Team Rocket planned to wear black outfits originally? (Kanto Season)

[Garren]

Saw this on the Pokemon 4chan board, no clue what magazine it's from, but judging by the article, it's prior to Pokemon anime hitting America, so relatively early in the franchise's history.

I can't imagine why an English magazine would randomly recolor an official Team Rocket character art so, um, were they originally planned to wear black in any pre-release material? I've never seen them depicted in black prior to Best Wishes, so I found this pretty interesting.

 

[Dogasu]

A CoroCoro magazine that came out like a month before the TV series debuted on TV-Tokyo showed them with black uniforms as well.

...which is weird, because even by that point, the coloring for those first batch of episodes would have been long done. Back in those days, hand painting the animation cels (because remember, this was years before they switched over to digital ink and paint) was done way in advance, so it's not like the stock art was sent out and then someone decided to change the coloring in the TV series at the last minute. Someone just sent CoroCoro (and, apparently, this English language magazine) the wrong art.

A similar thing happens with some old Orchid-Hakase art, where his hair color (particularly his eyebrows) is all different.

So, I dunno. Maybe they were meant to have black uniforms really early on in production but then someone changed their minds? And then someone forgot to update the stock art and sent it out by mistake? *shrugs*

 

[Adamant]

Most likely. Note the miscolored Brock in the same article - colors probably weren't entirely set in stone when the earliest promotional art got passed around.

In a similar vein, a lot of early art and products for the Disney Aladdin movie had Genie colored yellow.

 

[BugMite]

Looks like their gloves and boots were to be white at the same time... and then the colors of their uniforms were swapped.

I find it funny how chubby that Pikachu plushie is, especially in contrast to the one above.

 

[Cybersai]

If I remember correctly one of the Nintendo Power issues from right before Pokemon hit the U.S. also showed TR in black uniforms. It was one of their early 1998 issues....I think maybe the one with Yoshi's Story featured on the cover, but I might be wrong.