My eBay-won issues are starting to arrive. One of them is the Jason Priestley issue from April 1992, and it's my first exposure to the 128-page era of DA. But we've been focusing a lot on the magazine's glory years in this thread - I think it's time for us to take a gander at what Disney Adventures started to devolve into in the later part of the '90s. And so, here's the other issue that arrived yesterday, September 1999...otherwise known as "the Pokémon issue".
This issue was actually quite integral to my childhood, as it's what got me interested in Pokémon in the first place. But that doesn't change the fact that it comes from a time when Disney Adventures was beginning to evolve into something a lot less cool than it used to be. There wasn't nearly as much variety in their pages as there once was. Need proof?
Open up the front cover and you'll find this fold-out ad for Kids' WB's 1999-2000 season, proudly displaying the fact that the "Pokémon" anime was out of syndication and now rubbing elbows with Batman and the Men in Black. Unfolding the ad further revealed promotions for the premieres of "Detention" and "Batman Beyond", but I think we can all tell what the real draw was here.
By this time, Zip Code had been renamed Mailbox, and it was a lot less fun than it used to be. DA had begun the process of asking its readers to send in responses to pointless questions - like this rather heartless example of what some people would trade for tickets to see their favorite music group in concert. I wonder if Alex W. ever apologized to her little brother after N'Sync broke up.
Pokémon are
everywhere in this issue. Here's an ad for "Pokémon Snap", which had just come out for the Nintendo 64. After I got the game a few months later, I remember seeing this ad again and saying "Hey, you can't find Caterpie in this game!"
This is all that remains of Ticket. The DA staffers don't even have to scout for celebrity information anymore - the readers just tell them what to talk about. (I didn't scan the "Jett Jackson" comic because, frankly, it bored the hell out of me.)
Here's the article everyone came to see. I think "Pokémon Stadium" had already come out in Japan, which explains where they got N64 models for all 151 Pokémon for this thing. Can you figure out which Pokémon is missing? (Hint: It's Tangela.)
When I read this issue, I had only the most basic knowledge of what "Pokémon" was - I hardly knew any of the specific monsters aside from Pikachu, the starters, and maybe Poliwhirl (I don't know why Nintendo kept promoting Poliwhirl - nobody on the anime even got one until Season 3). In any case, this list helped me out a lot...
...Although some things still confused me for a while. Note that there's no indication of evolutionary lines here, so I had to discern them for myself. I thought Farfetch'd evolved into Doduo, I thought Cloyster came out of its shell and evolved into Gastly, and I thought Gyarados somehow evolved into Lapras. (Give me a break, I was new to the franchise!)
"Pokémon Snap" was incredibly easy - you could beat it in about an hour and a half, if not less. So articles like this that gave tips on how to win always seemed extremely redundant to me. The game only had something like four controls, so you were bound to figure all this stuff out eventually.
By the way, that disembodied Justin Timberlake head is part of a contest that was going on in this issue - if you found them all, you could win a trip to see
The Lion King on Broadway. Seems like unusual criteria for such a prize, but whatever.
Let's take a quick break from late '90s Pokémania - this is Disney Adventures, after all, and they do have certain obligations to fulfill. Like this boringly designed ad for the 1999-2000 One Saturday Morning lineup, for instance. Compared to the Kids' WB ad at the beginning, it's easy to see why this block had trouble drawing an audience.
Back to the Kanto region we go. This comic adaptation of the episode "Clefairy and the Moon Stone" originally appeared in Nintendo Power, but saw a reprint here over the course of three issues. This was actually my first exposure to the "Pokémon" anime. I had previously heard the name Team Rocket mentioned online, and until I saw this, I thought they were a rap group. (I swear I'm not making this up.)
The other big attraction in this issue is a five-page excerpt from J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", which was just about to be released in America. This issue has a lot of firsts for my childhood - this was my introduction to the Harry Potter series too.
Gosh,
more Pokémon crap! They got the games, the anime, the trading cards - they didn't miss anything in this issue. No wonder I became so enamored with the franchise after this.
Okay, let's talk a little bit about this. "2 B A Master" might just be the most embarrassing piece of Pokémon memorabilia that I own, and I can guarantee that I'd never buy this today. In addition to the complete PokéRap (which most people love but I just find to be "meh") and that mind-numbingly dumb "Team Rocket's Rockin'" song (Eric Stuart can sing, but not in his James voice), it also contains "Misty's Song", the most blatantly PokéShippy thing ever made, which still confuses American-only viewers to this day. This is a big part of why I made the jump to the Japanese version of the show.
Okay, enough of that rant...
...It's time for another one. This is one of those stupid "Super Music Action Ready Team" comics, and a prime example of how far the Comics Zone had fallen since the departure of Heidi MacDonald. All those great comics based on the Disney Afternoon shows? Reprints of Jeff Smith's "Bone"? Excerpts from "Simpsons Comics"? All gone under the editorial management of Steve Behling. Instead, we get Justin Timberlake teaching mole people how to dance. Whee.
Oh man, I would have loved to own that Iron Giant figure on the right. Considering how badly (and unjustly)
The Iron Giant bombed, I'm sure I can still find them in great supply somewhere.