Our kids take some time out of the Pokemon journey for a journey of self-discovery and enlightenment. Might as well, it's not every day you see a nun studying at a Buddhist temple. What can we learn from watching Slowpoke? Tune in to find out!
And this way to Pokepress, to read those interviews with TCG and VGC players! Or their YouTube channel, for a discussion of Pokemon music on vinyl!
Anne, since this was the last episode written by Takeshi Shudō, do you by any chance know if, after writing this episode, he left the Pokémon Company? The articles on the internet about him are very vague, making it hard to know if he actually left the company or was just kept as a chief writer that was put aside from the writing duties.
ReplyDeleteI can try to look into that, but I'm not sure. You're right, there's not a lot of information on that available (in English). My faulty memory tells me he was listed on staff till they finished writing the OS, but I might be wrong. Certainly the direction Master Quest took lends credibility to him being in the writer's room while they were breaking a lot of the Ash/Gary episodes. Even if he wasn't writing scripts directly, if he was still on staff, he probably had influence. While it seems he was ready to move on from Pokemon to something else, and during the movie 3 era the workload was stressing him out, I hadn't read anything official (just angry fan rants) that his parting with the Pokemon Company was anything but amicable. So unless he had a pressing personal reason, I can't see him just leaving in the middle of the season. In America, the writing staff is hired season block by season block, and while Pokemon and the anime industry do have some unique circumstances, it would be detrimental to everyone's job not to be run in a similar fashion. It's most likely he stayed on till the end of Johto, but I'll see if I can't dig up something official.
Delete(I read that he served in a sort of consultant capacity for some Diamond and Pearl episodes, like the one where we revisited the Thunderstone issue. The source I saw was not completely credible, and I didn't take the time to dig any deeper, but it would be cool if it turned out to be true. I'll see if I can't find that information again.)
Thank you for your answer.
Delete