An interesting event took place on December 1997 in Japan. There was an episode of the Pokemon anime where the gang encounters a Pokemon called Porygon. Porygon unleashed an attack in the anime that caused flashing lights. As a result of this over 700 people in Japan suffered from seizures. The episode since then has been banned on all television networks in Japan and has never seen the light of day in the USA. Porygon later received new evolutions in later Pokemon games but this Pokemon and its evolutions has yet to make another appearance in the anime. Every pokemon has been in at least one episode of the anime except for Porygon2 and its final evolution Porygon-Z.
This is not the only time Pokemon episodes have been banned.
Another episode of the anime that was shown in Japan featured Ash and his friends enjoying the beach. The episode was banned because the male character known as James was wearing a body suit with huge breasts. He was doing this to win a beauty contest. Interesting enough the episode was aired in the USA twice under the pretense that it was a “lost episode” but the episode was never shown again in the USA. Of course the scene with James and his fake breasts was cut out and yet the episode has still not seen the light of day in the USA.
Pokemon is one of the only known children’s television shows to have outright banned episodes. Normally when an anime is brought to the USA for children they just censor most of it but Pokemon has straight up banned episodes in the USA and even Japan. The amount of banned episodes it has even adds to Pokemon’s popularity even if it isn’t in a good way. Pokemon is popular in so many ways and it’s crazy that it always seems to find a way into real world issues.
Resources:
Takahashi, Takeo, and Yasuo Tsukahara. "Pocket Monster incident and low luminance visual stimuli: special reference to deep red flicker stimulation."Pediatrics International 40.6 (1998): 631-637.
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