#0025: Talking Pikachu

Who here loved Pokémon growing up? A fair few of you, yeah?

Who here… still loves Pokémon? Not as many of y’all?

Well, I don’t care. I still do. Obviously not with as much luster as I once did, it’s not like I’m still drawing pictures of Squirtle and putting it up on my wall, but I didn’t bail out on the franchise when the heat died down. I play the games when they come out, I try and familiarize myself with each new generation of lizards, blobs and angry rocks, and I’ve still got a whole backlog of Pokémon stuff cluttering my laundry room.

In fact, I’m surprised I hadn’t done a Pokémon item prior to this. I must subconsciously be more attached to the critters than I had assumed. Will I then regret parting with this glorious talking Pikachu? We’ll only know some distant date later. If I become a drugged out hobo sleeping in a pile of his own vomit, you’ll be able to point to this as the single event that led to my demise. Or maybe it was the time I bought a Hanson CD. It’s debatable.


The first thing you’re thinking, if you’re anything like me, is… what’s with that wacky colour scheme? Pikachu doesn’t have any white tinting around his face and tail!

The simple answer is… not known to me. Indeed, I’ve been asking myself this since I acquired it roughly thirteen years ago, but I was a particularly pedantic child with apparently less ambitious mysteries to solve, so hopefully you’ll be able to ignore it for now.

After all, other than that faux paus, this Pikachu is pretty spot-on. He’s got Pikachu’s weird little hunched over shape, his stubby little t-rex arms, and his great big brown stripes. He’s got a little bit of paint wear, particularly in black areas like his nose and the tips of his ears, but to be fair, when we get old, our ears and nose tend to be the first things to falter. He’s still a limber dancer, and his prostate is reasonably sized.

As advertised, the trump card held by this Pika lies in his title of ‘ye talking mouse’, powered by the same curious metallic system as the roaring lizard of yesteryear. This is dapper dandy at first, with his light-up cheeks and his sweet little voice, but eventually you begin to ponder what else he offers beyond that. So far, I haven’t unlocked any other hidden wonders, but I remain optimistic.

Is it just me, or did that start to look really, really wrong? I fear that that video will someday come back to haunt me. Potentially at the most inopportune moment, like during a presidential campaign or en route to the high score in Doodle Jump. Logic dictates that I shouldn’t have then bothered uploading it to Youtube or attaching it to this entry or publishing this entry as a whole… but then I would have wasted three precious minutes of my life for nothing, and I can’t handle that.

This Pikachu is still a bit enigmatic; he was made by TOMY in 1997 (by our Chinese overlords), and his ass spews all sorts of Japanese gobbledygook.


I can make out the phrase ‘todoka’ from exhaustive hiragana lessons of late ’05, but I have no idea what that means. I fear that if I were to try todoka-ing my talking Pikachu, he may never speak again. Come to think of it, I’ve never had to change his battery in all the time I’ve had him, which is more than I can say for most other battery operated toys. Those Japanese, they sure know how to make quality electronics, capable of speech, light and todoka.

A quick squiz at eBay reveals that he was part of a promotional package for the first airing of the television show, and they’ve got a boxed one up for sale at $90.

I wonder how much an unboxed one is worth? Surely more, because now that it’s been unpackaged, you can touch his ass and make him all noisy and shit!

I doubt I’m kidding anyone with that, but now that I’m aware that he was once of value, he seems much more precious to me. Could this lead to a treacherous u-turn that shakes the very legitimacy of INAKA to its core? Probably, but he’s fun to play with, so screw it, I’m keeping him.


Doesn’t he make a fantastic addition to the décor?