Pokemon S01E93-96: Enter Snorlax

Pokemon, Episodes 93-96

Episode 93: Navel Maneuvers
We're moving things a bit more quickly this time around, because... well, the Orange Island episodes are mostly just 'filler', yeah? Still, 'Navel Maneuvers' is a gym battle, making it technically a bit more important than the rest of the Orange Island episodes, I suppose. Team Ash bugger off to Navel Island, and there they meet a kid called Danny, who tells them about how the Navel Gym tests the trainer's own strength by forcing them to basically go through a nature trail. Which... okay, that sure is a nice twist, but we don't really get much out of it beyond a couple of requisite scenes of Ash sort-of bumbling through the course and nearly falling off of a cliff. I dunno, I kind of expect there to be like a lesson or something (like Danny saying that the real test is sportsmanship or Ash's care for his Pikachu), but nothing of the sort really happens. It's also certainly not OSHA-compliant, but I suppose having Danny (who's clearly experienced and actually the gym leader) pretending to be a competitor is the safety precaution needed in case some dude fell off the mountain or something.

The episode is also very much remembered by having the gym leader, Danny, actually flirt with Misty and making Ash jealous, but while watching this, while there certainly are a couple of lines here and there where Misty is clearly happy cheering Danny on, the 'jealousy' subplot is honestly barely there that I'm surprised that people made such a big deal out of this. Although maybe I shouldn't be, knowing fandoms.

The actual gym fight ends up being more of a mini-game sports competition, which is neat, I suppose, being a multi-part sequence of making a sled out of an ice chunk and then racing with it. It's neat stuff, but ultimately nothing particularly noteworthy. It's kinda neat to see the Pokemon doing something else other than battling, although it's not quite interesting enough to grab my attention. Charizard loafing around and accidentally making the perfect sled is neat. There's the obligatory Team Rocket battle which is, as usual in gym-centric episodes, feels like an afterthought and a distraction.

Ultimately, a decent if not particularly memorable episode. It was a neat watch, but I really don't feel like this is going to be one I'll be remembering any time soon.
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Episode 94: Snack Attack
Oh, hey, it's a capture episode! I know Ash catches his famous Snorlax in the Orange Islands season, and I think I vaguely remember watching this episode, and it's... it's certainly a better showcase of Snorlax compared to Snorlax's previous spotlight episode? When Team Ash arrive in the Seven Grapefruit Islands, they arrive at the sight of the locals panicking over fruit thieves... which turn out to be Snorlax! There's a bit of a fun bit of everyone having no idea what to do with Snorlax. Attacks don't faze Snorlax at all (poor Bulbasaur gets turned into a pancake), their attempt to rapidly harvest the fruits is thwarted by Snorlax's ability to swim between islands, and we get a bunch of fun gags as Team Rocket even gets in on the zaniness, pretending to be Snorlax's mom and using hypnosis at one point. Snorlax also straight-up tries to eat poor Goldeen, in one of the few times we actually see Pokemon try to eat other Pokemon.

While it's nothing particularly spectacular, I also like that there are some stakes in this with the grapefruit trees being chowed down by Snorlax serving as a bit of a timer. Eventually Team Ash ends up realizing that Jigglypuff has been following them, create a makeshift stage, and get a happy Jigglypuff to sing along, and the power of plot allows Ash and Pikachu to resist falling asleep long enough for Pikachu to unleash a thunder attack and Ash to capture Snorlax in a Pokeball. In a lot of episodes Jigglypuff's singing ends up being a bit of an eye-rolling deus ex machina, but this time it actually fits with the storyline, and the fact that our heroes got the idea to use other means to get Snorlax to fall asleep is also neat.

Ultimately, "Snack Attack" is very simple, and the only real notable thing about it is the Snorlax capture, but it's still a pretty solid episode that has a nice concept, follows through with it, and is a good spotlight for the Pokemon featured in it.
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Episode 95: A Shipful of Shivers
Kind of a solid episode, if, again, also a filler-y one. Team Ash arrive in Moro Island, and there's this whole excitement about a three-hundred-year-old official Orange League Winner's trophy that got discovered and is in a museum. We get a fun bit of Team Rocket breaking into the museum and stealing it, which of course involves some fun tomfoolery (the dub gets a lot of fun lines in this episode and the previous one for Team Rocket, there's a fun line about James's trust fund in this one). Of course, our heroes chase them, and both teams get lost in a foggy sea and find themselves on an abandoned ghost ship. Togepi gets lost while they are jostled around, but of course the little baby is un-harmed and finds a bunch of sheet ghosts floating around.

And that's the whole bit of the episode -- there's a pair of Gastly and Haunter haunting this ship, having been trapped in pokeballs there for the last 300 years. They're guarding the trophy and have stolen it back from Team Rocket, and we get some fun 'scare the main cast' moments as Gastly and Haunter dick around with them. Via using Meowth as a focus for their telepathy, Gastly and Haunter give their backstory, how their deceased trainer was the owner of the trophy and they're guarding it since it's the last command from their trainer, and it's... it's certainly an interesting story, and I could've very easily seen a version of this that has a moral about how you should move on from grief and how the ghosts could share the glory of their dead trainer to the world... but at the same time, I also find the actual moral that the episode has, which is to not be selfish and steal something that clearly has a much more personal value to other people and claim it for your own.

Ultimately, after Team Rocket gets sent blasting off again by the ghosts, Team Ash bugger off and leave the ghost ship to sink to the ocean floor. I didn't really mind this one, but it could've been a bit more interesting is all.
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Episode 96: Meowth Rules
Team Rocket episodes are always fun because of how different they feel, and this one is... an interesting one? The setup of this episode is quickly given to us -- while repairing the Magikarp submarine (Karpmarine? Subkarp?) Team Rocket asks Meowth why he can't use Pay Day, and Meowth notes that he spent so much time learning to talk that he is now unable to use Pay Day... okay, sure, I guess in the games all your Pokemon, even the god-like ones, can only ever do four things, and they can forget how to 'growl' or 'lick'. It's a stupid reason, but I'll buy it.

A quick confrontation with Team Ash causes Team Rocket to be sent blasting off again, but this time Meowth gets separated from Jessie and James and arrive in Golden Island, where the dumb islanders are worshiping a giant Meowth statue called the "Great Meowth of Bounty", and, just in luck, our unique, talking Meowth quite literally drops out of the heavens just as they are praying to the Great Meowth of Bounty.

Of course, Meowth being Meowth, he immediately takes advantage of everything that comes with being a god, which means an endless supply of fruits, and a bunch of skimpy belly dancers with cat make-up. Okay. There's a bit of Meowth and his new cult chasing off Ash, but then when Team Rocket comes and meets Meowth, Meowth ends up betraying them, telling the villagers that, no, he doesn't know who these people are, toss them to the sea. Of course, the whole worship thing has gotten into Meowth's head, and while it's not like, anything particularly groundbreaking, I do like just how conflicted Meowth's face is animated to be when he made the decision to dunk his friends away. (Also, of course the giant Meowth statue is a robot. Why wouldn't it be?)

Jessie and James work their way back into the island, and watches from the bushes as Meowth enjoys his luxuries, but then the villagers decide that 'it's time', and the Great Meowth of Bounty is supposed to give them money with Pay Day. It's a nice little nod to the setup done earlier in the episode, and when Meowth claims that he can't do it, the villagers toss Meowth to a stadium so that he can gain experience and learn the move, which is kind of hilarious if poor Meowth didn't get so beaten up by the Onix and the Nidoking. Despite the prior betrayal from Meowth, Jessie and James decide to help out and toss whatever meager coins they have -- including James's valuable bottle caps (which is another thing the episode brings up in its first scene), which convinces the villagers that this truly is the Great Meowth of Bounty. I do like how the episode makes it clear that it's not just merely a way to save Meowth's life, but in order to help Meowth maintain his cover and be happy. And they didn't even tell Meowth! It's not until later that Meowth sees the bottle cap and realizes that it's his buddies that has been helping him, and Meowth escape from the village and reunite with Jessie and James, leading to a reunion.

I do like this episode a lot. It's not one I remembered ever watching, and I don't think anyone ever brings this one up. The concept is admittedly kind of silly, and bringing in video game rules (with all this wacky 'experience points' and 'levels') is a bit jarring, but the final parts of the episode, while cheesy, is a lot of fun Team Rocket interactions. And this is why Team Rocket is really so fun -- they don't get the spotlight all the time, but when they do, the fact that they're ultimately decent people and loyal friends to each other, and the fact that Jessie and James are satisfied with helping Meowth out even without the cat knowing is really a neat scene. Also, of course Jessie and James are still dicks enough to sic Arbok and Weezing at Meowth on the end just in the off-chance that the villagers are on to something with the experience points thing. A good episode.
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Featured Characters:

• Episode 93:
• Pokemon: Lapras, Pikachu, Togepi, Meowth, Nidoqueen, Lapras, Bulbasaur, Charizard, Machoke, Scyther, Geodude, Electrode, Squirtle, Victreebel
• Humans: Ash, Tracey, Misty, Danny, Jessie, James
• Episode 94:
• Pokemon: Lapras, Pikachu, Togepi, Jigglypuff, Butterfree, Snorlax, Bulbasaur, Staryu, Meowth, Squirtle, Goldeen, Arbok, Lickitung, Victreebel, Psyduck
  
• Humans: Ash, Tracey, Misty, Jessie, James
  
• Episode 95: 
• Pokemon: Lapras, Togepi, Pikachu, Meowth, Gastly, Haunter, Marill, Staryu, Bulbasaur, Victreebel, Arbok, Beedrill
• Humans: Misty, Ash, Tracey, Professor Oak, Jessie, James
• Episode 96:
• Pokemon: Meowth, Lapras, Pikachu, Togepi, Squirtle, Nidoking, Onix
• Humans: James, Jessie, Ash, Tracey, Misty

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Random Notes:

• With Nidoqueen making her debut in episode 93, all of the non-legendary Kanto Pokemon have finally appeared in at least one episode of the anime. 
• Also... really? Nidoqueen, who isn't even an ice-type, manages to freeze the water spout faster than the ice-type Lapras?
• Victreebel gets a lot of mileage in these episodes, I feel, for gags. In one of the episodes it actually goes for Meowth instead of James, which is a bit of a rarity. In regards to Team Rocket's Pokemon, too, Lickitung makes a rare appearance and has his poor tongue be used by Snorlax to wipe his mouth. 
• The whole bit of everyone being surprised that the plants are growing after Snorlax razed the fruit trees... I think it's meant to be a PG version of saying that after a bunch of animals eat through a forest, their droppings make for good fertilizers? That's really the only explanation I can have, because I don't think Snorlax has any sort of plant-growing properties. 
• With Snorlax and Lapras, Ash finally has the full six-Pokemon-team for once after releasing Pidgeotto. 
• Notably, the Pokedex is shown to have data on Haunter when Ash scans them with his Pokedex, when it doesn't have any data on them in "Tower of Terror". Ash also re-scans the two Pokemon despite meeting them (and traveling with a Haunter, too) in previous episodes, but this is going to be commonplace in the series moving forward. Got to make sure the kids know what toy to buy!
• The timeline of an Orange League 300 years prior to the start of the series will be a bit questionable considering that everyone's using modern pokeballs in Gastly and Haunter's flashback, and we would see scenes later on showing people using primitive versions of Pokeballs... but I'm not about to get into a discussion about the Pokemon anime's non-existent timeline. 
• Dub Changes:
• The dialogue in episode 93 is altered a bit to make Ash sound a bit more jealous that Misty is only mentioning Danny. On the other hand, Danny's Japanese counterpart also gives Misty a cutesy nickname that makes it a bit more obvious that he's flirting. 
• They're not even bothering with replacing some of the Japanese writings, yeah? The sign in Navel Island is just blurred instead of being left blank or replaced with English. 
• Navel Island is really interesting, huh? A couple years down the line, Navel Rock actually shows up as an event-exclusive location in the Generation III games, supposedly located in the Sevii Islands, a group of islands very loosely based on the Orange Island. There's absolutely nothing in common between the two, but I thought I would point it out.  

One Piece Filler Arcs, Part 1 -- Dragons, Goats and Rainbow Mists

So yeah, I decided to watch One Piece's filler arcs. I'm.. I'm not sure why, exactly, but I've been watching/reading a lot of anime recently. I got caught up to My Hero Academia after everyone and their mother told me that the final saga is beginning. I've been rereading Attack on Titan and basically fell in love with the story all over again. Pretty great stuff, huh? Also, after doing that, I started rereading the physical copies of One Piece I just got on one of those huge collector's box things. I'm currently around halfway through the East Blue Saga. Pretty neat stuff, rewatching these.

But then at some point as I begun to start off my watch-through of the Wano-kuni arc for One Piece's anime, I talked a bit with a friend of mine who exclusively only watches the anime and never touched the manga. We talked about the newest movie, Stampede, and, got into a bit of a discussion about the general story... and we talked about some events that I have no idea about. So yeah... the wonderful land of anime filler. 

What's a filler, you ask? It's when an anime that's based on a story in a serialized manga catches up to the manga. A lot of old anime simply can't just do reruns and has to keep producing new episodes every week, but how do you make new episodes when the manga itself is still at a certain point in the story? The solution -- self-contained story arcs slotted in a convenient place between major arcs in the story. These tend to be non-canon to the manga and manga-based anime episodes, but it's still pretty interesting to watch them regardless. Bleach and the first Naruto were, as I gather, pretty notorious about this. I know Yu-Gi-Oh had a bunch of them, too. 

Now more modern anime tend to work more on 'seasons' now after the success of... Attack on Titan, I want to say? And even newer manga-based anime like My Hero Academia tended to have their filler be like, a single episode or two. But One Piece is basically the last one of the old-school anime that trudges on every single week. It doesn't quite has as much filler as Bleach or Naruto, as I gather, but there's still quite a few. And, hey, last year I watched through all of the movies, so yeah, at this point, why not? I'm going to try to watch all the filler arcs, at least as One Piece Wiki defines them!

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Warship Island Arc, a.k.a. Apis Arc [Episodes 54-61]

Oh man, old-school pre-timeskip One Piece art! I kind of missed you, actually. Google tells me that some episodes between 1 to 53 have had little bits of additional content tossed in here and there like a bunch of random side-stories in Loguetown or whatever, which I think would be easy thanks to how less plot-heavy the East Blue Saga are. And the Warship Island arc here is broadcasted between the Loguetown arc and the Laboon arc that would kick off everything leading to Alabasta. 

This particular filler arc ran 8 episodes, though a bit of the final parts of chapter 61 is adapting a scene or two from the manga of the Straw Hats climbing up the Reverse Mountain. And... and this is certainly a filler arc that dragged on for quite a bit and is clearly paced pretty slowly, and I'd say deliberately so. I mean, I know the One Piece anime runs on pretty slow pacing most of the time, but hey, I guess being filler does mean that they're buying time. 

This particular filler arc really feels like it's tailor-made to be pretty standalone, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was originally meant to be like a rejected movie or OVA script. The story is pretty simple -- our heroes meet a little girl called Apis, who escapes from a marine ship. After some typical shenanigans as our crew meet the girl and interact with her, they bring her back to her hometown of Gunkan Island (literally Warship Island). They pretty quickly discover the little secret that Apis is actually friends Ryu-jii (literally grandpa dragon) with a massive old Sennenryu, a Thousand-Year Dragon. The Straw Hats being Straw Hats, they quickly decide to help Apis out in getting Ryu-jii to his homeland of which would allow him to heal. 

Throughout all this, Apis is being pursued by two villains -- the obese fleet commander Nelson Royale, and his mercenary minion Eric "the Whirlwind". They want to get some dragon bones which will lead to the elixir of immortality. The Straw Hats fight with Eric and his Kama Kama no Mi fruit, which allows him to make wind sickles. As the Straw Hats travel to Lost Island, they find ruins and clues that Ryu-jii's homeland is actually Gunkan Island itself. Oops! We get a brief fight between Zoro and Eric, before returning back to Gunkan Island only to be met with the massive chain-wall fleet of Nelson Royale. While all of this is going on, there's a sub-plot where Eric is basically using the Marines in order to get the Sennenryu for himself. 

The climax goes about how you expect it to go. Our heroes fight the marines and Eric, though rather surprisingly, Ryu-jii gets shot down by the marine fleet's cannonballs and straight-up dies, although not before summoning literally the rest of its species. Turns out that Gunkan Island is Ryu-jii's homeland, and his death there means that he's reincarnated as a little baby dragon. The actual moment of Apis mourning Ryu-jii is actually pretty well-done, and the story closes off with our heroes bidding farewell to Apis and sailing off to the Reverse Mountain. 

...except, no, wait, Eric sneaks on board and threatens to blow up the Going Merry as it ascends Reverse Mountain! ...and Nami just quite literally kicks him off of the board and he falls down into the waves of the Reverse Mountain. Being a Devil Fruit user, the crew jokes about how he's most likely just straight-up dead and... yeah, Nami just cold-bloodedly murdered a guy. I'm not even mad, that's actually unexpected. Earlier in the arc Eric also murders Nelson Royale with his wind-sickles, so this otherwise light-hearted arc actually has a pretty substantial body count, it seems. 

And... and honestly? Overall, the filler arc was pretty slow, but it had a pretty solid plot and the four primary characters -- Apis, Ryu-jii, Eric and Nelson -- pretty much filled their roles with how you expect them to. Not too much to say here; I did feel like it dragged on quite a bit, though as always the antics of the Straw Hats and the voice acting does make the silliness of, say, their dragon-raft-mountain-boarding pretty neat to watch. The drama with Ryu-jii's death and the bickering between Nelson and Eric adds just a bit of spice to what would otherwise be pretty boring. 

There are some interesting bits going on, though. Apis is herself a devil fruit user, who ate the Hiso Hiso no Mi (Whisper Whisper Fruit), allowing her to speak to animals. She does help out the crew by talking to birds like once or twice in the arc, but I really kind of wished that she had just a bit more of a presence beyond just being the arc's obligatory kiddie guest star. As far as those go, she's not terrible, but she's not especially memorable either. 

And... yeah fucking dragons also show up, which is the biggest nod to the fact that this arc is one of the most non-canon among the filler arcs. I mean, sure, you could argue that the Sennenryu is a different breed of creature, but the fact that the cast explicitly talk about how dragons are supposed to be fictional and are surprised to see dragons in Punk Hazard and Wano... yep. Again, don't really think too much about it, clearly the anime staff just wants to make something that can be handwaved as 'oh, the Straw Hats had a minor adventure in-between major parts of the story'.

Ultimately, I think that the Apis/Warship Island Arc is pretty slow, but it's slow in a good way. I did like this story arc a fair bit, even if obviously it's throwaway filler, at least it's a very self-contained one with some genuinely well-done voice acting particularly near the end. 

Random Notes:

• In addition to the Reverse Mountain scene, the second episode of this arc also loosely adapts the scene where the Straw Hats sail into the Calm Belt and causes a horde of Sea Kings to appear. Only instead of Usopp falling off, it's Apis that falls off instead. 
• Another plot hole in addition to the dragon thing is Zoro making it a point to say that "I can cut through steel" and does so to slice through the steel chain blockade. This arc happens before Alabasta and Zoro's fight with Mr. 1.
• Another far more minor plot hole that falls into the 'the manga hasn't come to that point yet' is that Nelson Royale's rank among the Marines is 'Teitoku', a rank that isn't part of the official list of ranks in the Marines. It translates to something along the lines of Fleet Commander or Admiral, though the latter obviously now means something else in One Piece. This one is more easily handwaved by being an additional rank like how Garp is also an instructor in addition to being a vice admiral. (Plus, y'know, Nelson straight-up got killed in this arc, so...)
• Eric's Kama Kama no Mi is based on the mythological Kamaitachi, the sickle-weasel yokai that can create wind blades in myths. It's basically just Rankyaku, isn't it?
• Apis's devil fruit is also kind of undersold by Luffy being able to hear Ryu-jii's voice as well, though whether this was intentional (how early on was the Voice of All Things foreshadowed? I genuinely don't remmeber) or just a handwave from the anime staff? I'm legitimately not sure. 

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Post-Alabasta Arc [Episodes 131-135]

This one is... a lot more 'filler' than the rest, but I actually really like this sequence of episodes. It's something that modern One Piece, particularly post-timeskip, very rarely has any time to do. Maybe you get a couple of panels in-between arcs in the manga, but it is something that I certainly appreciate, showing little adventures and little interactions between the Straw Hats. Taking place after Alabasta, the five episodes in this 'arc', if you can call it that, is more of a series of standalone episodes, each featuring a member of the Straw Hats. For a moment I thought it was just going to be a clip show, and, yeah, there sure are flashbacks, but for the most part it's all brand-new.

None of these are particularly groundbreaking or super-exciting. Sure, 131 gives us Chopper creating his first medicine essentially as a dare by Dr. Kureha as she's on death's door. And I've heard people refer to 135 a lot, which is the Johnny-and-Yosaku episode. Remember Johnny and Yosaku? I liked them. I also do like the acknowledgement that Zoro has to actually train with his ridiculous three-sword style, and apparently in his youth one of his big problems is being so reckless with his katanas that he keeps breaking them, all but Wado Ichimonji. 

The rest of the episodes... it's all right, mostly a reaffirmation of each character's goals as they sometimes reminisce about the past. The Sanji and Usopp ones are probably the ones that feel the most 'complete', in a sense, in that they actually have a mini character-of-the-week story and isn't just the Straw Hats goofing around. And the Zoro one is essentially almost entirely a flashback. Otherwise... eh, they're all pretty all right., though nothing to write home about. Also somewhat more interestingly these episodes also feature Robin on their boat while she's still in her enigmatic-smiling-is-she-on-our-side phase, and the little bits where she hangs out with Chopper, or gets Luffy briefly interested in books, or giving Zoro a jacket... pretty nice stuff. 

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Goat Island Arc [Episodes 136-138]

This is actually an actual arc! An extremely slow-paced one, granted, but it actually has a bit of a story that's somewhat similar to Gaimon, a fact actually lampshaded by one of the episodes. Our crew lands on an island and after some hijinks involving goats, ends up helping out an old man called Zenny on the island. It was initially just the Straw Hats being nice guys, but then Chopper discovers that he's going to die in three days (and most of 136 and 137 are jokes to that effect) but then... he doesn't. Turns out he's a retired Money-Lender for pirates, and has a dream™ of becoming a pirate that he abandoned. A talk with Luffy over dinner changes that, however, and he's back to wanting to be pirating. Also, somewhere throughout these episodes he basically got the pirates to do chores for him, something that's easily the biggest 'we need to make scenes to get to the 20-minute episode mark'. 

A corrupt marine officer called Minchey tries to set up a trap to get glory over the Straw Hats' capture and steal Zenny's treasure behind the backs of the rest of the Marines, but despite surrounding the island in a trap and almost tricking the Straw Hats, the arrival of Zenny riding his ship down from the mountain ends up saving the Straw Hats in a way. The climax basically takes Luffy and Zoro out due to circumstance, allowing Zenny to have a bit of a face-off against Minchey. There's a vague 'my comrades are my real treasure' moral tossed in somewhere, and Luffy and company takes out the corrupt Minchey and earns the gratitude from the moral Marine captain Moore. 

Ultimately... eh. It's not quite as long as the Apis arc, only lasting three episodes, but I didn't really care for Zenny as a character, and throughout the episodes it's also pretty clear that Zenny doesn't really have any treasure. The three episodes flip-flopping on the actual severity of Zenny's medical condition also doesn't really help matters either. I dunno. Not a particularly big fan of this one -- the base concept of the story is actually all right, and the idea of Minchey as a Marine profiteer is a neat antagonist idea... but ultimately they really didn't do enough for me to actually care. 

Random Notes:

• Sanji makes a Mille-Feuille cake for Robin in episode 136. We're still a timeskip away from having Robin actually use Mil Fleur, but I bet someone in the anime department thought it'd be cute to have Robin eat a cake that has a similar name to her Devil Fruit attacks. 
• Throughout this arc and the previous batch of random vignette episodes, Robin is seen reading a book called 'Rainbow Mist', which leads into the next filler arc. I'm actually not sure if it's a book that exists in the manga,  or if the anime staff were pretty clever in incorporating it. 

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Ruluka Island/Rainbow Mist Arc [Episodes 139-143]

The last arc in these series of inconsequential adventures in-between Alabasta and Jaya (and one would say that Jaya is the manga's actual 'filler', except it actually serves several important plot points that lead into Skypiea) is the Ruluka Island Arc, also known as the Rainbow Mist Arc. Running for five episodes, it's... it sure is an arc. It's slightly more interesting than the Goat Island story, but it suffers from having too many characters -- none of which are really all that interesting -- and a concept that's just sort of vaguely explained. 

So after escaping some Marines and landing on Ruluka Island, an island where taxation is enforced by the pirate-turned-mayor Wetton. The Straw Hats quickly befriend local eccentric scientist Henzo, and half the crew (Luffy, Robin, Usopp, Zoro) gets roped into investigating a local mirage-esque phenomenon called the Rainbow Mist. Meanwhile, Sanji, Nami and Chopper sort of... stand around and fight Wetton's grandson and son, one of whom rides around a bicycle-powered mecha suit -- which is actually kinda cute. 

Throughout the middle portions of the episodes, Luffy and the rest of the crew caught in the Rainbow Mist basically figure out that it's a ship graveyard and also a time-space anomaly (no, really). Mostly because Robin read a novel detailing this exact incident. They can't get out because jumping or sailing out just brings them back into the same spot. Then they meet a bunch of four children... and surprise surprise, turns out that due to time-space shenanigans, these four kids were buddies and nakama with Henzo when they were children. When Wetton's pirates attacked Ruluka Island in the past, they were trapped within the Rainbow Mist after sailing in, leaving Henzo behind in the island to age 50 years while they aged like a couple of weeks. It's an interesting concept, but beyond some vague 'do not disrespect your nakama!' speeches from Usopp, it really goes nowhere. 

Luffy and the kids' captain, Rapanui, gets separated from the others for around an episode for no real reason other than to get Luffy out of the way before the final fight. With the utterly simple idea of tying a string to a boat, Nami manages to enter the Rainbow Mist, and later on Wetton blows up a lighthouse to convert it into a bridge or something. We get a typical showdown that's honestly comprised of Luffy going "this isn't what pirates are supposed to be", while Zoro's fight gets interrupted hilariously when Robin just plucks out the power cables to the mecha suit. 

But then apparently the lighthouse exploding caused the space-time distortion to... change? And with the kids staying behind in the Rainbow Mist, they create a big enough wind to push the Merry out and into reality. Throughout the episodes we've got a Marine Major that's powerful enough to flick coins to blow up entire warships, and has been secretly helping the Straw Hats out in the background of the city a couple of times. He shows up to arrest Wetton and his crew... and then, surprise surprise, turns out that the four kids were blown out of Rainbow Mist 50 years in the past, and Rapanui and Isoka at least became Marine officers. And also the author of Robin's novel. And also also because the coincidences needed to pile up even more, the Rainbow Mist distortion disgorged the Going Merry and all the humans trapped inside, but it also sucks in Wetton's house, and all the treasure on the beach, the mansion and the boat.

And... and I don't know. On paper it's not a terrible idea -- heck, the trope of a mysterious fog that doesn't let ships out really even becomes canon with the Thriller Bark arc. But the Rainbow Mist itself is less of an interesting locale for our heroes to explore and more of a stopgap that keeps part of the cast in one place. Wetton is an extremely underwhelming antagonist; while Henzo and the Pumpkin Pirates were pretty bland and their story never expanded beyond what you'd expect from them (i.e. a nakama speech). The fact that we get a random 'we get blown back to the past' bit really feels like it comes out of nowhere, and I actually did feel that it undercuts the comrade knowledge since Rapanui and the others end up basically leaving Henzo to wallow in grief in Ruluka for 50 years. And the pacing of the episodes, particularly the last two, really felt kind of messy. 

Random Notes:

• The final shot of episode 143 is the shot of the massive ship falling out of the sky, starting off the Jaya arc. Also, we've got several extra scenes in the final fight where the Going Merry gets a couple of additional damage done to the mast and the figurehead. 
• Igaram gets a cameo in episode 143 putting a Rainbow Mist book back on a shelf. 
• I know filler arcs and movies tended to take inspiration from the concurrently-running arcs in the manga, so did the electric mecha get inspired by Enel? 
• Zoro insisting that he will cut electricity gets absolutely made fun of by Usopp and Robin. That was cute.

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Anyway, I think that's a decent place to stop off for right now. Now I do understand that none of the filler arcs are going to be amazing or blow me away, but it's still neat to watch them -- if nothing else, filler arcs like these do help to sort of build up little adventures for the primary cast, something that is a very valid complaint about how the actual manga itself runs -- particularly post-timeskip. Granted, out of the four (three and a half, really) filler arcs here the only one with a halfway decent story is probably just the Apis Arc, but... hey, we're doing this. Apparently the next one is the best filler arc ever. We'll see, boys. We'll see. 

Pokemon S01E90-92: Fake Evolution

Pokemon, Episodes 90-92

Episode 90: Stage Fight
As we continue on the Orange Islands episodes, we're going to have more and more episodes that I just don't have anything to talk about, and "Stage Fight" is one of them. Our main characters stumble upon a certain Cool Thing of the Week, in this case being a Pokemon Showboat where a bunch of seemingly-talking Pokemon throw a play that's a riff on Rocky but with musical elements or something. Except it turns out that the Pokemon aren't actually talking, their trainers are dubbing them in the background. And then the main characters befriends one of the troupe and learns of her problems -- Kei's Raichu is really really shy after a traumatic experience where it accidentally shocked its trainer out of excitement and Kei tosses it into the ground. It's neat to see Ash actually giving a neat little speech or two about being a good trainer, even if his advice does basically amount to 'yolo'. It kind of works, though, in the context of this episode with a trainer basically tossing aside her well-being to protect Raichu during the inevitable Team Rocket attack.

The Team Rocket attack happens basically how you would expect it to happen, although those Magikarp sub missiles are hilarious. Team Rocket tries to basically bully the Pokemon on the boat into working for them, thinking that they're able of speech like Meowth... and apparently the human voice actors are also ventriloquists or something, and they fool Team Rocket enough to counterattack and Fire Punch James in the face. I'm not sure how this really works, wouldn't the Pokemon just attack Team Rocket on their own even without the ventriloquist dub voice? Whatever the case, after a heroic rescue moment (tm), Raichu regains its confidence and helps to take down the bad guys, Team Rocket gets sent flying again, and thanks to one of the actors losing his voice, Ash and his Pokemon get to stand in among the stage performance.

Basically not much really happened, huh? The story is decent enough and is well executed for a standalone story, but ultimately it's very much something we have seen (and will see) several times over in the series. We don't even have the excuse of letting a new Pokemon take the center stage, because by my count this is the third Raichu that ends up being the guest star of the episode.
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Episode 91: Bye Bye Psyduck
Okay, this episode is... weird? Again, this is the first time that I watched all of these Orange Island episodes, and I am somewhat surprised at the title. Okay, so the episode promises to shake up the status quo by seemingly being an exit for one of the main Pokemon cast in Misty's Psyduck. Obviously, that didn't happen, since Psyduck will be with us all the way to Johto and beyond.

And the huge twist is that Psyduck evolves into Golduck during a battle between Misty and a fellow Water-specialist trainer called Marina, and Golduck turns out to be super-duper badass... but it turns out that at the end of the episode, the Golduck is just some random Golduck who likes to show off to women, and good ol' Psyduck is still a good ol' goof, status quo, nothing changes. And I suppose it's a neat enough subversion, but at this point the show's kind of pretty stale and static that I genuinely honestly wished that maybe Misty gets Golduck and gets a pretty powerful fighter on her team, y'know? It's like the show is self-aware, going all "it's my first battle in a while", because... well, when was the last time Misty actually did anything in this show?

The action scenes in this episode is pretty neat, featuring a rare bit of showcase of Misty's party (including Goldeen!) against Marina's Tentacruel, strong Psyduck and Starmie. I just kind of wish they gave Marina other Water-type Pokemon that's not part of Misty's retinue, y'know? The action scenes with Golduck's psychic powers are pretty cool. Oh, and we get a typical Team Rocket action scene too with Golduck absolutely fucking up poor Arbok and blowing up the submarine with a Hyper Beam. Ash also acts like a particularly irritating brat in this one, being all 'left out' just because Misty and Marina are bonding over their love of Water-types. 

Anyway, despite the rather m'eh plot twist, this one is a pretty fun episode.
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Episode 92: The Joy of Pokemon
Another one that's just... all right, and I feel like that's going to be a running theme going on with a lot of these Orange Islands episodes. "The Joy of Pokemon" is a solid 20-minute episode, it quickly introduces a concept to us, has a relatively decent story, Team Rocket arrives to muck things up and has a relatively all right conclusion. Everything happened as you'll expect it to, and this episode's guest star of the week is the tanned and "buff" Nurse Joy that goes around on a kayak to all the different smaller islands in the Orange Archipelago. It's interesting to give a Joy some extra screentime and some backstory to distinguish her from the other Nurse Joys, even if she's still ultimately a character of the week.

The main story is basically just how super-competent this tanned Joy is, and how much she loves Pokemon, including the gigantic 3-meter Magikarp that she helped cure as a kid and is now her best buddy. Later on, the big Magikarp ends up trying its best to help rescue Joy and Team Ash from Team Rocket's huge Magikarp submarine, before evolving to Gyarados and beating up Team Rocket. Nothing too spectacular, but it's a neat enough 'plot of the week', I suppose. There's a weird bit in the middle where Tracey is so convinced that Nurse Joy is going to drown because she's reckless enough to go out in the storm, and I do appreciate the fact that, hey, just because Tracey's trying to white knight it up doesn't mean that the kids are suddenly more competent than the clearly super-competent Nurse Joy that's been doing this all her life.

Anyway, none of these episodes are particularly special or spectacular, but they're all relatively solid entries, I suppose.

Featured Characters:

• Episode 90:
• Pokemon: Mr. Mime, Chansey, Pikachu, Togepi, Hitmonchan, Clefable, Machoke, Abra, Jynx, Raichu, Meowth, Victreebel, Weezing, Marill, Squirtle, Psyduck Staryu
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Tracey, Jessie, James, Professor Oak
• Episode 91:
• Pokemon: Staryu, Togepi, Pikachu, Lapras, Psyduck, Tentacruel, Goldeen, Marill, Squirtle, Poliwhirl, Kingler, Poliwrath, Horsea, Wartortle, Seel, Seaking, Dratini, Dragonair, Dragonite, Tentacool, Meowth, Golduck, Starmie, Arbok
  
• Humans: Misty, Tracey, Ash, Jessie, James
  
• Episode 92:
• Pokemon: Lapras, Pikachu, Togepi, Chansey, Magikarp, Kingler, Sandshrew, Vileplume, Onix, Mankey, Bulbasaur, Gyarados, Jigglypuff, Shellder, Dewgong, Squirtle, Marill, Staryu, Psyduck, Meowth, Seel
  
• Humans: Ash, Tracey, Misty, Nurse Joy, James, Jessie
  

Random Notes:

• As the dancing Pokemon in "Stage Fight" shows us... Jynx has foot! These bizarre bare-footed-human feet! This facet has basically been retconned with all of Jynx's other appearances, with the games that allow you to rotate the model showing us that Jynx's lower body is this slug/dress thing.
• "Stage Fight" is removed out of some international collections, likely because of the appearance of the black-faced Jynx and the fact that this is kind of an inconsequential episode they could remove without really depriving the audience of much. 
• So I guess Psyducks can swim naturally, and it's Misty's Psyduck that's, uh, special. I'm not sure if I've ever seen a Psyduck in any subsequent anime episode or the games or the various mangas swim, though. 
• We get a return of the Misty Lure, which first debuted in the Aupoculo episode, and will make brief, recurring appearances in subsequent episodes.
• Episode 91 is actually Goldeen's battle debut, almost ninety episodes since its first appearance. Poor fishy. 
• Episode 92 shows off perhaps yet another example of how sizes in the Pokemon anime world is basically arbitrary, yeah? Pokemon Go in particular would take this concept and run wild with it.  
• Some of the pokemon that Joy visits clearly have trainers, but I am curious just how the system is for Joy to visit Pokemon like that random Shellder or Seel that are just living in the wild
• Jigglypuff makes a brief cameo in 92, but our heroes wisely kayak away before she could take over the plot and Jiggly-ex-machina.

Reviewing Monsters - Resident Evil Outbreak

 Resident Evil Outbreak (2003); Resident Evil Outbreak: File #2 (2004)

Our next couple of games are also another two that the makers of the franchise try to pretend didn't happen. I think the two Outbreak games suffers more from the fact that they were released roughly a decade earlier than when they would've otherwise be popular. Where the Survivor series had their gimmick on a console accessory, the Outbreak games had their gimmick on online multiplayer gameplay... which, in 2002, was more of a novelty gimmick. I still personally think that online multiplayer gameplay is still a novelty gimmick for the majority of games out there that are not explicitly designed with it in mind, but at least modern games have functional online multiplayer. 

Anyway, the story of the two Outbreak games basically take place in the backstory of the huge Raccoon City outbreak (duh) that took place in Resident Evil 2 and 3, focusing on a selection of survivors that meet up in a bar and have to band together to survive. Somehow, they manage to enter Birkin's underground lab, find themselves onto a case carrying the G-Virus, and visiting the hospital in RE:3, a nearby hotel and Raccoon University as they are chased by Umbrella agents. Ultimately Outbreak has 40 different endings depending on choices you make and which characters you pick for each stage. Outbreak 2 brings the survivors to previously-unseen parts of Raccoon City, including Raccoon City's zoo, the subway, a nearby abandoned hospital, Raccoon City Police Department, and ultimately trying to escape before the nuclear bombardment. 

RETURNING ENEMIES:

We're talking about monsters, and returning from previous games are the regular zombie, the zombie dog, Crows, Neptune, Giant Moth, Lickers, Giant Spiders, Giant Alligators, Wasps, Hunter Gammas, G-Adults and a couple 'special' zombies like an 'Axe Man' that doesn't really give me much to talk about.

Hunter R & Hunter μ

Yet another Hunter Alpha variant that doesn't use a Greek alphabet name is the MA-125 Hunter R, a modified version that's a lot lanker than its predecessor. We've got the Hunter II, Hunter Elite, Sweeper, technically Hunter Beta... and now we get perhaps one of the most visually distinct variation that still keeps the same 'green, scaled lizard-man' vibe of the Hunter Alpha. Hunter R here is a lot more lanky and athletic-looking, and I do like that grin on his face and the smooth skin of its lower arms. As you can probably expect, these are faster but a lot less durable. I actually like this, even if its proportions are admittedly a bit more humanoid (and therefore more boring) than the basic Alpha mold. Not too much to say here, Hunter R is a pretty cool looking variant. Apparently they were killed in-universe when someone messed with temperature controls, freezing all the Hunter R's.

That picture on the right is actually a Hunter with a Greek letter! Hunter μ (myu) is named so because it's a smaller version of Hunter R, a Hunter 'micro' if you will, since μ is basically synonymous with micro in scientific jargon. Not very interesting, but I really do like the fun usage of the name. 

T-Virus Leech & Leech Man

So the T-Virus got into a bunch of leeches in Raccoon City's sewers, but didn't mutate them like they did with the Progenitor Virus. It's either a bit of a continuity error with Resident Evil 0 or maybe the leech biology just reacts very differently with just how these viruses are introduced to them? These T-Virus Leeches look identical to regular leeches, but they can swarm over a human body and turn them into a 'Leech Man' to move their whole colony. So maybe they already have the hive mentality down, and they just haven't transformed into their purple slug-like brethren? I'm still not really certain just why the Resident Evil franchise loves the 'leech colony' trope so much.

Apparently, this particular colony of leeches were created out of the Raccoon City hospital's supply of medicinal leeches, and this entire mass have used the body of a poor doctor to move around ventilation shafts and stalk survivors. Hilariously, you can actually distract the Leech Man by tossing around blood packs around. Pretty cool!

Zombie Lion

So a level in this game is the Raccoon City zoo, and this basically allowed the designers to toss in a bunch of zombie animals for you to kill. There really isn't much to say here about the zombie lion pride, there is a male and three female lions that roam around the zoo after being infected by the T-Virus. They sure are lion with zombie bits!

Zombie Hyena

Ditto for these zombie spotted hyenas, although it's notable that the model for the zombie hyenas doesn't quite 'zombify' them as much as the lions or the zombie dogs. They are pack hunters, and I can see the game designers just putting a skin over the zombie dog model and calling it a day. Not that I'm complaining, though, it's these sort of 'reskinning' that I am absolutely fine with, actually making a significantly different-looking creature that has an excuse of moving similarly to something else. 

Hornbill

The infected zoo idea is perhaps kind of too 'silly', which is why no other Resident Evil game have revisited it after Outbreak... not even as a 'oh no, the animal specimens got loose' kind of thing. Still, in-between the obviously scary animals like lions and hyenas, I do absolutely love that apparently the Raccoon City Zoo's population of hornbills have also taken to stabbing people with their big-ass beaks. Hornbills actually do look like they should be dangerous with that massive beaks, although the actual animals are very docile. Interestingly, the hornbills look basically identical to an uninfected hornbill (lump of human flesh in their bloody beak aside). Is there just something about bird physiology that makes these crows and hornbills not transform too much physically?

Scissor Tails

Okay, that's an interesting one! The token insect monster of this one is based on an earwig, and one with a pretty lovely gravel-like texture to it. Earwigs are, I feel, insects that are recognizable enough to the general public but so under-used as a fantasy monster. I don't think even Pokemon or Digimon have ever had an earwig-based monster. I guess they're neither 'gross' or 'dangerous' enough to jump to mind as a bug monster? They don't actually do too much with Scissor Tails here, though -- there are two variants, with brown ones being just big scary monsters, while blue ones have an an added extra 'poison sting' attack to the earwig's cerci-pincers. Real earwigs do use their butt-fangs to catch prey or defend themselves, but they are certainly not poisonous. I am delighted to see earwigs as monsters, but on the other hand... I kinda wished that they did more? I'm all for representing the animal kingdom as bioweapons, but at least have them do something interesting. 

Mega Bite & Giga Bite

I would split these two up, since "Giga Bite" is a boss... but Giga Bite is literally just a larger Mega Bite with no alterations and there isn't even a good screenshot of her online. Anyway... how about those names, huh? Mega Bite and Giga Bite? Hee hee hee. Fleas are another arthropod that I don't see being utilized as monsters in video games enough. I think it's that face, I don't think anyone can take those flea faces seriously. Again, though, there's really not much to talk about the fleas here other than them being giant fleas. The Giga Bite is also a 'queen', shoving yet another eusocial behaviour to these creatures that really had nothing to do with them. If they had wanted a 'boss' for the fleas, wouldn't a host animal be more suitable? 

Flying Bug (a.k.a. Swarm) / Rafflesia

See, this is how you adapt one of these weird real-life creatures into a video game monster. The Rafflesia itself is stationary, and just slightly larger than its real-life counterparts. However, the Rafflesia flower is blocking your path to a plot-mandated part of the game, and your characters are forced to destroy it to proceed. However, the Rafflesia is protected by a swarm of Flying Bugs (alternatively called "Swarm" in some localizations) which would go berserk when you blow up their little feeding ground. The Flying Bugs themselves are just generic flies or something. Not the most spectacular enemy here, but a fun one nonetheless. 

Green Zombie

Y'know, both versions of RE:2's Ivy monster were visually much more impressive than this one, but I absolutely find this plant zombie to be hilarious simply because he's wearing his parasitic plant like a hat. The Green Zombies here are all unfortunate humans that were parasitized by a 'mother plant', similar to the concept that would be used for Plant 43/the Ivy Zombies in the Resident Evil 2 remake. They're basically similar to regular zombies, just with an added 'poison fog' attack. Neat. 

Tyrant C

Only seen in the multiplayer modes, Tyrant C is just another variant and an excuse to have Mr. X copycats run around the multiplayer map. It sure has a bunch of little horns on his head, and apparently it has 'elasticated arms', although it's noticeably a lot more fragile. Eh.  

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Bosses:

G-Mutant
So the original Resident Evil 2 only had a single 'G-Adult' miniboss that were born out of a non-Birkin host. The remake expanded on this, showing that "G" has created a whole colony of genetically-incompatible G-Adults in the sewers. But when Outbreak was made, I think the concept they were working off of is that each individual 'imperfect' G-Adult looked different, and, well, the main characters of Outbreak apparently fought another such G-Mutant. This one is a fun variation of the original concept, although Outbreak's G-Adult retains most of his humanoid proportions and just instead carries huge slabs of nasty tumorous flesh in a combination of a huge tumour backpack and a tail. Got to have that creepy eyeball on the bubbly tumour-backpack, too, and I really like that the entire upper half of his face is just covered with mutated... bone? 

Regardless, I do really like just how different the G-mutants actually are from each other -- sure, it's impractical for the RE:2 remake to have different individual-looking unique G-mutants, but I really do like that between each of the different games that portray them, each G-mutant looks different while keeping the same 'one giant eye in a part of their body' aesthetic. Like the CGI movie-exclusive Curtis Miller here, who I probably won't cover in any of these reviews, but look at that gangly G-mutant!

Giant Leech

The source of the "Leech Man" and a swarm of other smaller leeches in a hospital level is a Giant Leech, and this is a pretty lovely bloated regular leech with some extra spikes, the size of a boat and... okay, that's still a lamprey mouth, but that's still a pretty nasty-looking mouth. Interestingly, the Giant Leech here is noted to be the 'queen' of the colony, which is terribly wrong for actual leech biology but actually consistent with the Progenitor Leeches in Resident Evil Zero. Not much to say here, it sure is a cool giant leech. 

Suspended

Less of a boss and more of a memorable little unique enemy, this Suspended is a lady who hangs down from the ceiling, able to stick onto the ceiling with her legs and attack the survivors with her angry hands and her tongue. It's theorized to either be a unique version of a Licker, or maybe a regular zombie in the process of transforming into a Licker, which is very, very cool in addition to the idea of some contortionist zombie jumping down on you from the ceiling being pretty nasty. In-game, the Suspended is actually stronger than Lickers and will actually call them to help out, so it seems that she might actually be a stronger variant. 

Thanatos

One of the final bosses in the first Outbreak game is "Thanatos", a uniquely powerful tyrant. He's African-American, which is actually a rarity among any 'boss' monsters in Resident Evil, at least until we get to Africa in RE5. Thanatos here is created by rogue Umbrella scientist Greg Muller, who wanted a Tyrant... "optimized for killing"? Like the Super Tyrant from Resident Evil 2 wasn't optimized for killing enough? I do like that the 'basic' form of Thanatos looks so human, though. Like, this is just a human with an exposed heart and slightly more monstrous claws, giving us the same uncanny valley vibe that Mr. X so effectively conveys. 

Tyrants are gonna Tyrant, though, so as you fight him he ultimately loses one arm, turns the other into a huge stabby claw, has extra muscles and is extra-angry. At this point I'm kind of numb with all of these Tyrants, and the story behind Thanatos isn't exactly particularly interesting. This form is called "Thanatos R",  with R standing for Reborn. 

Zombie Elephant

Outbreak 2's zoo stage ends with you fighting Oscar the Elephant, the star attraction of Raccoon City Zoo. Rampaging elephants are actually pretty terrifying in real life, and Oscar here actually has a nastily downward-pointing mutant tusks and tattered ears. I actually find it pretty cool that it's the elephant that the designers of Outbreak used as a boss instead of the lion or some kind of predatory animal. If the wiki descriptions are to be used, Oscar is apparently also pretty freaking cunning, collapsing the entrance to trap the survivors in the zoo. The fact that this elephant is also actively trying to eat the humans might be just that extra bit that is needed to push it into 'well, this scary' territory.

Huge Plant & Evil Shade

Here is the source of all the weird zombies that the survivors found around the abandoned hospital zone, so it's probably a different hospital than the one Carlos and Jill ran around in Resident Evil 3. You first see these 'Huge Plant' monsters, which are just huge weirdo flowers that spray poison around, but turns out that they are just part of the central plant monster, the "Evil Shade". There's a whole story about how this Evil Shade had consumed the corpse of some lady called Dorothy, and his insane husband, one of the main villains here, kept feeding corpses to the plant, thinking that the plant is the reincarnation of his wife. I to like that 'central' plant that is just this giant tumorous bulb encrusted with little seeds and giant vines bursting out of it. Nothing particularly new in the franchise, but certainly one of the cooler monster plants to come out from it. 

Tyrant R (Code T-0400TP)

It's a bit stretching it to say that Thanatos, Mr. X, Nemesis and maybe one or two other Tyrant-style enemies were running around Raccoon City all at the same time, but Outbreak 2 gives us yet another Tyrant. Tyrant R's human form isn't even trying to hide that it's a copy of T-103 "Mr. X", and it's explicitly a creature from that program. Apparently Tyrant R's specialty is that it's actually a fair bit more intelligent and durable. It somehow developed self-awareness, killing its handlers (who attempted to use it to take out the escaped Hunter R population). Tyrant R basically pursues our survivors before mutating into a version of Mr. X's original super-mode, which is just a huge hulking spiky man with spiky hands. It's pretty cool, I'll give you that, but I definitely think that at this point we're pretty Tyrant-ed out.

Nyx

Far, far cooler is when Tyrant R's super form gets straight-up eaten by a completely different bioweapon, Nyx! Nyx here is actually an amoeba monster, or at least a bioweapon that's based on one. We've never actually seen any bioweapon like it, and by the time our survivors faced it, Nyx has assimilated so many random corpses (and Tyrant R) into its body that I think the idea is that it's trying to assume a humanoid form because it's consumed so many humans. I love that Nyx's legs is so mismatched, with his right leg having a second smaller leg jutting out of it. Its head is just this huge wibbly-wobbly mass of blobby goop, and its right arm is just a giant club made out of like a dozen corpses that Nyx has absorbed. The gameplay element here is to get Nyx to expose its 'nucleus', which is hidden in that puckered-looking part of its chest. Also, yeah, its head also kind of looks like a ding-dong. Not my favourite enemy design, but at least it's not another Tyrant! 

The original concept for Nyx also had him absorb Tyrant R, but had it use the more, more boring way of just Nyx using the Tyrant's own head as its own. This way, showing the Tyrant half-merged with Nyx's body, is far, far more unsettling and memorable! I do like that this game's final flesh-glob boss is actually meant to be a flesh-glob. 

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Not actually the strongest Resident Evil game in terms of monsters, but at least we did get a bunch of fun zombie animals and some neat enemy variations from it. 

Pokemon S01E87-89 Review: Form Differences

Pokemon, Episode 87: The Crystal Onix; Episode 88: In The Pink; Episode 89: Shell Shock 

Episode 87: The Crystal Onix
Another trio of episodes, and it's not like I'm trying to rush through these things, it's just that... well, they're not very exciting. None of them are flat-out bad, I don't think, and most of the Orange Islands episodes so far have been relatively solid, but we've moved far beyond the time when just 'okay' plots have lost their novelty. They're entertaining as much as they basically are neat episode-of-the-week episodes, but ultimately... m'eh?

Episode 87, "The Crystal Onix", attempts to put a little twist on the currently marketable 150 Pokemon by spotlighting... Onix, a Pokemon that has been the main focus of episodes at least twice -- when Brock used it back during the Pewter gym challenge, and the Bruno episode. What's wrong with spotlighting, oh, I don't know, someone far more under-appreciated like, oh, Cloyster or someone? Anyway, in a setup that's going to be increasingly familiar, Ash and company arrive in Town-of-the-Week (Sunburst Island), meet the character-of-the-week (the glassblower Mateo and his sister Marissa) and discover that they've been looking for MacGuffin Plot Device Pokemon for years (the titular Crystal Onix), and in the span of 20 minutes, Ash and company stumble their way into finding and resolving said plot device.

It's just that while the concept of a Pokemon variant itself is neat, the presentation of the episode itself is pretty lackluster. The titular Crystal Onix is kind of just there, and sure, it's pretty dang cool to realize that it's basically a water-dwelling Onix that makes use of its crystal colouration to camouflage itself in a lake, and that it apparently is... immune to water and vulnerable to fire? What, is it secretly Steel-type? (It'd be a neat foreshadowing to Steelix in that case) But ultimately the Crystal Onix is just there.

Mateo and Marissa aren't particularly interseting characters either, with the whole gimmick about Marissa's message in a bottle feeling pretty much padding, while Mateo's motivation of wanting to see the Crystal Onix to get some inspiration ending up feeling hollow. The episode kind of wants to frame it so that Mateo only gets the inspiration he so desperately needs to make a life-like crystal Pokemon sculpture, but also goes out of the way to show off that he is already a pretty good crystal-sculptor beforehand, so it's kind of a bit confusing just what he got out of the encounter with the Crystal Onix. Either a "the skill was in me all along!" moral or Mateo actually being a shitty sculptor beforehand that improves would've gone a long way in making the storyline more coherent.

Team Rocket's also there, trying to capture the Crystal Onix after hearing rumours while working off a debt for smashing some of the crystal sculptures of a different store (in what's even more padding), but ultimately this doesn't come up to much. I do commend the episode for using some rather unconventional Pokemon -- guest star of the week Mateo actually gets to fight the Crystal Onix with his Cloyster and Charmeleon, a bit of a rarity for someone not in the main cast to even do anything. Tracey's Marill makes its debut in this episode, and I do like the brief bit of Venonat fucking up with its radar eyes, and, of course, James' Victreebel chomping down on the poor sod's head. Ultimately, it's a decent episode and I'm being kind of nitpicky, but it does feel like it's missing an extra oomph for it to actually be a good or great one.
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Episode 88: In the Pink
This episode, "In The Pink", feels like a different draft for "Crystal Onix", but instead of a single weird Pokemon, this time we get a whole island of different Pokemon. All the Pokemon in Pinkan Island are coloured pink, because of a unique fruit that grows there. It's not quite similar to the Crystal Onix or Valencia Island's patterned Pokemon, because the episode establishes that the pink colour is temporary (Ash's Pikachu gets his cheeks and tail temporarily bleached pink) but it's... it's a neat enough story, I suppose. There's some ham-handed moral about exploiting Pokemon and shoving them in cages and forcing them to perform while maltreating them like circus animals, a sentiment that kind of rings hollow considering the whole point of Pokemon is, well, capturing and collecting creatures. It's okay for them to be in Pokeballs, but not in cages, I guess? I dunno. The moral about poachers is given via a very preachy Oak segment that I felt would've done better if it had been integrated a bit better with the obligatory "Team Rocket tries to steal Pokemon" part of the episode.

Thankfully, awkwardly discussing the moral implications of poaching strange variations of living creatures just to exploit them isn't the only thing that this episode has going for it, because for the first time since ever, Misty and Togepi have a storyline that doesn't involve Togepi running off and getting into hijinks... it's Misty trying to teach Togepi moves, and trying to figure out why the little egg pixiebaby doesn't even know one. After an adorable flashback to Misty's disastrous attempt to teach Togepi Headbutt, this sort of plays in the background as something that kinda bothers Misty... but, of course, the audience knows that Togepi is able to unleash Metronome by wagging its fingers just right, and throughout the episode that's sort of what Togepi does, pulling off convenient moves like Teleport and Barrier to pull out heroes' fat out of the fire.

There's a fair bit of neat scenes in this episode too. I still find Tracey's gimmick of sketching Pokemon while measuring them with his binoculars to be absolutely stupid -- exemplified even further by the fact that he's making black-and-white sketches of alternate-coloured Pokemon. But the bit with them hauling a trapped Rhyhorn out of being stuck on a cliffside, or the sequence with Jenny using a lassoo and a jeep to subdue a Nidoking are both pretty neat. I also do love the brief bit with Team Rocket's Lickitung being surprisingly effective and adorable as it just waddles around with the same pose before being spooked off by a Nidoking. The brief imagination spot with Team Rocket opening a pink-themed Disneyland is over-the-top but also fun, featuring the return of the dolled-up Weezing and Arbok we've seen before in the past. Team Rocket truly loves their giant snake and their tumour-gas-bag, it's neat.

Anyway, this one was another one that's also all right. By virtue of having a lot more moving parts and a far more fun ending conflict with the Nidoking, I think I like this episode a bit more than "Crystal Onix".
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Episode 89: "Shell Shock"
"Shell Shock", the next episode, is... a weird one. In it, our heroes land at yet another island, called Fukuhara Island #4, where a news reporter is following an palaentology team headed by a Nurse Joy, in search of fossils of Kabuto, and apparently they are investigating claims that this might lead them to the secret of Kabuto Oil, which is apparently some sort of fountain of youth serum or whatever. It's kind of neat, and I kind of appreciate the episode having the gimmick of cutting to the news reporters hamming things up. It's just such a shame that the dub doesn't quite have the high energy needed for the gag to work, but I appreciate the effort.

Of course, as the excavation team moves through the island, a lot of falling rocks nearly murder them if they don't come equipped with a small private army of Machokes and Rhydons. This Nurse Joy doesn't want to confirm to her family's Chansey exclusivity, and good thing for her. Team Rocket spies on this all from their Karpmarine, and decide to steal the fossils for their own.

Turns out that the sabotage effects are done by a crazy local called Umberto, who screams bloody murder about a prophecy that the moon will glow red and sink the island into the sea if these dang outsiders don't leave. Okay, Mr. Crazy Doomsayer Man, maybe you'll make a better point if you haven't been trying to kill these people with falling boulders. What would happen if Nurse Joy didn't have a handy squadron of musclebound Pokemon with her? Now if this was a Godzilla movie or Ultraman episode, this would be a setup of the silly archaeology crew unleashing some sort of long-sealed monster and the crazy kook is the one they should've listened to all along... except in this episode's case, nothing really makes much sense.

The excavation team find a cave with walls and floor and ceiling all covered in Kabuto fossils, but Team Rocket show up with their bombs that cause a collapse of the cave. Out of nowhere, a blood moon appears, and apparently the light from the moon... causes the Kabuto to come to life? I do like the explanation that all the Kabuto 'fossils' are actually just them in hibernation, entering a rock-like state, but the explanation as to why the blood moon suddenly appeared, why the Kabuto responded to it specifically, or why there's even a prophecy in the first place is never explained. Besides, the whole bit about 'scavengers'... really doesn't ring true; Joy's team never really wanted to exploit the fossils, just maybe collect a couple and put it in the museum.

Of course, apparently the entirety of the island is made up of hibernating Kabuto, and despite Team Rocket only collapsing the cave on the bay, this causes a chain reaction that causes all of the Kabuto to break free and cause the island to collapse, because the foundation of the island is built on dormant Kabuto. Okay, sure. Umberto's stupidly-specific-for-no-logical-reason causes everyone to run into the forest and make a raft out of the trees, which, again, doesn't really make a whole lick of sense. Who makes these prophecies anyway? The humans escape, the gigantic cluster of Kabuto disappear deep beneath the ocean, and there's a vague attempt to make it all look like the story of the episode makes sense with Joy shrugging it as the true meaning of the "Kabuto Oil makes you live forever" bit at the beginning and how the news reporters decide to keep it secret to protect the Kabuto... who's swam off into the deep ocean anyway, plus Fukuhara Island's freaking gone, so fat good keeping the story secret is going to do.

The story and the premise of the plot are genuinely decent -- the idea of these supposedly-extinct Pokemon actually just being in hibernation is a very cool one. So is the idea that these creatures are actually forming the backbone of an island. But the execution is so piss-poor and tied to a prophecy that doesn't make sense and a character of the week that's particularly obnoxious, which makes this one feel a lot weaker than it should've been.

Featured Characters:

• Episode 87:
• Pokemon: Lapras, Pikachu, Togepi, Onix, Meowth, Venonat, Marill, Cloyster, Arbok, Victreebel, Staryu, Charmeleon
• Humans: Tracey, Ash, Misty, James, Jessie
• Episode 88:
• Pokemon: Lapras, Pikachu, Togepi, Rhyhorn, Jigglypuff, Meowth, Exeggutor, Rhydon, Primeape, Vileplume, Bellsprout, Mankey, Caterpie, Weedle, Venonat, Nidoran F, Nidoran M, Paras, Diglett, Pidgey, Oddish, Poliwhirl, Scyther, Geodude, Pidgeotto, Electabuzz, Rattata, Arbok, Weezing, Victreebel, Lickitung, Nidoking, Dodrio, Muk, Psyduck, Marill
• Humans: Ash, Tracey, Misty, Officer Jenny, James, Jessie, Professor Oak
• Episode 89:
• Pokemon: Lapras, Pikachu, Togepi, Growlithe, Machoke, Kabuto, Meowth, Rhydon, Squirtle, Goldeen, Staryu
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Tracey, Nurse Joy, Jessie, James

Random Notes:

• Marill makes its debut in the anime as yet another pre-Generation-II preview Pokemon! Remember when these were a thing? That the anime would debut brand-new Pokemon months before the actual Gold and Silver games came out? I think this makes Marill the fifth Generation II Pokemon to show up after Ho-Oh and Togepi; plus Snubbull and Donphan in the Mewtwo movie.
• It's kind of odd that Ash's Pokedex has Marill's data, despite all the talk about only having the data of 150 Pokemon. We'll just chalk it up to inconsistency, but I'm surprised the anime doesn't try to hype up Marill as yet another rare, unknown-in-Kanto Pokemon like they did Togepi. 
• It's this batch of episodes that really establishes Victreebel chomping down on James's head any time he sends it out as a running gag, huh?
• Episode 88 has a lot of adorable scenes -- Misty teaching Togepi headbutt is one, and Lickitung's hilarious 'get in and get out immediately' caper into the Nidoking's lair is fun. 
• Oak identifies Jenny's group on Pinkan Island as "Rangers", predating the concept of Pokemon Rangers by half a decade. Interestingly, the way Jenny defeats the rampaging Nidoking non-lethally -- by spinning around it with a lassoo -- would be eerily reminiscent of the whole gimmick of the NDS Pokemon Ranger games, where you hav to spin around a rampaging Pokemon with a device to calm it down. 
• Nidoking is immune to Pikachu's thundershock! Hooray, did the Pokemon anime team finally figure out "Ground is immune to Electric" bit? Not quite, because the cast identifies it as Nidoking just ignoring the damage thanks to rampaging. Dang it, anime team!
• The Pink Pokemon are even more proto-Shiny Pokemon, aren't they? I'm actually surprised the anime crew didn't bring up the Pink Butterfree that Ash's Butterfree shacked up with. 
• Tracey is all panicking when Ash finds out that he's also sketched Officer Jenny, so I guess Tracey's also a bit of a pervert? It's pretty tame compared to what Brock gets up to, though, and it's just not played up at all that everything around Tracey just feels underwhelming. 
• Errors:
• No one really documents the changes for the Orange Island episodes and I'm a bit too lazy to look for the Japanese versions, but I can spot errors! Misty calls out Starmie instead of Staryu in episode 88 -- Starmie's left in the Cerulean Gym, of course. 
• Episode 87 has the Charmeleon's final attack identified as Ember, but the animation is pretty obviously Fire Spin. Fire Spin spins around!
• Tracey identifies the Rhyhorn as being 8 meters long... which is very likely a flub. While the anime portrays Rhyhorn as being pretty much bigger than the game's length of 1 meter (3 feet), sizing Rhyhorn up to the size of a real-life rhinoceros, it's closer to 8 feet than 8 meters, and that's being gracious.
• Not sure if it's a dub addition or not, but I do really appreciate episode 89's narrator noting how every episode starts the same with the scene of Team Ash on top of Lapras and bemoans the fact that the narrator isn't allowed to have any fun. 

Gotta Review 'Em All, Bonus Episode #5: Shinies - Generation 8

I did this for the previous seven generations a while back. Anyway, not much to say. Credits to Pkparaiso for the animated gifs, which is where everyone seems to borrow from. I commentate on the shiny Pokemon quickly and speedily. This will be pretty fast, and I'll try not to have it be more than a single sentence or two.

Pokemon S01E84-86 Review: Alolan Island Challenge

Pokemon: Episode Orange Islands, Episode 84: The Lost Lapras; Episode 85: Fit To Be Tide; Episode 86: Pikachu Re-Volts

Episode 84: The Lost Lapras
I think I'm pretty comfortable in doing three episodes at once for these Orange Island episodes, because at this point I feel like the show's making use of its original Orange Island setting to be a bit more experimental, swapping back and forth between being completely self-contained standalone episodes or having shorter arcs that extend across multiple episodes. Throw in the fact that they sort of changed the dynamic a little with the introduction of Tracey Sketchitt, Brock's brief replacement, and gave Ash a semi-permanent addition to his team, and this segment as we properly start the Orange Island arc is... interesting. 84 is essentially a huge introduction for Lapras (and to a lesser extent Tracey) while also setting up the small but definitely palpable changes that the Orange Islands bring. Also, this is the episode that basically introduces that the Orange Islands have their own gym/tournament system, throwing Ash straight into a variation/repeat of the Indigo League. Hopefully it's paced a bit better with less of an episode quota to fill.

The plot for "the Lost Lapras" is honestly just pretty simple. Ash and Misty survive the crash-landing of the blimp in episode 83, and they find that they've crash-landed on the tourist resort of Tangelo Island. They quickly see a bunch of assholes beating the shit out of some poor Lapras stranded on a beach, and Ash, of course, goes in to confront these asshole animal abusers. Before the battle can begin, though, some dude in a green T-shirt called Tracey shows up and starts running his mouth as he measures, sketches and comments on all of the Pokemon. It's an interesting thing to give Brock's replacement kind of a gimmick with the sketchpad (surely Snap's photographs would be a lot more practical, though?) but ultimately I can see why so many kids are kind of turned off by Tracey. With a far plainer design than Brock and basically being there just to do the same 'commentary on Pokemon by someone who knows what they're talking about' that both Brock and the Pokedex filled in previous episodes, it's easy to see why people saw Tracey as redundant.

That said, it's not that Tracey really gets a good showing in his first outing. After his first scene where he's only barely more memorable than any wacky character-of-the-week, he sort of just fades into the background beyond a brief scene of him being excited at knowing someone who knows Professor Oak. Ash's Pikachu zaps the hell out of the punks, they find out that this young Lapras was probably left behind by its pack, and then Ash and company end up deciding to try to rehabilitate Lapras and get it to trust humans. The scenes that happened are what you would expect, but it is pretty neat nonetheless to see dumb ol' Ash try his best to befriend Lapras in his usual dense manner. Also, Ash learns about the Orange gym challenge, gets excited, and talks to Oak a bit about delaying the delivery of the GS Ball for a while.

After an obligatory and honestly at this point very tired Jigglypuff bit, Team Rocket show up and steal Lapras with a smoke bomb, tying the poor giant ice-dinosaur thing to a flatbed truck and driving off. We get the return of action hero Ash as he rides around on a bicycle, chases up to the Rocket truck and basically rescue Lapras after a bit of a scuffle. It lasts a bit too long, I feel, but I do think Lapras seeing Ash try his damnadest to stop the runaway bed part of the truck from driving off of cliffs does work in selling that, yeah, Lapras trusts Ash now. The episode ends with Ash riding in on Lapras, revealing that he's getto-da-ze'd Lapras off-screen as they are hanging out in the sea. It's an all right episode, pretty solid and not too remarkable other than the whole slew of tone-setting it does. With Lapras as their newfound transport and Tracey latching on as another traveling companion, we march on!
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Episode 85: Fit to be Tide

Episode 85 then throws us immediately into the first gym battle in the Orange Islands in Mikan Island. It's honestly pretty quick, without much build-up. They arrive there, Tracey and Oak tell Ash about the gym on the island, they meet some brat who sets up a trap, who turns out to be the little brother of the Mikan gym leader Cissy, and we quickly set up the fight. The little brother (named Senta in the original but unnamed in the dub) is honestly completely pointless, and other than delivering the expected shonen trope of "oh, last season's tournament? That's peanuts compared to what we have here" is kind of there to fill up screentime.

Cissy tells Ash (and us) that the gym challenge in the Orange Islands are a wee bit different, in that instead of just straightforward battles, there are also competitions involved, and it's a neat excuse for the animation team to not have to animate too many action scenes while also delivering something visually interesting that makes it look like Ash and his crew are doing something to earn the badge instead of, hey, let's deal with the fire that's set off at the gym.

Cissy's fight is pretty neat, I suppose, with the first part of it being a water gun sniping competition between Ash's Squirtle and Cissy's Seadra, which is actually pretty neat looking. The second competition is a surfing competition, where Ash and Lapras have to compete against Cissy and her Blastoise to reach a buoy and back to the beach. Before they can do this, though, Team Rocket shows up in their Magikarp submarine and try and catch the Pokemon present, using a net to capture Blastoise. But there's this running gag of the Rocket submarine having its rotor blades tangled up by Dhelmise seaweed, causing them to sink and panic and whatnot before Blastoise proves strong enough to return back to the shore even while dragging the submarine behind it. And then Blastoise and Pikachu just zap Team Rocket and send them blasting off again. At this point it just seems like Team Rocket is just there as an obligatory distraction, y'know?

The actual race between Blastoise and Lapras are... neat, and Lapras ends up using Ice Beam to create an ice-skating rink and somehow this causes it to move faster than the swimming Blastoise. Okay! That's how Ash wins the first badge in the Orange Island gyms. It's... it's not a terrible episode, but definitely not one that I'll be remembering a couple of weeks down the line. I do appreciate the effort in making the Orange gym challenge a bit different from the norm we're used to, but ultimately the end result is just... it's just kind of there, y'know?
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Episode 86: Pikachu Re-Volts
Episode 86 is a bit more exciting despite not being a gym battle episode, because it features a lot of Pokemon and the return of Butch and Cassidy. As far as filler standalone episodes, this one is pretty fun. Ash and company arrive on Mandarin Island to find a bunch of trainers attacked by their own Pokemon. As Ash and company try and help, suddenly Pikachu and Togepi, those outside-their-Pokeball deviants, jump out of their trainer's arms and start showing off an evil grin and Pikachu starts zapping Ash, before running off with the berserking Magnemites and Grimers. Oh no, Pikachu went evil! The local Officer Jenny show up and tell our heroes that the Pokemon in the island have been going berserk and disobeying their masters and whatnot, with the only Pokemon that's unaffected so far being Jenny's own Gastly, who is a spooky ghost critter and apparently that grants him immunity from whatever's going on.

Team Rocket also arrive on the island and get surprised when Meowth suddenly gets mind-controlled as well, and it's a lot more obvious on the normally talkative Meowth as he basically walks around zombie-like. Team Rocket fellow Meowth through some secret alleyways or whatever and they arrive on an underground warehouse room where they meet up Butch and Cassidy, who uses a massive psychic-amplifier machine to amplify their Drowzee's hypnotic powers, and shows off an actually impressive line-up of Pokemon that they've managed to brainwashed. Why doesn't Team Rocket as a whole do this a bit more often? Weaponize these dang mind-controlling Psychic types, you fools!

Jessie and James decide to steal the Pokemon for themselves to make a name for the boss, but when they bring out their full fighting force of Arbok, Weezing, Victreebel and the completely-forgotten Lickitung, they all get quickly mind-controlled by Drowzee as well and join Cassidy's army of hypnotized Pokemon. The Pokemon beat up Jessie and James, who end up waking up in the Pokemon Center. They manage to identify Butch and Cassidy as the ones behind the crimes, but refuse to stain their reputation further by working with the cops, or help Ash. As a side-note, I am not impressed by Ash's dub voice particularly in this first season, but Veronica Taylor does a pretty decent job in these scene selling Ash begging for Team Rocket to please please please help him get his buddy Pikachu back.

Still, Team Rocket obviously ended up having a change of heart after Jenny offers them the chance to be heroes or something, because we all know that Jessie and James are secretly softies on the inside. They show up outside of Butch and Cassidy's base with a peace offering of a massive cart filled with Pokeballs, but of course it's a trojan horse containing team Ash and Officer Jenny in it, and Jenny sics her Gastly on the Pokemon army. Said Gastly ended up being a complete champ as it basically tanks a fuck-ton of elemental attacks from the Pokemon present, in a surprisingly well-animated scene of it splitting apart a bunch of fire/electric/water attacks by placing itself in the way of the attacks.

Ash, meanwhile, beelines Pikachu and actually ends up tricking the brainwashed Pikachu into zapping him in front of the Drowzee machine, blowing it up and freeing everyone present from the mind-control. There's a whole bit of "I will let myself get hurt to rescue you" heartwarming sentiment going on, but I do like that for someone who tends to be portrayed as a buffoon, this is an example of Ash completely winning the fight with nothing but guile.

We get the big final fight, but Drowzee is apparently still too dang powerful, using its psychic powers to disable Pikachu and knock Team Rocket's four Pokemon around like dolls, but when they command Drowzee to use Metronome, Togepi mimics Drowzee's movement... and we cut away to the base blowing up, sending Butch, Cassidy and Drowzee flying into the air. So yeah, Togepi is able to use Metronome now, and it's... it's kind of going to alternate with Psyduck's headache-ex-machina as a way to pull a surprise random victory in subsequent episodes. I'm completely surprised that this completely unrelated episdoe is how this little thing first gets brought up, because it honestly does feel like a pretty random thing that gets tacked on to the episode, which has previously been a highlight of Drowzee's psychic powers, as well as the team-up with Team Rocket.

Of course no one realizes it's Togepi that won the day, and they attribute their victory to Drowzee's Metronome backfiring, and we close the episode with Team Rocket overlooking the city from a rooftop, realizing but refusing to accept the hero's welcome that Mandarin Island has prepared for them, before walking off into the sunset. It's kinda cool, I suppose, for these goofballs to pull off these reluctant anti-hero vibe every now and then.

Anyway, I kind of like this episode a fair bit, random Togepi Metronome aside. The team-up with Team Rocket felt natural and earned, Butch and Cassidy being a slightly more serious opponent is neat, both Drowzee and Gastly feel like complete badasses thanks to their powers, and it's overall a surprisingly solid episode, which I liked a fair bit.

Featured Characters:

• Episode 84:
• Pokemon: Pikachu, Togepi, Lapras, Spearow, Hitmonchan, Beedrill, Krabby, Tauros, Dodrio, Meowth, Sandshrew, Voltorb, Starmie, Jigglypuff, Weezing, Venonat
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Tracey, Nurse Joy, Jessie, James, Professor Oak
• Episode 85:
• Pokemon: Lapras, Pikachu, Togepi, Meowth, Chansey, Muk, Seadra, Squirtle, Psyduck, Blastoise, Weezing
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Tracey, Jessie, James, Professor Oak, Cissy
• Episode 86:
• Pokemon: Lapras, Pikachu, Togepi, Grimer, Voltorb, Magnemite, Gastly, Meowth, Primeape, Electabuzz, Hitmonchan, Jolteon, Starmie, Poliwag, Vaporeon, Wartortle, Vulpix, Ponyta, Mankey, Growlithe, Flareon, Magikarp, Kingler, Arbok, Likcitung, Weezing, Victreebel, Drowzee, Seaking
• Humans: Ash, Misty, Tracey, Cassidy, Butch, Officer Jenny, Professor Oak, Jessie, James

Random Notes:

• As of eipsode 84, the English dub changes openings from "Pokemon Theme" to "Pokemon World", which is... it's kinda there?
• It is very interesting to note that the whole gimmick of the Orange Island gyms is that the gym battles are not just pure fights, but also include other skills that the Pokemon must be able to do. To some degree, I feel that this concept ended up being revisited in the Island Trials in the Sun and Moon games, which had non-standard gym equivalents that tended to have wacky coming-of-age activities for your character to do before the battle.  
• Speaking of familiar plots, Butch and Cassidy's evil plot in 86 is basically what the Lake of Rage bit in Gold and Silver are supposed to be, right?
• Very convenient that the Tangelo Island Pokemon Center has a huge swimming pool that can accomodate Lapras, huh?
• Tracey has a Venonat with radar eyes, which shows up in 84 but I completely forgot to mention it. Venonat's adorable! 
• "The Lost Lapras" is, I think, the first time in the anime we've seen the Potion item from the games, which have had artwork in things like TCG's and whatnot during this time period, but the anime treats the Potion as a drinking medicine instead of the wound-spray that it tends to be depicted as in other media. 
• This is the first debut of Team Rocket's Magikarp Submarine! While they've used a Gyarados Submarine in the Kanto arc, in the Orange Island arc they swapped to the smaller Magikarp submarine. 
• Episode 85 is the first time that "Muk shows up to smother Oak" ends up being a long-running gag that will be repeated particularly often in the Johto and Hoenn seasons. 
• This happens a lot as the series goes on, but I think this is the first time that Ash compeletely forgot about a Pokemon that he's seen before, having to check out Seadra in his Pokedex despite fighting one in the Indigo League. The real-life reason, of course, is that this is basically a combination of advertising and exposition.
• Jessie's Lickitung finally makes a re-appearance some 30+ episodes after it first showed up!
• A particularly noticeable animation error resulted in a pretty uncanny-looking Jolteon without its white spike collar. 
• Ghost-types (and especially not Gastly) are not immune to psychic powers! That'd be the Dark-type, introduced in the next generation!
• Dub Changes:
• The hula girls in the original Japanesse said a phrase that could be interpreted as either "these look good on you" or "the two of you are a good match for each other", which is why they are blushing. The English dialogue is just generic welcoming.
• Mikan Island was originally Natsukan Island in the original Japanese. Both draw from "Natsumikan", a type of mandarin orange in Japanese, which is a surprising thing to keep, even if none of the dub voice actors pronounce it properly (the dub pronounces it as myke-AN instead of mee-KAN)... it's an interesting decision for them to change it from a Japanese name to a different Japanese name.