Pokemon S01E70-71 Review: A Cat Looking At The Moon

Pokemon, Season 1, Episode 70: Go West, Young Meowth; Episode 71: To Master the Onixpected

Now, episode 70, I did remember watching, and I'm not sure why, because back when I was a kid, I was missing a huge chunk of episodes from episode 64 to 73 from the VCD collection I had. I guess I must've caught it in broadcasted form and it ended up sticking with me because, well, "Go West, Young Meowth" is such a memorable, unique episode? Or maybe it could be one of those 'special' episodes that got released in like episode collections or something. I dunno.

But this is a pretty dang awesome episode. "Go West, Young Meowth" just sidelines the entire good guy cast for a majority of the episode. The plot hook of this episode is that our heroes got called into Hollywood (the real Hollywood in the dub; and Hollywood, Kanto in the original) to watch the movie that Spcfhielbunk made in episode 69 in a pretty neat little continuity nod, and that's quite literally all they do in this episode, just watch a movie off-screen with Ash's mom cosplaying Marilyn Monroe for a gag.

Turns out, though, as Team Rocket sort of tails along Team Ash as they are wont to do, we discover that Meowth actually comes from Hollywood, and as we get a fun parody of... I dunno, the hardboiled detective/criminal genre or something, Meowth dons this trenchcoat as he begins to regale James, Jessie and the audience with his backstory. And while the English dub does a pretty great job, this was one episode I ended up tracking down and watching in Japanese due to the pretty great performance by Meowth's seiyuu -- with the standout moment being the awesome integration of Nyarth no Uta, one of the ending songs, into part of Meowth's little trip down memory lane.

I do really like this episode. Meowth's backstory isn't all that deep, it's quite stereotypical by anime's standards and there's a sense of hilarious overdramatization throughout it (particularly when Meowth walks past his old haunts and whatnot), but you can't help but feel sorry for the poor kitty. Coming from a place where he's a stray cat begging for scraps, strung up by random humans and eventually being taken in by a gang of Meowths led by a Persian, our Meowth ended up living as what's basically a stray cat in an analogue to a street gang.

And then, of course, Meowth found love, a lady Meowth named Meowzie owned by a snotty rich lady, who brushes off Meowth for being a mere street-cat who can't ever hope to compete to a human, who would provide for her. And Meowth ends up going through a bit of a quest to become more human, ending up staying on the attic of a mansion that was home to a class teaching posh language, and in-between trying to learn how to speak human language, Meowth ends up being sort of beaten up a lot more because his attempts to run on two legs got him caught more often than not. Eventually, though, Meowth manages to learn the human language, particularly with the aid of a picture book. His first word was 'rocket', and that was what eventually led him to join Team Rocket. And after all this? Meowth shows up to meet Meowzie, showing off his human-like talents, only to be dismissed as a freak among Meowths, far worse than just a regular Meowth. And Meowth ends up setting off to leave Hollywood and be the richest freak she'll ever see... eventually joining Team Rocket.

That's where the flashback ends, and in the present day Meowth ends up hanging out with his old gang buddies, and his old Persian head honcho tries to recruit Meowth back into the gang... but Meowth refuses, because his loyalty is with Team Rocket now. And then plot twist, Meowzie's a part of the gang now after being abandoned by her trainer. Believing that Meowzie was held by the gang against her will, Meowth tries to escape with Meowzie, but the rest of the Persian gang stands in his way. We get a pretty cool entry of Jessie and James with a riff on their motto declaring their loyalty to one of their own, which is awesome, and then we get Meowth and Persian face off on the roof of the building. Meowth wins the fight... but Meowzie rushes to Persian's side, because her loyalty is still to the group that took her in, and to her, Meowth is still a human-talking freak.

After a bit with them sort of showing up to gate-crash the movie theater and literally do nothing else, the episode ends with Meowth sitting on the roof looking up at the moon. And it's a pretty great episode, really -- Pokemon is a very episodic show, and it's starting to really show this habit in the... oh, post-Saffron episodes, I suppose, where generic standalone episodic plots end up becoming the norm. But every so often you stumble onto gems like "Go West, Young Meowth", which doesn't just serve as a backstory to a recurring one-note character we've seen for 69 episodes, but also really flesh it out and add some tragic backstory to it.

Is it simple and full of obvious cliches and pastiches? Sure, but it sure as hell was really memorable for five-year-old me watching this episode, and the fact that it's the antagonist that got a fleshed-out, sympathetic backstory is pretty unprecedented, really. And, sure, Team Rocket's not the most threatening antagonists out there, but still, they're the bad guys and this show meant for a far younger audience manages to make me sympathetic for poor Meowth. Even Jessie and James got to show off a neat moment of solidarity, too, and sure, using Arbok and Weezing to fight off a bunch of Meowths isn't the most badass moment out there, but it's still a great moment.

Anyway, episode 70 was great.
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That said, I remember absolutely nothing about episode 71, and I was absolutely caught off-guard when I opened up this episode yesterday to find out that... Bruno of the Elite Four was in this episode? I've never realized that any of the Elite Four appeared in the Kanto season, considering they swapped the game's final bosses in the Indigo plateau in favour of an Olympics tournament style arc, but I genuinely wasn't aware that Bruno showed up. Between the games and especially the Pokemon Adventures manga (where the Kanto Elite Four were straight-up a terrorist group and the big bad of the second huge arc), I have an inordinate amount of love for the Elite Four. Sure, there's not much to go on from the games, but at least this is going to adapt something from the video games and not just random filler between Giovanni and the Pokemon League, right?

Wrong, because "To Master the Onix-pected" is far, far more bland and filler-y than many of the episodes in Ash's two months of not-training. Hell, quite literally the only thing that made this episode even notable is the inclusion of Bruno, which they proceed to not really do anything with. Ash and Brock frame Bruno up as this super-awesome Pokemon trainer that they need to learn a mysterious 'secret' to being a great trainer from, but turns out Bruno's sort of a ditz and hardly the mysterious hermit-like guru they were expecting him to be. Which is all nice and dandy, but they spend so much time just having Bruno be sort of just there. And then it turns out that the lesson Bruno is imparting is... that there isn't any shortcuts to becoming a master and also love your Pokemon and stuff.

There's also a slightly different sub-plot from Team Ash dicking aroud with Bruno's not-training about a particularly gigantic Onix with a scarred-face. Go ahead, insert your own 'dynamax' joke in this episode. We'll make them next episode, when it's more appropriate. I don't mention animation all that much, but the giant Onix isn't animated all that well, though, particularly when it's moving where it's just this static snake that moves straight through the terrain, whereas most other times that Brock's Onix shows up it at least sort of moves like a snake, y'know? Other than a brief acknowledgement by Brock about the giant state of the Onix and a very throwaway Onix-vs-Onix sequence that lasted maybe three seconds, we don't really get much mileage out of it. Bruno shows up, deduces that the giant Onix is rampaging because it's in pain (it's got a Sandslash stuck in between its body pars) and then Bruno captures the Onix.

There's even a B-plot with a random dango meatball selling old lady and Team Rocket cosplaying as sages that don't even make much sense and is just shoehorned in to pad out the scenes before we meet Bruno.

It's... it's just underwhelming, is all. Maybe I wouldn't be so harsh on this episode if it didn't follow the silly-but-fun "Lights, Camera, Quacktion" or the also fun, character-driven "Go West, Young Meowth". Maybe I wouldn't be so harsh either if it didn't offer such a forgettable version of Bruno. But I dunno, this episode just feels like it just exists, a pretty mediocre episode that doesn't do anything wrong, but doesn't really leave much for me to remember.

Featured Characters:

• Episode 70:
• Pokemon: Mr. Mime, Pikachu, Togepi, Meowth, Persian, Arbok, Weezing
• Humans: Ash, Brock, Delia, Misty, Jessie, James
• Episode 71:
• Pokemon: Hitmonchan, Pikachu, Togepi, Meowth, Onix, Staryu, Squirtle, Sandslash 
• Humans: Bruno, Ash, Brock, Misty, Delia, Jessie, James

Random Notes:

• Dub Changes:

• In the original Japanese version, Meowth's song was, well, Nyarth no Uta (Meowth's Song), which is the second closing theme for the Japanese version of the show, making it a neat, thematic tie-in.
• In both the dub and the original Japanese, it really is "Hollywood". The difference is that while the dub specifies Hollywood, California, the original Japanese changes the first katakana for Hollywood, the equivalent of calling it Horiwood or something along those lines, making it a bit of a parody of real-life Hollywood during the '50's-'60's economic crisis.
• Another reference to a Binnes Film Festival is cut from the dub. 
• All of the movie posters for Scphielbunk's movie, "Pokemon: The Movie", is altered to be blank posters. The actual dub name for Spchielbunk's movie is "Pokemon in Love", so I'm not sure why they couldn't have done that instead. 
• Meowth's picture book, of course, originally had a bunch of katakana that is supposed to help him pronounce and speak, instead of just a single letter and a single picture. 
• One of the more notable changes is that Japanese Meowth's story focused more on finding a place in the world and just, y'know, living. English dub Meowth was looking for love since the very first scene of the flashback, while Japanese Meowth only did so after meeting Meowzie ("Madonnya" in the Japanese version). There's also a fair bit of changes in this episode that I won't go into too much detail into, because obviously a lot of the dialogue in "Go West, Young Meowth" had to be changed, thanks to the difference in learning katakana and English. 
• The original Japanese version had Ash and Brock try to learn Bruno's "ougi", a term that most translations tended to translate as something along the lines of "signature move" or "secret art" or "esoteric technique", whereas the dub uses the more generic term of 'secret'. 
• Bruno's 'fork' pun was originally a pun on ougi, which could also mean fan.
• It's really interesting that episode 70 implies that Meowths are quadrupedal by default, and Team Rocket's Meowth is an exception because it learned to walk on two legs to mimic humans. Obviously, this didn't last at all into the franchise, and bipedal Meowth ended up being the default pose for all Meowths in all Pokemon media. 
• The Pokemon: The Movie poster is... uh... Psyduck has an interesting pose in that poster, let's just say. 
• In a surprising edit, that massive wallpaper with English alphabet and Japanese katakana isn't censored. Sure, with Meowth cavorting all over the place it'd be hard to actually do the terrible 4Kids editing, but I'm genuinely surprised they didn't actually cut out this segment considering how they've been exorcising every single instance of katakana in the show. 
• Meowzie/Madonnya's owner's license plate is 052-NYA. "Nya", of course, is the onomatopoeia for a cat's cry in Japanese, with Meowth's Japanese name being Nyarth. 052 is Meowth's Pokedex number. 
• The French instructor that Meowth listened to was actually speaking French in both dub and original versions. 
• While fighting Onix in episode 71, Ash yells that Electric-types don't work on Rock-type Pokemon... when it's the Ground part of Onix's typing that's immune to Electric types. Not that the Kanto season ever really was consistent about this, anyway.
• Dub!Onix getting to keep its voice has never been more obvious than this episode, with the massive, loud repeated IWAAAAAAHHHK coming on-screen every five seconds or so in the second half of episode 71.