Pokemon S01E58-59 Review: Quiz Game Show

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 58: Riddle Me This; Episode 59: Volcanic Panic

A two-parter in Cinnabar Island and... it's interesting? On the other hand, Cinnabar Island in the games was filled with so much fun stuff that could've been adapted into entire episodes of their own -- the Pokemon Lab and resurrecting fossil Pokemon; the mysterious, abandoned Pokemon Mansion where the Mewtwo experiments happen; the subtle implications (at least in some media) that Blaine's a scientist that's somewhat involved with the Mewtwo stuff... and all of those are completely abandoned in favour of a bizarre take-that on turning small towns into tourist traps or whatnot? And I guess the Pokemon anime was always more episodic than serialized? I dunno, though. The first half of episode 58 felt particularly bland, although at least making the Cinnabar Gym into a two-parter does make it feel more like an event in the same way that Sabrina's Saffron Gym ended up feeling? I dunno.

Episode 58 starts off with Team Ash arriving on Cinnabar Island, but quickly being informed by Gary and his walking harem of cheerleaders that Cinnabar Island is a resort and no pokemon trainer's been there since the time of Professor Oak... yet Ash and company somehow knows about the "Volcano Badge" and stuff? They quickly run into this bizarre dude with sunglasses and glorious hair, who, of course, is the gym leader Blaine, disguised as a generic hotel promoter -- and voiced with a completely stoned-hippie voice in the dub, which actually works relatively well in this case. Blaine rants about how the Cinnabar gym is abandoned, and how the entire island has been turned into a tourist trap because of all of the hot springs, and leaves our heroes a name card for the Big Riddle Inn.

Ash and company attempt to go the Pokemon Lab, only to find that it, too, is swarmed by tourists. And then they try to look for a hotel, only to be rejected at every turn... eventually coming across Gary and his posse in a fancy Japanese-style hotel with Pokemon geishas and Gary being a dick as usual... and then Jigglypuff shows up! Team Ash run the hell away while Jigglypuff puts Gary's room to sleep and does the usual Jigglypuff gag.

Meanwhile, as they continue in search of a hotel, Ash and company realize that there's a riddle written on the card that Hippie Blaine gave them before, and they eventually realize that it leads to the only building in the island with a visible clock tower. Which is kind of impractical and ridiculous, honestly. What if Ash and company actually found a room at one of the local hotels? What then? Silly Blaine, this is why you don't have any business.

We need to have a Team Rocket plot, so Team Rocket arrives on their Meowth balloon, not to steal Pikachu this time but to attack the Pokemon Lab! Which... is a literal work-out-with-training-equipment gym for Fighting-type Pokemon in anime continuity. Because the police are useless, the Pokemon Lab ends up calling Blaine, which in turn causes Team Ash to run towards the Lab. Pikachu rides Pidgeotto and unleashes a thunderbolt to send Team Rocket and their balloon blasting off again. As a reward, Blaine tells Team Ash that there's a secret gym, but to reach there they had to go solve another riddle. The riddles, by the way, are completely nonsensical in the dub and barely made sense in the original Japanese.

This leads to a hot springs scene, and it's Togepi that ends up wandering around and stepping on the Gyarados fountain to accidentally activate it, causing a boulder to move and reveal a secret staircase. The moving boulder also destroys the wooden wall separating the boys and girls' bath -- and, sure, Misty's wearing a towel and all, but god damn it Blaine, you're a terrible man for designing your secret gym doorway like this.

Anyway, our heroes change, enter and find Blaine's gym and it's actually badass, a slab of arena suspended over magma held in place by chains. It's like something out of a more serious video game, actually. The hippie man takes off his fake mustache and wig to reveal that he's Blaine, the gym leader! Whudda thunk?

It's pretty decent setup for the battle, and Ash sends out the water-type Squirtle against Blaine's Fire Pokemon... and Blaine's Ninetales takes the poor turtle out with a Fire Spin. It's... it's very anticlimactic, actually, with the (relatively weak) fire move taking out the water pokemon for no particular reason. They could've had Ninetales use a different-typed move, or focus on Fire Spin's immobilizing properties, or something, but nope, Ninetales just wins 'cause.

Round two is Ash's Charizard versus Blaine's Rhydon (surprisingly, not a fire type!), but Charizard is still disobedient and flies off the battlefield to take a nap. So Ash tosses in Pikachu. An electric type against a giant ground-type dinosaur? Madness, Ash! Pikachu's attacks refuse to do damage, but then we get the memetic "aim for the horn" scene, where apparently thunderbolting Rhydon's giant metal drill causes him to be zapped and knocked out because the horn is a lightning rod or something. Okay. Sure.

Blaine's last Pokemon is a Magmar, and we get a genuinely badass scene of the magma around the stadium bubbling and rising up like a giant wave before revealing Magmar's form within it. It's a scene that stuck with me as a kid, because of just how different it is -- it's not just sending a creature out of a Pokeball; Blaine's Magmar literally rises up from the depths of molten magma, and it's so hot that even Pikachu's thunderbolts are deflected. The episode ends with the cliffhanger of Pikachu about to be roasted by the massive Fire Blast that Magmar unleashes...

And episode 59 picks up where 58 leaves off. Pikachu barely hangs on after dodging the fire blast, but Ash calls off the match, conceding it because he doesn't want Pikachu to fall into the lava. Blaine leaves Ash, noting that while he lost the match, he respects him as a Pokemon trainer now or something. As they recover in Blaine's inn, Misty and Brock suggest that Ash try another gym since clearly Blaine's out of his league, but Ash's a single-minded boy and insists that he's not leaving Cinnabar Island without a Volcano Badge.

So it's Team Rocket time! They show up with a pair of fuck-off missile launchers that shoot out ice missiles, and they arrive at Blaine's gym, and start launching their seemingly-infinite amounts of freezing missiles at Magmar. This freezes Magmar, but Magmar just melts his way out, and Team Rocket just launches even more missiles. Not sure why Magmar's just standing there instead of attacking, though. What a dumb fire duck. The massive amount of ice unleashed throughout the volcanic cavern ends up causing a chain reaction that will lead to a volcanic eruption (the science is definitely bogus, but Blaine and Brock try their best to explain it). Said volcanic eruption sends Team Rocket blasting off again, and to protect the island from being wiped out from the volcano, Blaine sends Magmar to try and stop the lava flow by throwing rocks to dam up the magma.

Our heroes join in, but Charizard, being Charizard, takes a nap like a dick and refuses to help out until Magmar's manliness sort of inspires him to join in. The other Pokemon also help out, which is kind of adorable, although I really do think that Brock really should've tossed out Onix a lot earlier -- that huge rock snake, fire-type or not, would've been able to help toss boulders to dam up the lava flow faster than Magmar or Charizard could, surely?

This sequence really did take up a bit too long, honestly. for how little impact it has. But eventually Blaine agrees on a 1-v-1 rematch, on top of a bunch of pillars sticking out of a different volcano, which brings up some neat JoJo vibes. I do really like how Ash fully expected Blaine to give him the badge as a reward for helping Blaine out, and Blaine pratfalls at that. It's a neat little nod at how the little twerp really hasn't been properly earning his badges through battle, and I love it.

The battle between Magmar and Charizard (who wants to fight a worthy opponent more than actually listening to Ash) is helmed by animator Iwane Masaaki, who's famous for being the mastermind behind some of the better-animated episodes in the original Pokemon series, and it really, really shows. The battle between Magmar and Charizard isn't super-duper unique, but we get so many scenes that look pretty, and that's not something I ever associated with the original season, whose fights generally last less than a minute. But hey, this fight genuinely looked impressive in a way that Charizard-vs-Aerodactyl didn't, and I can easily believe this is the moment where everybody sitting down watching the telly in the '90's end up really loving Charizard as this badass fire dragon.

The Skull Bash knocking Charizard off of his footing; Charizard tumbling down the rock pillars, only to reorient itself and fly back up and leaving the lava spraying around in the wake of his wings; the airborne divebomb down towards Magmar; Magmar's somersault behind Charizard; the animation of the magma as Charizard bursts out from being trapped there; and finally, the Seismic Toss sequence with the over-the-top animation of the Earth itself showing up as Charizard spins around... it's pretty well done. The fight clocks it at around three or so minutes, but it's still pretty neat, and unlike the rather bland Rhydon and Ninetales fight from the previous episode, I actually do like the way that both Magmar and Charizard make use of their respective favoured terrain -- Magmar tries to drag the enemy into the magma itself; while Charizard makes use of its flying ability to blindside Magmar. It's pretty neat, and while it's Charizard's victory more than Ash's, it's a neat way to close off the Cinnabar Island gym.

Seven badges out of eight, and as our heroes prepare to leave Cinnabar Island and get Ash's eighth gym badge, we are apparently going to do a bit of a backtrack through Kanto all the way to Viridian City. Which means... more 'filler' episodes! I didn't mind this two-parter, though. It's very uneven, but there are a lot of parts that I liked, and it is capped off by one of the prettier fights in this leg of the show. 

Pokemon Index:

• Episode 58:
• Pokemon: Togepi, Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Meowth, Hitmonlee, Electabuzz, Hitmonchan, Machoke, Machop, Poliwhirl, Primeape, Pidgeotto, Ninetales, Squirtle, Charizard, Rhydon, Magmar
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Brock, Gary Oak, Blaine, Jessie, James, Nurse Joy
• Episode 59:
• Pokemon: Magmar, Pikachu, Togepi, Meowth, Charizard, Onix, Geodude, Squirtle, Staryu, Psyduck, Jigglypuff
• Humans: Ash, Brock, Misty, Blaine, James, Jessie

Random Notes:

• Blaine's portrayal here uses a radically different design compared to how Blaine usually looks in the video games or other media. Only the 'quiz' gimmick was kept from the Red/Blue/Green video games, but that's because the anime drew from an early, pre-Red/Blue design for Blaine that doesn't characterize him as a scientist, but as just an old bald clean-shaven dude. 
• Pikachu aiming for Rhydon's horn and causing damage to the Ground-type Pokemon is absolutely bizarre, and it's often mis-quoted (as "aim for the horn!") by Pokemon fans as a way to disparage how the anime's battles sometimes contradicted the rules set by the games.
• Speaking of wacky anime-only powers, Magmar in this episode has an aura of superheated air that causes Pikachu's thunderbolt to be sent upwards with the air updraft. Which is kinda cool, I won't lie, but also doesn't make that much sense. 
• I've always thought the set-up of Cinnabar Island's gym being dilapidated and everyone thinking that there's no gym there to be weird, since for some reason Ash and company kept talking about how the Volcano Badge could only be found on Cinnabar Island. It's just kinda weird, y'know?
• I do like that there's the unique implication in the anime how Kanto has more than eight gyms, with Brock and Gary telling Ash at some points to look for his seventh badge elsewhere. As the series goes on it's something that's dropped to tie in to the games a bit better, though. 
• In Gary's meal, we get even more examples of random real-world fish showing up in the Pokemon world! A tiger is also seen on a mural on one of the hotels, apparently a reference to the real-life Azuchi Castle. 
• The geisha Hitmonlee and Electabuzz are... they're weird. 
• There's a complete non-sequitur in episode 59 where Jigglypuff shows up during the scene of all the Pokemon trying to help dam up the magma flow. Jigglypuff completely disappears after that scene. I don't understand. 
• "Will Pikachu be turned into the world's cutest lava lamp" is such a hilariously odd-sounding cliffhanger to end on, silly dub narrator!
• Dub Changes:
• A lot of the riddles in this episode don't make sense, particularly in the dub, and that, obviously, is thanks to the dub changing a lot of the riddles. Here and here are a breakdown of all the changes made in this two-parter, and I agree that at least some of the original Japanese riddles actually could be translated as-is into English. (One of the particularly bad riddles involves the implication that wigs keep your head dry. No they don't.)
• Gary didn't mention Professor Oak at all in the Japanese version of the episode, which is actually a neat addition here to help give him a more snobbish attitude.
• Blaine's "hotel card" was originally a pack of tissues, because in Japan, tissue-pack marketing is something that's done with the (pretty good) logic that people will throw name cards away, but a pack of tissues are cheap to produce and will actually be kept around by the prospective customers. 
• Gary telling Ash to spin around three times and say Pikachu is actually a pun on sankai, the dish he's eating in the Japanese version, which could also be read as "three times".
• Blaine's Japanese name is itself a pun on 'wig'. In the English dub, we end up just getting the impression that Blaine's just doing it all as a generic trickster dude. 
• Dub!Blaine in episode 59 randomly ends up throwing puns all over the place instead of riddles. 
• The recap segment for episode 59 was particularly atrocious for being bad, using completely different lines for Blaine and Ash compared to what's said in 58, and changing Ninetales' Fire Spin into Ember. 
• Dub!Misty says "Starmie" when she's summoning Staryu. 
• The scene of Team Rocket spying on the twerps on the hot springs in 59 (and choking when they impulsively try to say their motto) is changed to them training to handle the heat in preparation to entering the volcano in the dub. 
• When Charizard tosses Magmar's Fire Blast into the air, the shape of the Fire Blast (kanji for 'big') briefly changes to 'medium' and 'small' before petering out. The English dub just edits this to have the Fire Blast stay as the 'big' kanji all the way through. 
• In the dub version, I think this is the first episode to swap out the Pokerap for Pikachu's Jukebox, which features some 'hip' Pokemon songs. Ah, the '90's.
• "Aerial Submission Attack" is actually something from the Japanese version too. It's not a real Pokemon move. 
• Episode 59 is the first time in the Japanese show that the episode ends with a "Professor Oak's Pokemon Lecture" segment, which was cut entirely for the dub -- presumably the haikus and random Japanese culture references are a bit harder to translate? It's basically a little 'spotlight' episode of Oak briefly describing a Pokemon.