Are you old enough to remember when Poliwhirl was pushed as one of the main mascots of Pokemon before they decided he just wasn’t popular enough?
Are you old enough to remember when Poliwhirl was pushed as one of the main mascots of Pokemon before they decided he just wasnt popular enough?
Not really, that was third parties thinking they were slick and using the Pokemon with the literal hypnosis swirl on its belly to try and subliminally message boomers about how Pokemon is the devil and brainwashing their kids to commit sin by believing in things like magic, evolution and being accepting of those damn filthy Japs (two nukes wasn't enough) and their perverted media.
only americans were moronic enough to believe any of that
This is a myth pushed by zoomers who got confused by the manga. Poli was never meant to be a mascot he was just Reds bro in the manga
Core audience didn't know what a manga was back then, whirl was a shillmon
This looks more like the designers just picked some Pokemon they thought looked cool.
It looks more like you weren't around back then is what it looks like, but if you have to cope you just go ahead and cope feller
It is. I am a boomer and was around back then. Pokemania marketing was more varied. It wasn’t like today where they only market the shillmons of the generation and forget about everything else.
This.
First Pokemon I ever saw was a random poster with a Geodude on it, nothing else, it was weird but frick man I wanted to know more he looked cool suddenly everyone at school was talking about it...
First pokemon I ever saw was this exact picture
I was 6 and my mom handed me a bunch of cards someone at her work had given her
Yes I was there, I think it was a personal favorite of someone in the company. Poli was on the NYC pokecenter for a long time. He's very distinct but he doesn't have that cute/cool factor ala Pika/zard. If I remember correctly Clefairy was also pushed and that didn't really work out either.
I got a tape in the mail and some lady introduced the series to me. I actually dismissed Pokemon at the some due to a superficial similarly to "Bumpity Boo", but I was very young then.
>not going for the much netter example
you're going to make the kiddos think Poliwhirl being a psuedo-mascot is a lie
*better
Looks more like they chose whatever was easiest to shape marshmallows into
Do none of you research this franchise before posting here? Multiple interviews, from different people and sources, clearly illustrate that Poliwhirl was considered to be a forefront mascot, partially because he was Tajiri's favorite, but that they also admitted that, in the early days of its release, marketing tried throwing everything to the wall to see what stuck. (Look at the earliest commercials Western commercial, and they treat Pokemon like generic spooky monsters.) Pikachu being the mascot was a fluke, he just was popular (which one Dev stated to be because of the circumstances of Pikachu's introduction in the game. He specifically made Pikachu's encounter-rate low in Viridian Forest to make it more rare and special, just because he liked the creature and, to their claim, didn't want people focusing on it because then it'd be less special to them, but it backfired)
But to say, "Nah, I didn't experience personally, so it's not real," when we have both circumstantial evidence from the time period like
along with early commercials and merchandise, while also having literal interviews is asinine. If you didn't know that, that's fine, but why add to a discussion to say its fake or uniformed when you really don't have anything to add to the conversation? Obviously it's wrong to say explicitly that Poliwhirl was the old intended mascot, but he was a contender, as were many other Pokemon at the time, and to deny that is just as wrong.
A lot of people that use this board now weren't even alive during Pokemania, so it's easy for them to try and manipulate the truth out of jealousy. Those of us that were there know the following mons were shillmons for Gen 1:
>Pikachu
>Meowth
>Jigglypuff
>Bulbasaur
>Charmander
>Charizard
>Squirtle
>Clefairy
>Psyduck
>Poliwhirl
>Mewtwo
Secondary shillmons:
>Venusaur
>Blastoise
>Geodude
>Arcanine
>Chansey
>Eevee
>Snorlax
I mean, just check out the choices of Player Token in the 1999 Pokemon Monopoly
Gengar was also on a ton of things.
it's interesting how many of these pokemon Eevee eventually beat out
>Geodude
I don't remember ever seeing retro geodude merch. Does anybody have examples because that's the most interesting to me
Not that anon, but I had one of these as a kid.
Graveler, but my sister owns this from all the way back when.
All of those were because of the anime, mewtwo wasn't promoted until the movie
>generic spooky monsters
Exactly, Catch them all was the tag line. It wouldn't make sense to promote a select group. The PokeRap was a thing
I had one of those squirting poliwag toys from Burger King and lost it at the grocery store when I was little 🙁
I am and still have a Poliwhirl plush from that era
He was very much a prescence in the early marketing materials. I remember I used a poli-bro during my original red run right up until like celadon city. The anime even gave misty a poliwhirlfor a time.
It was Tajiri's favorite Pokemon, so I always thought it made sense it had a presence in early marketing.
I remember it being one of the B-tier shillmons along with psyduck, meowth, eevee, snorlax, etc.
Yes but mostly for merch and tcg
I'm old enough to knopw how much /vp/ exagerated that.
same thing happened to Jigglypuff, amirite?
Yeah
I certainly do. I had a little Poliwhirl figurine, but I'm not sure where I got it from. Maybe a happy meal or something. I dropped it in the toilet while I was peeing and was horrified, so I fished it out and doused it with my mom's perfume to mask the smell. Obviously didn't work for shit and my mom got mad and told me to wash my hands. We washed the Poliwhirl too but it never got rid of the sickeningly sweet perfume odor. I must've lost it when we moved several years later. Good times.
You always say Poliwhirl got shilled back then but then show the same two pictures over and over and no other proof
To think it went from a potential mascot, to a Gym Leader's signature Pokémon, to not even being allowed into the newer games...
/ourguy/ https://discord.gg/uPCrZrS6
They probably thought Poliwhirl was worth shilling because it has a similar "x factor" to what Hello Kitty has: No mouth.
Part of Hello Kitty's success hinges on the fact that the character has no mouth. You can never see her true emotions at any given time (important for merch), which meant that kids were able to project their own emotions onto the character and bond with it. Poliwhirl had no mouth and was cuter than poliwrath, so they figured it was worth a shot and maybe it would stick.
kino design