ONM Remembered – Pokémon Week, day 6
“Make sure you go along to the Pokémon Tour… it’s gonna be ace!”
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 95 (August 2000)
I hope I got the date wrong on this issue, or the printed date is later than its actual street date… otherwise by the time kiddies picked up this issue, they’d have missed damn near every venue. They only waited TEN WHOLE MONTHS to legally get their paws on a Mew, and now they’ll have missed their only chance! THIS IS HOW YOU BREAK YOUR FANS.
I was still a Pokémaniac at this time, but I don’t think the tours ever appealed to me. Even at that age, going to a place stuffed to the gills with obsessed fans must have sounded a bit much for my liking. And after dragging my dad to see Pokémon: The First Movie with us, I think I knew I couldn’t make him suffer any more.
That said, I was mad about getting Mew. Another issue around this time had a contest where you had to describe Pokémon to a kid who’d never even heard of the franchise before, all in 200 words or less. Explain successfully (I can’t remember if you had to actually win them over into the Pokémon frenzy, or just allow them to understand what all this fuss was about) and you could win a Mew! Even as an incompetent adult, I wouldn’t have a clue where to start on a task like that. That contest would’ve gotten its own entry, but, well, I’ve no trace of it. The page had to be cut up and sent away! C’est la vie.
I was going to say that the combination of Ant, Dec, and a chicken-footed misshapen Pikachu would be the worst way of promoting your video game tour… but then I remembered that before they devoted themselves to hosting every single terrible variety show ITV has to offer, they devoted themselves to hosting kids shows and getting into stupid Pokémon-themed antics.
… my god, that was fourteen years ago, wasn’t it?
