"I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was! To catch them is my real test, to train them is my cause!"

Alright, what's the next line? Whether you're already singing along to yourself or you have no idea what I'm talking about, welcome. This is the Pokemon TV Retrospective, our new and comprehensive look back at one of the longest running and most successful cartoon series ever created. We think it's a good time to reflect on it, as the show is currently approaching its 14th anniversary since it first began airing in Japan -- and its latest season, Pokemon Black & White, is set to premiere here in America this Saturday, February 12.

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It'll be the 14th season. Seriously, Pokemon's been going on that long. The English dub of the anime got started in September of 1998 in the States, and it's chronicled one long, continuous story ever since. Ash Ketchum's quest -- to be the very best. The sheer quantity of content that's been produced in that span of time is staggering -- there have been over 675 episodes created and 13 spin-off movies, many of which have debuted theatrically.Compare those totals to another well known staple of animation in America -- The Simpsons. Fox's on-going Sunday night comedy series has been on the air for more years and has had more seasons, but the episode count for it is about 475 right now, and there's only been one film featuring Springfield. Looking at it that way, Ash and Pikachu blew past Homer and Bart years ago.So what's the secret? What's made the Pokemon anime series so enduring, when other cartoons based on video game properties more normally last only a couple of years? What keeps Pokemon so continuously popular, and why is it that Ash, after over a decade of traveling and training, still hasn't become a Pokemon Master? We'll dive into all those questions and more right here, so read on, Rhydons:When it first began airing in April of 1997 in Japan, the goal of the Pokemon anime was pretty straightforward -- it would take the plot of the popular Pokemon Game Boy games, which were about a year old by that point, and adapt them into about a year and a half of television. A kid takes off on a journey in a world full of monsters, seeking to catch those monsters and train them for battle -- and ultimately become the champion of the Pokemon battling league. Simple. Easy. But, from the start, the cartoon began to separate itself from its source material and take some creative liberties.You can see it happening from the very first episode. We meet our hero, Ash Ketchum , (whose English last name is a play on the series tagline of "Gotta Catch 'Em All) and we see that his journey to become a Pokemon Master is plagued with problems from the start. He oversleeps on his 10th birthday, the day he's allowed to go and pick up his first Pokemon and begin his journey, and when he finally does show up to see his hero and mentor Professor Oak, all three of the available starter monsters have already been given away to other new trainers. Ash gets stuck with a leftover creature that the Professor just happens to have laying around -- a troublesome and headstrong Pikachu that refuses to stay in his Poke Ball.That intro to the show set up the entire feel of Ash's journey pretty well, as while the cartoon mostly sticks to the same story structure as the video games it's adapting, it also isn't afraid to mix things up or take off on tangents from time to time. In the games, for example, all new trainers pick from either a Bulbasaur, a Charmander or a Squirtle as their first monsters -- Pikachu isn't an option.But you know what? It worked. Diverging just enough from what players of the games had already seen for themselves on their Game Boy screens helped the anime find its own voice, and the ridiculousness of it all just kind of gelled. Ash's Pikachu managed to take down monsters like Geodude and Onix in the early episodes, even though the attacks he used against them would have been completely ineffective in the games.Ash managed to find and capture each of the three normal starter monsters out in the wild, or through other means -- and that couldn't have happened in the games either.But it's funny how things have a way of coming full circle. The changes that the cartoon introduced into the basic Pokemon RPG narrative ended up becoming so popular and so well received that, ultimately, the games themselves were altered accordingly -- Nintendo published, called a "Special Pikachu Edition" of the originalandGame Boy games, and it brought Ash's adventure right back around into the gameplay. Your starter monster was Pikachu, he walked around behind you in the overworld scenes instead of staying in a Poke Ball, you could capture Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle all separately through new plot events and more. For Nintendo to recognize and regard the anime so highly to go back into its games and implement those changes -- well, the cartoon must have been getting something right.Though Pokemon Yellow still won't let you kill an Onix with a Thunderbolt.