Pokemon S01E62 Review: Pink Alien Invaders

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 62: Clefairy Tales

This is kind of a strange episode to fit in here, huh? After the insanely long gap between the Fuschia and Cinnabar gyms (which lasted some 20+ episodes), we get like three random filler episodes going from Cinnabar to Viridian, and none of them are especially interesting. The real-life reason for this was apparently the episode-scheduling team had moved up the production of the Viridian City gym episode in order to tie in to the Mewtwo movie... but the entire series itself ended up being delayed for months thanks to the Porygon episode incident, making the tie-in to Mewtwo end up being aired a couple of months after the movie itself, but thanks to production orders and whatnot, the episode order isn't changed, leading to this rather odd ordering and pacing of episodes. Not that Pokemon is the most well-thought-out series as a whole, mind you, and I'm just talking about this because this episode really doesn't give much for me to talk about and I would prefer to keep the Viridian City gym episode as a standalone review.

And honestly, why this episode felt so weak is that it's a rehash of episode 6 in this very season, "Clefairy and the Moon Stone", where we highlight Clefairy and its premise, which amounts to maybe these pink fairy balls are aliens?! And also there's some geek conspiracy theorist thrown in as a guest star of the week? Except episode 6 was a bit more ambiguous and set up the Clefairy as something that's a bit more mysterious and magical, as these strange pixies that worship a stone that may or may not came from space and may or may not have brought them from space. "Clefairy Tales", on the other hand, has the premise of a spaceship crashing, bringing with it a small horde of Clefairy who then proceed to raid the local town for random knick-knacks to rebuild their ramshackle spaceship. Which is actually kind of a cute concept, but the execution feels partiularly bland. The Clefairy themselves are pretty much just kinda there to not do much after the initial premise, and not even adding the Jigglypuff/Clefairy pink-puffballs-slapping-each-other rivalry really amounted to a whole ton and having Jigglypuff's song solve the episode's plot is starting to be a rather irritating trend.

To the episode's credit, at least it kept bouncing around concepts so it's nowhere as straightforward as its predecessor. We go from Jigglypuff witnessing the UFO crash landing and the Clefairies bouncing out, then we cut straight to Team Ash eating ice cream and meeting a cute Clefairy, which of course is just a distraction for the other Clefairies to steal their bags. Turns out there's a string of robberies throughout town, and local conspiracy theorist Oswald sort of blames it all on aliens.

And then a straight-up UFO manned by tall silver-skinned Gray-style aliens show up, who proceed to quite literally take Pikachu and just walk back to their shuttle while our heroes gawk in stupidity, and Pikachu gets stuffed into this weird little glass bulb dome. But these particular aliens are actually Team Rocket, our heroes figure it out, and Pidgeotto attacks the crane. The confrontation with Team Rocket gets interrupted by Clefairy stealing Pikachu (who's still trapped in the dome) and the actually funny gag of Oswald claiming oh my god Clefairy is an alien... and so is Jigglypuff, and so is Misty, and apparently he got his alien detector from one of those old-school mail-away coupons that come with comics. That's actually a funny gag.

Then Jigglypuff shows up and I think this episode was where, as a kid, I realize just how much more expressive Jigglypuff's design is and how much objectively cuter it is compared to Clefairy. It's the eyes and the little sphere body with nub limbs. Anyway, Jigglypuf leads our heroes (sans Brock, who quite literally got separated from the rest of the team) and Team Rocket to the Clefairy's secret underground base, where they're repairing their hilarious UFO, which is basically half of a rocket glued onto a big spherical UFO. They plan to use Pikachu to power their spaceship, and also somehow they are able to use like baseball bats and woks to fix the spaceship.

We get a confrontation where Jigglypuff faces off against like six Clefairys at the same time and we get a pinky-pink slap slap contest, which is kind of cute, and then Jigglypuff reclaims its microphone-marker, which the Clefairy had co-opted as a lever in their cockpit. Jigglypuff puts everyone to sleep, and the Clefairy ship takes off, which also apparently knocks out all of the missing items right to their owners. Team Rocket gets blasted off with the booster portion, while Ash and Misty rescue Pikachu and escape with Bulbasaur's aid. The Clefairy ship then crash-lands again next to a village, still making it ambiguous as hell just whether they're actually aliens or if they're just going through the motions and they're earth-born creatures trying to go to space or whatever.

Anyway, this episode exists. I only vaguely remember it as a kid, and it's no wonder that it didn't leave much of an impression beyond the general ridiculousness of a secret space-base in the sewers. This one isn't a bad episode, but definitely kind of a forgettable one. Next up we're getting the Viridian Gym!

Featured Pokemon

• Pokemon: Jigglypuff, Pidgey, Caterpie, Clefairy, Togepi, Pikachu, Meowth, Pidgeotto, Bulbasaur
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Brock, Officer Jenny, James, Jessie, 
• Various Pokemon in stock images are seen in a scene transition.

Random Notes:

• We're still in the Kanto seson and it's not quite as prevalent, but as the series goes on into its hundreds, we'll get a bunch more episodes like this where we sort of realize that the show's episodic nature tends to mean that the show writers (and, to an extent, the characters) are very much operating on a very loose memory, because no one even mentions the fact that this is more or less the same plot as episode 6, "Clefairy and the Moon Stone". 
• Dub changes:
• A relatively minimal amount, actually! Really, the only major thing they changed is inexplicably removing a line from Team Rocket lampshading that they're finally on a rocket, and the word 'chicken' being added into the chef's dialogue. Everything other dub change are relatively minor puns thrown in. After the sheer amount of stuff changed for the Blaine episodes, it's refreshing. 
• I guess this is where I could talk about the "Who's That Pokemon" segment? At around the Blaine episodes, the dub (which has been inconsistent on whether they copy the Who's That Pokemon segment or do their own) ends up switching all of the Who's That Pokemon segments to sort of preview next week's episode. It doesn't work every time (that Paras one in episode 59 has nothing to do with 59 or 60), but it's been otherwise a neat pattern. Episode 61's Whodat feature features Clefairy, which stars in this one, and this episode features Arcanine, which features in the next one. 
• I did love the fact that Jigglypuff's doodles on Oswald and the lead Clefairy aren't even actual attempts to doodle like a mustache or monocle or whatever, it's just straight-up scribbles. 
• That curved building that allows the Clefairy's ship to take off is very convenient, isn't it? 
• That massive rocket-booster portion that detaches and falls down to the city, uh, probably caused some property damage, didn't it?
• Did no one really care that they left Oswald abducted by a bunch of insane Clefairy? Eh.