Pokémon Review — The 1997 Original Is Shaggier and Sweeter Than You Remember

A ten-year-old and an electric mouse that refuses to get in the ball. Rewatched today, the opening stretch of 1997's Pokémon is startling in how little it resembles the frictionless franchise machine that followed — Pikachu genuinely dislikes Satoshi at first, and earning that trust is the show's actual pilot arc, not the license's. That scrappiness is the original series' secret. Against its late-90s contemporaries, which mostly ran on tournament ladders and power escalation, Pokémon was structured like a road movie: Kanto, the Orange Islands, Johto, one small story at a time, with Takeshi and Kasumi as traveling companions rather than rivals.

Does it hold up on a modern binge? With the right expectations, better than you'd think. The episodic format that once felt like limitation now reads as anthology comfort — town, problem, creature, resolution — and the Team Rocket trio's ritualized failure is genuinely funny in accumulation, a running gag the show commits to with vaudeville discipline. Episode-to-episode, the sincerity is disarming; this is a show that believes friendship-through-effort without a trace of irony, and that conviction ages well.

The caveat is unavoidable at 276 episodes: there is a lot of formula here, and stretches of the middle leagues blur together in ways no modern series would risk. This is not a show to marathon for narrative momentum. But as an era artifact and a low-stakes nightly ritual — 269 episodes streaming free on our site, essentially the whole run — it remains one of the most pleasant time machines in the catalog.