Pokemon S01E68-69 Review: Four-Twenty Bulbasaur

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 68: Make Room for Gloom; Episode 69: Lighs, Camera, Quacktion

As we continue with our marathon of episodes of Ash's un-training arc, we get another pair of standalone episodes. "Make Room for Gloom", episode 68, is... it's another one of those episodes that focus on a single Pokemon and a single plot, and it's another usage of the trope of Brock falling in love with a girl-of-the-day and swears up and down to help her, something we sort of see with the Mr. Mime episode. It doesn't quite get as bad as some of the later episodes, but the only real thing that makes this episode not quite as bland is that it's early enough in the series that you don't quite get tired of it yet.

Anyway, as Ash tries his best to dodge the dreaded responsibility of chores, he ends up in Xanadu Nursery, a half-abandoned, overgrown giant greenhouse... which is actually ran by a lady called Florinda, her Gloom, and some other dude called Potter who sort of disappears for a significant portion of the episode. We get a bit of a neat little sequence of Florinda and Gloom showing Team Ash the wacky plants in the garden -- including "Pokenip", which made Bulbasaur look really wasted. Yeah, they can call it "Pokemon Catnip" all they want, we all know Bulbasaur just sniffed some real good weed. Bulbasaur and Gloom become very fast friends after Gloom cures Bulbasaur from some stun spore grass.

Florinda gives a quick exposition to our heroes that she's supposed to inherit the Xanadu Nursery, but she feels like a massive failure since she can't even make her Gloom evolve with the Leaf Stone. Brock gives some sappy excuse about how Gloom is strong because of love for its trainer or whatever, and then Professor Oak literally pops out of nowhere (no, I'm not being an ass, he literally just shows up) and claims that Florinda bought some shitty ripoff fake Leaf Stone, and we get an adorable charades sequence as Florinda describes the people who sold her the fake stone, which, of course, is Team Rocket. Team Rocket also shows up, and they decide to steal all of the valuable plants in the greenhouse. Okay, that's... different, I guess? We get a fun bit where Meowth cosplays as an old Chinese apothecary or some shit before lobbing a stun spore bomb.

Only Florinda and her Gloom are in a position to save the day, and turns out that Florinda has taught Gloom some moves from magazines, and with a combination of Double Team and Solar Beam, Gloom sends Team Rocket blasting off again and spends the rest of the episode's screentime cuddling with Bulbasaur. And Brock's fantasies of getting a girlfriend is dashed when Florinda professes her love to Potter. Okay, sure. There are a fair amount of neat moments, and I really don't have much to nitpick about the episode. It's just kind of there. A solid but unmemorable concept, and one that sort of already feels repetitive even in this Kanto season. I mean, we already had a Gloom-centric episode (the Erika one) and a herbs/plants-centric episode (the Paras one). This one does shuffle the details around a bit to make it feel different, but while it's not as bland as "The Pi-kahuna", this one does feel pretty bland.
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Episode 69, on the other hand, is... is a lot more fun. This is what I kind of wish these standalone filler episodes do a bit more often -- just take a concept and go balls to the wall batshit insane with it. Even if the storyline is thin and the plotline is basically the same with every second Pokemon episode, at least this episode is a lot more memorable, y'know? The episode doesn't start off as promising. Some random chick called Katrina shows up and challenges Ash to a Pikachu-vs-Raichu showdown and Team Rocket shows up and gets zapped.

And then they all get interrupted by Cleavon Spielbunk ("Schpielbunk" according to official sources, but I am too lazy to edit the entire episode with this admittedly funnier spelling), a hammy director who's filming a movie about Pokemon. Spielbunk has one of the better (and I use that term loosely) voices for a character-of-the-week in the dub, and he's looking for Pokemon talent to star in his movie, "Pokemon in Love"... and needs a co-star for his prima donna Wigglytuff, who scared off its previous co-star, an Abra.

This leads to an audition sequence with each of our main characters having their pokemon compete. We've got Pikachu, Meowth, Arbok, Weezing, Psyduck, Vulpix, Katrina's Raichu, plus a bunch of randoms like a Tauros and a Hitmonlee, which I do appreciate. The audition isn't super complex, but it does lead to some neat visuals, and I do really appreciate Arbok and Weezing, those two dunderheads, try their dang hardest to perform. The second part of the audition is a singing competition... but then Jigglypuff shows up, puts everyone to sleep and leaves the episode after drawing a Chaplin mustache on Wigglytuff's face. The final segment of the audition has Wigglytuff get paired up with Meowth, but Wigglytuff hates anyone upstaging it and bitch-slaps the shit out of Meowth, and later on Arbok and Weezing. And eventually... only Psyduck is left.

We then get Spielbunk's hilariously insane summary of his vision for "Pokemon in Love", which is a Disney-fied pastiche of Romeo and Juliet, except with Wigglytuff and Psyduck, and the turf war being between Wigglytuff's Normal-type 'family' and Psyduck's Water-type 'family'. All of this is told through a neat montage of artwork that I do really like, and the sheer absurdity of everything that's going on is neat. Casting Psyduck as the star in this movie pastiche shouldn't be this funny, and yet it is, and I was giggling non-stop as Spielbunk goes through his watercolour storyboards.

Also neat is the following sequence. Too often Team Rocket are reduced to being one-off gags that I really do appreciate the moments when they show that they are very much decent people to those they consider their friends. In this case, Arbok and Weezing are straight-up depressed (the animation people get a lot of mileage out of Arbok's face) and James and Jessie end up giving this huge speech about seizing the day and not letting obstacles get in their way. They quite literally give this huge speech just to restore the self-confidence of their Pokemon. Pretty wholesome!

Spielbunk recruits the kids to help out in special effects and also using Pikachu and Raichu as extras (which sort of ruins the whole 'Normal family vs Water family' thing going on, but eh) and getting our heroes' Pokemon to set up a thunderstorm for epic lighting. It's prety neat. The extra Pokemon fight each other and Wigglytuff and poor confused Psyduck is suposed to calm them down, but the Pokemon get a bit too much into the fight and Wigglytuff gets pelted in the face by Pikachu, and it joins in the slap fest as well. Team Rocket shows up... and gets dogpiled by the fighting Pokemon, and for some reason Spielbunk orders his two cameramen to join in, and Team Ash sort of pose and say things in front of the camera.

Meowth is the only one unaffected by the fighty-fight-cloud, and uses a giant crane-claw machine to grab every single Pokemon on the battlefield. There's a bit of a way-too-long sequence of Misty and Wigglytuff begging Psyduck to do something... and it's sort of undercut by the fact that Ash, Brock and Misty forget that they have other Pokemon on their belt. Psyduck runs around and panics for a bit, before Headache-ex-machinas his way and blows up Team Rocket's device with his psychic powers. Yeah, it's either Jigglypuff or Psyduck when the show-writers don't know how to end an episode's conflict, huh?

Anyway, the episode wraps up relatively tamely, with the Spielbunk talking about how they could totally have a future doing movies or whatever but none of our characters are going to take him up on that job. The narrator (and also Brock this time) notes about just how Ash has been spending a couple of weeks doing absolutely jack shit in training, which... yeah, is definitely on-brand for Ash. He is not a smart boy.

Featured Characters:

• Episode 68:
• Pokemon: Dodrio, Pikachu, Mr. Mime, Togepi, Gloom, Bulbasaur, Meowth, Arbok, Weezing
• Humans: Delia, Brock, Ash, Misty, Professor Oak, James, Jessie
• Episode 69:
• Pokemon: Togepi, Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Raichu, Meowth, Wigglytuff, Doduo, Weezing, Arbok, Hitmonlee, Tauros, Vulpix, Psyduck, Nidoran F, Diglett, Abra, Fearow, Pidgeotto, Staryu, Raticate, Chansey, Blastoise, Poliwrath, Cloyster, Gyarados, Magnemite, Krabby
• Humans: Misty, Ash, Brock, James, Jessie
• Multiple other Pokemon appear as stock images in a scene transition, and as part of the sstoryboards. 

Random Notes:

• So, uh... whose egg is that that Brock is cooking? A Flying-type Pokemon? Chaney?
• I feel like it's been quite a while since we've actually seen Team Rocket call out Arbok and Weezing. Their bigger role in episode 69 is certainly appreciated. I love Arbok and Weezing. 
• Episode 68, I think, marks the first time Brock gets all love-dumb around a girl and gets cock-blocked by Misty's ear-pull. 
• Episode 69 manages to get around the fact that the visuals show Psyduck's character dying to a rubber dart arrow by using the words 'mortally wounded'. 
• Dub Changes:
• In the original version, Delia asks Ash to bring back a cart full of herbs instead of fertilizer. In the dub as well, Ash randomly forgets that his mom asks him to bring fertilizer and the dialogue has him go off to bring flowers back to his mom. 
• The Japanese version of episode 68 was more explicit about the fact that Florinda's family has a long-standing tradition of having a fully-evolved Grass-type Pokemon. The Solar Beam attack that Gloom knows is also something that's "expected" out of a Pokemon from a respectable family, although in this case I love the ditzy "I kinda read this in a magazine" line from the dub.
• There is a lot of pun on Gloom's name (Kusaihana) and the term 'kusai' (stinky) in the original Japanese dub, which gets translated into either different jokes or non-punny dialogue. Likewise, the reference to 'catnip' and 'cats' are dub-only. 
• The Japanese version actually explains that Professor Oak was on his way to the greenhouse, and that Team Rocket was following him. 
• Episode 69 changes Brock's curry (explicitly shown in the scene, too!) as chili. Exactly two decades after this episode airs, a main-series Pokemon game would have a huge aspect of it revolving around cooking curry. Seriously, though, even if the translation team thinks that kids are so dumb that they wouldn't know what an onigiri was, curry's not like, something that's exclusively Japanese. 
• An error in the dub has Spielbunk claim that he won the "Golden Growlithe" award, when the statue actually shows an Arcanine. The original Japanese version has him say that he won the Binnes (the locale of episode 66 which was translated into 'Seafoam Island' here) Film Festival. 
• In the original Japanese version, Pikachu and Raichu used Thunder, which was changed to Thundershock in the dub. 
• The third part of the audition was a two-shot trial in the original Japanese version, but the dub changes it into yet another singing competition. The Japanese dialogue is also a lot more explicit that the other Pokemon are moving off the stage because they are afraid of being double slapped by Wigglytuff. 
• The dub voice actors had way too much fun dubbing episode 69 and inserting a lot of movie terminology puns and talking about cartoons and stuff. 
• The two Magnemite that flies around holding stage lights are pretty neat, a fun little touch that really didn't need to be there but it still a nice touch. 
• In the Japanese version, episode 69 marks the changing of the closing credits from "Meowth's Song" to "Type Wild".