Pokemon S01E55-56 Review: Play Pokemon Snap

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 55: Pokemon Paparazzi; 56: The Ultimate Test

A couple of... interesting episodes, I suppose. Episode 55 is another "[insert profession here], but with Pokemon" episodes, and would be utterly unremarkable if not for the introduction of Snap (or Todd, or Todd Snap, depending on your dub), a character that's going to join our heroes for the next couple of episodes, and would eventually become the star of his own side-game, Pokemon Snap, a game where you take photographs of Pokemon. Surprisingly enough, though, Snap's recurring role in the anime was not originally meant to promote the game, since Pokemon Snap went into development way long after the Snap episodes have been broadcasted in Japan. So, uh... yeah.

Pokemon photography is actually a very neat and genuinely sensible career, essentially being the National Geographic photographer equivalent in a world with super-powerful animals. The episode essentially centers around Snap trying to take photos of a very camera-shy Pikachu, and a misunderstanding when Team Rocket, disguised as an old couple, thinks that Snap is the best "Pokemon catcher" of all time and emotionally guilts him into help catch Pikachu. Of course, Snap is the best at catching pictures of Pokemon, a pun on words that gets translated relatively well in English.

That said, though, I really didn't like the episode all that well. The hijinks was neat, and the actual scenes of Snap trying ot get pictures of Pikachu and things kept getting in the way was neatly animated, but the plot of Snap realizing that saving a person's life is more important than his camera (you don't say?) did not land at all, and both Ash and Snap's argument ends up sounding far, far more juvenile and assholish for me to really end up liking Snap all that much. The Pokemon anime isn't one for particularly deep characterizations, of course, but Snap in particular felt like a particularly bland pile of tropes gummed together.

Episode 56, meanwhile, is an interesting one. We've seen the super-elite school to get into the Pokemon Championship very early on in the series, with the Weepinbell/Graveler fight and whatnot, but turns out that in the anime version, you can actually apply to go through the Pokemon League Admissions Exam for a less barbaric or travel-heavy way to get to the League. Which is a pretty interesting concept -- the episode notes how it's a way for people like Nurse Joy (who has a job that prevents her from travelling) or old people from really travelling too much over Kanto. But the Pokemon Admissions Exam is... it's an interesting episode. The hijinks in this episode is always memorable, particularly the "what is this spherical Pokemon? It's a Jigglypuff viewed from above!" troll-question in the test, but ultimately I'm not sure how I feel about this episode or the Admission Exam in general -- the episode waffles on making it feel like an absolute troll test (particularly during the multiple-choice question segment) and making it a relatively serious test of its examiners (during the battle one, where our heroes have to fight with Pokemon they are unfamiliar with), but ultimately, I kinda wished that they had leaned more one way or another.

Throw in the fact that Jessie and James, very uncharacteristically, ended up joining in the examination and even went so far as to sneak away from their teammates to be a Pokemon master... that felt bizarrely out of character, and just a way to get them into the episode and engage in hijinks like the sheer giddiness that James has at being able to command a Pikachu during the battle segment of the test. The battle segment in general is pretty fun, with the hilarious bit of Ash being able to eke out a decent fight with Team Rocket's Pokemon, while James ends up getting disqualified due to him forgetting that electricity doesn't work on ground-types, or that double-battles won't be an official thing until Advanced Generation.

Episode 56 does have a couple of good moments despite its tonal inconsistency, and if nothing else, it's pretty entertaining to watch. The examiner was given a fun little faux-Russian accent by Ted Lewis, which adds some charm to what would otherwise be a forgettable guest character, and I do like the little twist that, nope, all the Pokemon in the examination actually does listen to the examiner. There are some neat little details in 56, like the Nurse Joy that apparently aced the test, or the fact that Snap hangs out the party and does jack-all... but nothing really ends up coming out of any of these.

Pokemon Index:

• Episode 55:
• Pokemon: Togepi, Pikachu, Squirtle, Aerodactyl (flashback), Pidgey (photograph), Dugtrio (photograph), Mankey (photograph), Slowpoke (photograph), Eevee (photograph), Kangaskhan (photograph), Chansey (photograph), Snorlax (photograph), Pidgeotto, Bulbasaur, Goldeen, Psyduck, Staryu, Starmie, Horsea, Onix, Geodude, Zubat, Vulpix, Meowth
• Humans: Misty, Ash, Brock, Todd Snap, Jessie, James
• Episode 56: 
• Pokemon: Togepi, Pikachu, Meowth, Oddish, Weedle, Lickitung (image), Vulpix (image), Hitmonlee (image), Magikarp (image), Caterpie (image), Koffing (image), Voltorb (image), Electrode (image), Jigglypuff (image), Omanyte (image), Arbok (image and present), Poliwag (image), Poliwrath (image), Charmander (image and present), Ponyta (image), Squirtle, Graveler, Charizard, Ivysaur, Flareon, Weezing, Jolteon, Vaporeon
• Humans: Misty, Brock, Todd Snap, Ash, James, Jessie, Nurse Joy

Random Notes:

• Todd Snap's Japanese voice actor was Yamaguchi Kappei, who the anime world would know as the voice actor of One Piece's Usopp. This episode was broadcasted two years prior to the airing of the One Piece anime, and Yamaguchi quite literally just uses the voice he would later use to voice Usopp. 
• Todd Snap's name is "Snap", to coincide with Pokemon Snap, in most versions of the English dub, but for whatever reason, in the Kids-WB version of the dub, his name is redubbed as "Todd". Whatever the reason was for this bizarre change, the character would be given the full name "Todd Snap" in most publications.
• Snap brings up the Aerodactyl incident in "Attack of the Prehistoric Pokemon", which is a surprising nice bit of continuity in this first season!
• Surprisingly, episode 55 has the Onigiri correctly identified as rice balls by the English dub, which is probably the only time in the original airing of the dubs to actually not call them donuts or sandwiches or whatever. Presumably, this is because we get a full animation of Brock actually using a spoon to scoop up rice and make the onigiri. By the way, this won't last. 
• The English dub for episode 55 also surprisingly kept the 'joke' of Ash mistaking Snap's camera for a machinegun, as well as the imagined sequence of Brock, Misty and Pikachu being gunned down by an unknown assailant, so maybe a completely different team is in charge of 55's dub?
• A miscolouring error in episode 56 has a Weedle that Snap is taking photographs of be coloured green like a Caterpie. 
• Likewise, while the voice actors and the context of the evolution would be about Poliwhirl, the image shows a Poliwrath. 
• Dub Changes:
• A pun that was changed is the sequence where Snap has a Blastoise mask. In the original Japanese, it's a pun on kameraman (cameraman) and kamex (Blastoise's Japanese name), whereas the English one has it be a pun on Master and Mask-er. 
• The sequence with the pitfall trap has Tooru (Japanese Snap) think that the old couple is telling him that the dirt pile is a good place to set up for a photo, whereas the dub changes it to the soft dirt being "a good place to wait", something that Snap doesn't actually do.
• Episode 56 changes the "who's that Pokemon" from a repeat of the Jigglypuff-viewed-from-above joke into a generic Vulpix one. 
• Episode 56 has a large amount of edits due to the nature of the show being a test. Most memorable, is the somewhat-sloppy editing of the monitor screens. Click here for a breakdown of all the edits, but most notable ones is the mistake among the editors of using a Poliwrath's picture instead of Polliwhirl, as well as changing the "write the answer in the touchscreen" sequence of the second part of the test into "scroll down a series of pictograms" -- something that's probably not conducive to the fact that the examinees are supposed to identify a Pokemon by its silhouette.