20 years of Pokémon opening
by Nicolas
Posted on Wed, May 27, 20
Preamble
If you’re a fan of Pokémon, and you’ve watched the anime, no matter your age, there is very few chances you’ve started with subbed anime, and since it was kind of the norm in the 90s when Pokémon appeared, the opening songs had an english version (which were not even a translation of the japanese one in english but a full-on new melody and new lyrics and a new editing of the opening credits). Other countries either had the english version, or the same music but with the lyrics translated to their language (my case in France).
So no matter where you come from, except if you’re from Japan or have always watched it subbed, you should have heard the same things as me and come to the same realization : there are pretty recurrent themes in those openings.
I don’t even know how it came to my mind when I haven’t watched it in years but I challenged myself to verify it with visualization. The lyrics were taken from Bulbapedia and the timings were recorded by myself. Here we go
The Commentary
Season 1
Graph explanation
I’ll take this first season to clarify the graph for you, for the next openings we will focus on the content. So as you can see, I have divided the graph in four lines, which are the four big themes already laid out by this first opening.
The first one, in blue, is reserved for the Pokémon word itself, since it is the most used word in the whole database : 60 occurences out of the 22 openings.
The second one, which ranges from Yellow to Red, is dedicated to everything that appeals to strength, as well as the terms used to designate “the best trainer”.
The third one, in shades of green, is dedicated to the other themes of the Pokémon franchise (and important to the nekketsu genre in general) : friendship, courage, adventure, etc.
The fourth one, in a range of pink to purple, denotates aspirations, destiny, and all big concepts like that.
The x-axis represents the seconds in the music where the words appear.
Note : You will probably notice in the legend some terms that are not used later, that is because I already show all the words I’ll be using in the future.
A good start
So season 1 has the longest opening, which gives it the time to lay out all the big themes that we will find throughout the series and its openings, we can note that those lyrics start by “being the best” and mentions Pokémon quite late comparing to the ones that will follow; and they only add the two other big themes in the second half.
Season 2
As you can see, the second season’s opening is heavily focused on “being the master”, funny when you know that for 20 years it will be the only one where Ash actually becomes the champion. And since the title is Pokémon world those words are repeated a lot, in fact it is the opening that has the highest count of Pokémon, with 11 occurences, but of course being longer than most others helps it.
Season 3
The third’s season’s opening was supposed to introduce a new Pokémon region, so it is more focused on its theme of “A whole new world”, as it repeats it quite often, but it also repeats Pokémon Johto instead of just “Pokémon” like its predecessors.
It’s the first opening to set a tendency that we will see a lot of in the future : the occurences of Pokémon are located at the beginning and the end, with few ones in the middle : teh song is not all about pokémons, but it still wants you to know what you are watching.
Season 4
Note : from here on the openings are 45s long instead of 60s
This opening starts with samples of the first one, but as you would expect from Born to be a Winner, it is even more focused on this theme than the other openings, so much so that it doesn’t really let room for the rest.
Season 5
Not much to say about this one : it is mostly about “The path to victory” and of course it hase the theme of its season The Master Quest, but other than that it’s a pretty classic one
Season 6
Again, we have an opening that is supposed to introduce a new region, so of course the first line has “brand new world” in it. But then it takes a very different approach from the third season : finding your way and becoming hero.
Note that it doesn’t say Pokémon At the beginning, but it does mention Pallet Town.
Season 7
This one I find very interesting, because we can see the second theme shift to a softer approach, it’s not about being the best or winning anymore, it’s more about the battles and the challenges themselves, and of course it’s about This Dream.
This shows a good evolution in the values that the Pokémon franchise was trying convey, we are not here to all be champions (as Ash lost the previous leagues and will lose this one), we’re here for the experience.
Season 8
This graph is another one where the title (well not the title exactly, but the name of the season) has a great presence, but it’s even more noticeable since the other themes almost have nothing, even if I wanted to put more points, they would be red to represent all the “unbeatable” and “undefeatable”.
Season 9
Note : from here on the openings are 30s long instead of 45s, I changed the scale to be increase readability.
This high number of keywords is very surprising when you consider that it’s the first opening to be only 30 seconds long, and moreover it is very diverse.
As a fun fact : for many countries that had translated english openings to their languages until then,
this is the first that was broadcast directly in english.
This is even funnier when you notice that it’s the first opening that doesn’t say world.
Season 10
This one could not be more obvious : the first lines state “it’s a brand new game, a brand new world” as its introduction to a new region (Sinnoh).
There is a nice progression from “it’s all about the challenges” → battle → win → master.
Season 11
I don’t have much to say about this one, it’s very typical, playing in known territory but with a good diversity.
Season 12
Like n°10, there is kind of an escalation in the fighting, except there is no mention of the best anymore.
Season 13
This one is super interesting because there is almost no mention of fight or power, (the only point in that category is from the season’s name : Sinnoh League Victors, which I’ve made count as Victory).
This is a real shift in focus and the whole Unova arc (seasons 14, 15 & 16) will follow that new tendency
Season 14
As the season introducing the new region of Unova, this opening doesn’t use the word world but it is mostly about choosing a path
Season 15 & 16
Nothing to add beyond the fact that those two follow the new tendency of focusing more on paths and friends than battle and masters
Season 17
This one is very particular as it is a remix of the first one, so I’m putting the first one beside it to compare, and it is interesting to see that while its length has been divided by two, there is not a lot that is missing.
The music has kept all the spirit that the original one wanted to convey.
Season 18
While this opening doesn’t directly refer to season 6, it does start with “you’re just a kid on a quest” when I Wanna be a Hero started with “A kid from Pallet Town”, but it might just be me making strange correlation at this point.
Apart from that, we can notice that the lyrics have shifted back to a state closer to the first seasons, with more battle and fights.
Season 19
Strange to see that this one doesn’t seem to have anything in it, but really, it’s very empty even with the full text, it has three sentences :
I stand tall ‘cause I know I’m a Winner Knock me down, I’ll just get up again You’ve met your match, yeah, I’m no beginner
And the rest is just Pokémon and Gotta catch’em all; however, a very big thing to notice is the fact that Pokémon is not the last word.
Season 20 & 21
I’m putting these two side by side because… otherwise there’s nothing much to say. This emptyness is kinda interesting in itself though, it’s not much about the battles anymore but it’s not a lot about friendship either.
And I think it actually speaks about why people have criticized the Sun & Moon arc a lot (apart from its new art style which is a subjective preference).
In those lyrics, just like the anime itself, the theme is discovery, it is made for people who don’t know Pokémon and need to learn about it, just like the protagonists go to a Pokémon school. And it shows that Game Freak knows that their old public have aged and don’t watch the anime anymore, and now they have to renew their audience.
Season 22
And to follow what I just said, now that the audience is familiarized with the franchise, we can go back on track with the battles (or more precisely here the challenge)
UPDATE : Season 23
This theme is a revolution in the Pokémon franchise as it is the first one to not directly say “Pokémon”,
and you’ll notice that it is empty in the “Fight/Victory” category too.
Of course the Journey is the main focus of the song since it is the focus of the season too (even in the title).
You can really feel the shift in the atmosphere, just like Pokémon Journeys itself is a big shift in the way the show is handled,
being named just “Pokémon” in Japan, and being the only season since season 2 that doesn’t follow the path of a mainline videogame
(but season 2 didn’t have a videogame launched at the same time so the circumstances were different).
Conclusion
Well it was fun, and it certainly made me think about the evolution of the series.
If you want a graphical representation of the evolution here is one :
We can see that the word Pokémon has decreased and stabilized around 2-3 occurences (but Pokémon Journeys might be setting a whole new trend).
The Battle/Victory category has been steadily decreasing, giving its place to the Friends/Adventure but it has pretty big spikes from time to time.
Also the Ideals category has stayed pretty consistent over the years.
I hope this article was as entertaining for you to read as it was for me to write.
PS : I’ll make a note (though a bit late) that I personally discovered Pokémon with the season 8 in French and I watched fansubs of the Japanese versions from season 12, 13, 14, 17 and 23.
If you felt in any way that I was biased towards those openings, that might be why.
PPS : I’m sorry for all my colorblind friends, but I had to use a lot of colors so sometimes the shades are really close to each other
Thank you for reading this to the end, see you next time.