Atomic Bomb Attacks Directly Responsible for Pokemon?

[Zeta]

Consider this:

America blew part of Japan to high heaven, doing huge physical and emotional damage.

The fear the Japanese continued to have of follow-up attacks was expressed through the 1950s movie "Godzilla".

Godzilla spawned numerous similar TV shows and concepts, one of them Ultraman.

Ultraman began to use the monster he fought in battle by keeping them in small capsules.

Satoshi Tajiri is inspired to expand this idea into Pokemon.



So if we hadn't bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, there may have never been a Pikachu.

 

[Mozz]

Yet another reason it was a great idea :-D

 

[Doctor Oak]

I'm pretty sure Godzilla has much deeper roots than post-war Japan's Nuclear Fear. Afterall, stories of The Kappa (Which Godzilla... and in a way Golduck) are sort of based on were around a long time before Atomic Weapons...

Interesting point though - but worth pointing out that Tajiri was more obsessed with the idea of Bug Collecting than Super-Monster-Battling. So really, without extreme nerdiness, we also wouldn't have Pokemon

 

[Dogasu]

However, despite all the monster battling in the original Godzilla movie, it is, first and foremost, an anti-atomic weapons film. The ones that followed probably weren't created with nuclear protests in mind, but that's how the franchise started.

And shouldn't this thread be titled "Atomic Bomb Attacks Indirectly Responsible for Pokemon?"

 

[birdboy2000]

I think it was more that nuclear radiation was more the popular explanation at the time, and Godzilla would have become a sixty-foot-tall lizard or whatnot for some other reason anyway. ^_^

 

[Dogasu]

I had heard that the director explicitely said that he created the film as a way to express his anti-nuke philosophy.