The Pokemon Franchise In The Turn Of The 21st Century

Transmedia Storytelling and Trasnational Fandoms: The Pokemon Franchise in the Turn of the 21st Century

In the late 1990s, Times Magazine had the following headline stamped on its cover page: “Pokémon: For many kids it’s now an addiction—cards, video games, toys, a new movie. Is it bad for them?” That edition came out only five years after the Pokémon universe emerged out of the inventive mind of the Japanese video game designer Satoshi Tajiri. In the following years, Pokémon rapidly became a worldwide phenomenon, leading many to even consider it as “Japan’s most successful export.” With passionate fans from across Asia and the Americas consuming all kinds of its texts, the Pokémon franchise became the hallmark of one the most prominent examples

Regardless of the media format, different levels of interaction between fans engendered creative artworks, in-person conventions, communities in virtual spaces, and many others. Although fans are now capable of interacting on a global scale through fast-paced, participatory, and diversified media systems, the early stages of media fandom primarily encompassed a much smaller scale. According to Coppa, with the advent of the Internet in the 90s, fandoms underwent a form of modernism that dramatically changed their interactions with one another. However, it was not until a later period of that same decade that Pokémon was first broadcasted in Japan. First aired in the United States in 1998 on the TBII (Cartoon Network and Warner Brothers Network back then), Pokémon easily captured the American audiences as one the most relevant transnational

These examples offer an important insight into the development of Pokémon as a transnational fandom. The difficulty for American audiences in finding animes (due to availability and translation, mostly) largely explains why they became “some of the earliest adopters of online