Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon - Hardcover

Tobin, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822332507 ISBN 13: 9780822332503

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Initially developed in Japan by Nintendo as a computer game, Pokémon swept the globe in the late 1990s. Based on a narrative in which a group of children capture, train, and do battle with over a hundred imaginary creatures, Pokémon quickly diversified into an array of popular products including comic books, a TV show, movies, trading cards, stickers, toys, and clothing. Pokémon eventually became the top grossing children's product of all time. Yet the phenomenon fizzled as quickly as it had ignited. By 2002, the Pokémon craze was mostly over. Pikachu’s Global Adventure

describes the spectacular, complex, and unpredictable rise and fall of Pokémon in countries around the world.

In analyzing the popularity of Pokémon, this innovative volume addresses core debates about the globalization of popular culture and about children’s consumption of mass-produced culture. Topics explored include the origins of Pokémon in Japan’s valorization of cuteness and traditions of insect collecting and anime; the efforts of Japanese producers and American marketers to localize it for foreign markets by muting its sex, violence, moral ambiguity, and general feeling of Japaneseness; debates about children’s vulnerability versus agency as consumers; and the contentious question of Pokémon’s educational value and place in school. The contributors include teachers as well as scholars from the fields of anthropology, media studies, sociology, and education. Tracking the reception of Pokémon in Japan, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Israel, they emphasize its significance as the first Japanese cultural product to enjoy substantial worldwide success and challenge western dominance in the global production and circulation of cultural goods.

Contributors. Anne Allison, Linda-Renée Bloch, Helen Bromley, Gilles Brougere, David Buckingham, Koichi Iwabuchi, Hirofumi Katsuno, Dafna Lemish, Jeffrey Maret, Julian Sefton-Green, Joseph Tobin, Samuel Tobin, Rebekah Willet, Christine Yano

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph Tobin is the Nadine Mathis Basha Professor of Early Childhood Education at Arizona State University. He is the author of “Good Guys Don’t Wear Hats”: Children’s Talk about the Media, editor of Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education, and coauthor of Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the United States.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"The contributors to this volume are the smartest scholars working today in the areas of global media and children's media. This book tells an entertaining and surprising tale of how the little Japanese Pokemon transformed children's culture and global media economics. The changes that Pikachu wrought are only the beginning of fascinating new trends in role-playing games, video games, cartoons, and toys and the accelerated spread of such fads via the Internet."--Ellen Seiter, author of" Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture"

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Pikachu's Global Adventure

The Rise and Fall of PokemonBy Joseph Tobin

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 Joseph Tobin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822332503

Chapter One

Introduction Joseph Tobin

In the last years of the last millennium a new consumer phenomenon developed in Japan and swept across the globe. Pokemon, which began life as a piece of software to be played on Nintendo's Game Boy (a hand-held computer for playing video games), quickly diversified into a comic book, a television show, a movie, trading cards, stickers, small toys, and ancillary products such as backpacks and T-shirts. Entering into production and licensing agreements with Japanese companies-Game Freak, Creatures, Shogakukan, and TV Tokyo, among others-and with companies abroad, including their wholly owned subsidiary Nintendo of America, Wizards of the Coast (now a division of Hasbro), 4Kids Entertainment, and the Warner Brothers Network, Nintendo created a set of interrelated products that dominated children's consumption from approximately 1996 to 2001. Pokemon is the most successful computer game ever made, the top globally selling trading-card game of all time, one of the most successful children's television programs ever broadcast, the top-grossing movie ever released in Japan, and among the five top earners in the history of films worldwide. At Pokemon's height of popularity, Nintendo executives were optimistic that they had a product, like Barbie and Legos, that would sell forever, and that, like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, would become enduring icons worldwide. But by the end of 2000, Pokemon fever had subsided in Japan and the United States, even as the products were still being launched in such countries as Brazil, Italy, and Israel. By the end of 2001, Pokemon's control of shelf space and consumer consciousness, already in steep decline in Japan and the United States, was beginning to fade globally. As the Pokemon craze comes to an end we are left with the task of analyzing its significance and understanding the dynamics of its rise and, just as interesting, its fall. To analyze these phenomena, I hosted a Pokemon conference in Honolulu, in November 2000. Presenters came from Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, Israel, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, from the fields of anthropology, communication, sociology, and media studies. The papers presented at the conference serve as the cornerstone for this book, which tells the story of Pikachu's global adventure and discusses what the Pokemon phenomenon can teach us about children's engagement with the new media, Japan's rise as a culture- and software-exporting nation, and the globalization of children's popular culture.

NINTENTIONALITY

I can introduce the central theme of the book by presenting two Pokemon-like versions of the rise and fall of Pokemon.

Version One

A group of men sit around a table at their corporate headquarters on the outskirts of Kyoto plotting to capture the hearts and minds (not to mention the money) of the children of the world. Other companies have managed in the past to cast a spell of consumer desire over such market segments as American girls five to nine or Japanese boys eight to twelve; but the Nintendo plan is far more ambitious and nefarious: they aim to brainwash children everywhere, young and old, boys and girls, and to implant in them a desire for an endless stream of interconnected products including video games, videos, trading cards, and ancillary merchandise. To serve this evil purpose, the Nintendo masters enlist Tajiri Satoshi, a brilliant, reclusive young game designer, to author a new video game. Tajiri and his team at Game Freak in Tokyo come up with the idea of a mythical world in which young "trainers" capture and train over 150 imaginary wild creatures. The genius of this plan is that just as the youthful trainers in this mythical world collect "pocket monsters," seeking to "catch 'em all," so will the gullible and vulnerable children of the world be hoodwinked into spending the majority of their waking hours and a good portion of their parents' money on purchasing all available Pokemon merchandise.

The plan works just as the Nintendo brain trust hoped. Pokemon spreads quickly through Japan, first as a hand-held video game cartridge, then as a comic book, which provides character development and back story for the Pocket Monsters, the trainers, and their adversaries. The Pokemon masterminds next introduce the television show, a show that not only entrances its viewers, but one afternoon in 1997 gives over seven hundred of their young Japanese fans seizures.

The next step is expansion to the U.S. market. The directors of Nintendo in Kyoto direct their minions at Nintendo of America to flood the United States with Pokemon Game Boy cartridges, television show episodes, trading cards, and ancillary merchandise. Nintendo and their partners release the first Pokemon movie in Japan and then, six months later, in the United States. Pokemon trading cards soon become children's most sought-after possessions. The media begin carrying stories of Pokemon-crazed kids cheating, stealing, and fighting over Pokemon cards. The scarcity of the most desirable "hologram" cards produces an overheated Pokemon commodity market, in which cards purchased in stores in packets of eleven for four dollars get resold for as much as a hundred dollars apiece. The story of Pokemon's conquest of Japan and of North America is repeated across Europe, Latin America, East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and the Philippines.

As the millennium draws to a close, the Pokemon directors open a Poke-center in Tokyo and plan stores for other major metropolitan areas. All Nippon Airways introduces a fleet of Poke-planes (747s painted with drawings of Pikachu and friends). Disneyland-like Pokemon theme parks are planned. New episodes of the TV series, each introducing a new pocket monster, are broadcast on Saturday mornings, first in Japan, and soon after in Hong Kong, the United States, and Europe. Nintendo creates a master plan for the systematic release of Pokemon products in a widening arc of world markets. A third movie is released. New series of the Game Boy game are in production and planning. The release of each new character compels children to return to the stores to buy new cards and games. Nintendo has created the perfect children's commodity-one with perfect synergy between its interconnecting domains (hardware, software, toys, TV, movies, cards) and one whose purchase can never be completed. It is in fact impossible to catch, or buy, them all.

By the end of 2001 Pokemon has become one of the top-selling toys and games of all time and Nintendo one of the world's richest and most profitable corporations. The profits accumulating in their war chest from Pokemon sales position the Nintendo Corporation to transcend the world of toys and games and become a major global player in the production of the next generation of interactive computers. Nintendo's state-of-the-art gaming computers, which run one of the most demanding of consumer applications, are poised to compete with desktops, cell phones, and notepad computers as the crossover platforms of the new millennium. Nintendo announces that its next systems will be driven by IBM processors. Today, toys and games; tomorrow?

Version Two

The kids of the world are bored. Power Rangers was a fun for a while, but the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822332507
• ISBN 13: 9780822332503
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar