistake it for would probably be Winnie the Pooh. And being able to recognize a character right away is extremely important. ということは、遠くから見てもピカチュウと間違えられる可能性があるのはプーさんくらいということになる。すぐわ かる、という点でこれは非常に大切なこと なんですね。

You'll notice that Pippi's not mentioned here at all. OK, so then what does "Pikachu Wandering the World" have to say? This excerpt's taken from Page 344 of the Bungei Shunjuu article:

The world of the animated Pokémon TV series is different from that of the Game Boy video games in that Pikachu, a cute yellow Pokémon who's popular with young girls, is the main character. In the manga series running in CoroCoro, a pink Pokémon named "Pippi" is the main character, and while children are familiar with that Pokémon, they decided to change it to "Pikachu" for the animated series. Now, Pikachu is a weak Pokémon during regular gameplay. But it feels more pet-like and familiar, and it was thought its sharp yellow color would be a good fit. テレビアニメのポケモンの世界は、ゲームボーイのゲームの設定と違い、女の子にもうける黄色いかわいらしいポケモ ン・ピカチュウを主人公に据えました。コ ロコロでの連載漫画は 「ピッピ」 というピンク色をしたポケモンが主人公で、子供たちにはなじみもありましたが、あえてアニメでは「ピカチュウ」に変えたのです。ピカチュウはゲームの基本 設定では力の弱いポケモンです。しかし、よりペット的で身近に感じられ、メリハリの利いた体色・黄色に設定されているのが良いと思われました。 The color yellow is used in traffic lights, as one of the three primary colors, to tell people to watch out. And on top of that there's almost no competition when it comes to famous characters who are yellow. I think there's just Winnie the Pooh, and maybe that's it? If you print Pikachu on a T-shirt and then see it from far away you can still tell it's Pikachu, with little chance of you mistaking it for something else. 黄色は、色の三原色の一つで注意を促す意味合いを持つ信号の色にもなっています。その上、黄色いキャラクターとい うのはコンペティター (競争相手) があまりいません。クマのプーさんぐらいしかいないのではないでしょうか？ということは、Tシャツなどにプリントした場合、遠くからでもピカチュウはよく 認識され、間違われる可能性が少ないといえます。

Here, Pippi is indeed mentioned as being the star of the comic series and that "they decided to change it to "Pikachu" for the animated series."

Sarah Natochenny

The final bit of information I want to mention before bringing all this all to a close comes from Sarah Natochenny, the English dub voice actor of Ash Ketchum from 2006 onwards. She reportedly repeated the claim about the show's mascot originally being Pippi during MegaCon Orlando in February 2024, according to CBR's account of the conversation:

Fan Question: If you had to pick a Pokémon partner for Ash besides Pikachu, who would it be? Sarah: Clefairy. The mascot wasn’t originally going to be Pikachu. It was going to be Clefairy.

A person officially involved in the franchise repeating the claim certainly seems to add a bit of legitimacy to all this, though it should also be pointed out that Ms. Natochenny is simply a voice actor for a foreign language dub brought in nearly a decade after the project had already started. It's entirely possible she's been made privy to certain secret information direct from Japan, sure, but even if she does get some information we know for sure she's not getting everything. She found out Satoshi won the Pokémon World Championships the same time as the rest of us, for example.

“I was in Michigan at a convention at Grand Rapids Comic Con, and it was early morning and I woke up really early for some reason,” she says. “It was like six in the morning and I looked at Twitter and I’m like, ‘What is happening?’” Natochenny initially didn’t acknowledge Ash’s big win publicly, having made it a rule for herself not to talk about things happening in the anime until those episodes aired in English-speaking territories. But then The Pokémon Company started acknowledging it on English social media and she made her own video about it.

The Occam's razor explanation to Ms. Natochenny's response to CBR above is that she most likely saw the idea of Clefairy being Ash's starter posted online somewhere, believed it, and then simply repeated it in public.

Conclusion

Let's wind down this write-up by taking a look at the claim from Wikipedia one more time.

When the production staff started on the anime, they wanted a specific character to focus on. At first, Clefairy was intended to be Ash's starter. Due to a last-minute adjustment, Pikachu got the role because it was relatively popular compared with the other Pokémon and the staff thought that "potentially both boys and girls would like it". [3]

So first, the easiest part of this to debunk is the "last-minute adjustment" claim in the second sentence. Because even if Pippi being the mascot ever did make it past the "someone brought it up in a pre-production meeting one time, maybe" the very tight schedule by which the animated series was produced makes the "due to a last-minute adjustment" claim completely implausible. Pikachu was locked in as Satoshi's starter as early as January 1997 for a show that that was set to debut in April; that's not really "last minute," is it?

You also have to remember that animated television shows were still completely analogue back in 1997. In an era where hand-painted cels were physically being placed on top of painted backgrounds and then converted to actual rolls of film, one frame at a time, swapping out one main character with another just wouldn't have been feasible in the amount of time given. It's not like today, where you can generally swap out one character for another with just a few clicks of a mouse. Replacing one Pokémon (Pippi) with another (Pikachu), in the year 1997, would have required the show's artists to have to pretty much reanimate huge chunks of the episode, an expensive and time consuming prospect the production companies simply wouldn't have had the luxury to even entertain.

Hiroki could be swapped out with Takuya in Pocket Monsters Diamond & Pearl Episode 082 "The Nomose Great Marsh's Gureggru Festival!?" because by that point (2008) computers were being heavily used to assist in the show's production. This was not the case eleven years earlier with the 1997 episode "Pokémon I Choose You!"

You also have to take a look at the actual first episode and realize how much Pikachu's electric typing is baked into the episode's story itself. The multiple shots of characters getting electrocuted, Satoshi's decision to wear rubber gloves when around his Pokémon, the final battle against the Onisuzume, Kasumi's bike...you can't just explain all this away by saying "oh, all that was probably just Clefairy using Metronome, over and over."


OK, so maybe swapping out Pippi with Pikachu wasn't a last minute decision, but that doesn't mean it's impossible the switch didn't happen earlier in production, right? Well, no, it's not impossible, but there just isn't the evidence to support that actually being the case, either.

What most likely happened is that back in 2004 or so, people saw the "Pikachu's Global Adventure" retelling of the Masakazu Kubo's quote -- without knowing anything about Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters manga or how unbelievably popular it was in Japan -- and misinterpreted the line "change it to Pikachu" as "we had concrete plans to make Clefairy the star of the animated series but then switched it out with Pikachu." For most fans in the West, Kousaku Anakubo's Pocket Monsters manga is just an insignificant footnote, a neat little bit of trivia and nothing else. But in Japan, that series was the face of Pokémon for a very significant period in the franchise's life. Without that extremely crucial bit of context it's easy to see how people could misinterpret Mr. Kubo's statement (or, rather, an English language recap of a quote originally presented in Japanese).

There doesn't seem to be any concrete proof that tangible steps were ever taken in making Pippi the original mascot of the animated series. The possibility may have been brought up in a very early pre-production meeting somewhere, based pretty much entirely on the Normal-Type's popularity via its manga series, but there doesn't seem to be any solid proof to suggest Pippi was ever a serious contender for the role of the show's mascot.