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I’m back after a Rosh Hashana break. Here’s a new one, and I’ll be back with a Weekender tomorrow! — Dan
The Illusionist Who Made a Pokémon Disappear
In 1996, video game designer Satoshi Tajiri introduced Pokémon to the world. His first creation, a Nintendo Game Boy series called Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow, took the world by storm, and now, the Pokémon franchise includes a lot more than just video games. Pokémon regularly tops the list of the most valuable media franchises, earning more than $100 billion — more than Mickey Mouse and his friends, per some sources. There’s no stopping Pokémon, it seems.
Unless you claim to be psychic — oh, and probably have colorable legal claim against the franchise.
Uri Geller isn’t a Pokémon. He’s a human and, unlike Pikachu and Charizard, exists in real life. He’s a well-known illusionist but a controversial one — he, speciously — claims to have actual psychic powers. He is most notable for his “ability” to use nothing more than brain power and force of will to bend metal objects, and, in particular, metal spoons.
The character pictured above, on the other hand, actually is a Pokémon. It’s a Psychic-type and uses psychic attacks in battle. It’s recognizable by the metal spoon it is holding — according to the Pokémon Wiki, the spoon was “forged by [the Pokemon’s] psychic powers.” In English, it’s name is “Kadabra” (and it evolves from a Pokémon called “Abra,” which I appreciate), but in the original Japanese, it’s name, Romanized, is “Yungeraa,” which sounds a lot like “Uri Geller.” Those three factors — psychic, wielding a spoon, and named Yungeraa — make Kadabra feel very similar to Uri Geller.
Geller wasn’t too happy about that, as he’d later share with Kotaku:
“I was in Tokyo,” he begins, immediately distracted by telling me how famous he is in Japan, how he has been for decades, “doing big TV shows there ever since the early ‘70s.” Come 2000, he’s inundated by children in a mall, all clutching copies of a card. “They were shouting, ‘Yungeller!’” the Japanese name of Kadabra, a Pokémon undeniably based on Uri Geller, with his name in an Anglicized version of its Japanese name, ユンゲラー. “And when I held the card in my hand, I said, ‘Hang on, that’s my name on the card.’ No one had ever contacted me from Nintendo Pokémon. And, you know, I was pretty angry at that.”
So in 2000, he sued the Pokémon company, claiming that Kadabra was an unauthorized parody of him. And — he had a case. In fact, the Pokémon company didn’t put up much of a fight. As the Pokémon Wiki notes, “Kadabra's katakana (ユンゲラー) was very similar to Uri Geller's transliteration into katakana (ユリゲラー),” and if you add in the spoon, that’s an unlikely coincidence to say the least. Geller demanded £60 million ($80 million) from Nintendo, the deeper pockets at the time, for the unauthorized use of his identity. And while he never saw any money from the suit, Nintendo capitulated in another way: they stopped printing Pokémon cards with Kadabra on it. As Kotaku reported, “no card has featured the yellow mustachioed fox-thing since 2003.” At least, not until 2020.
That year, Geller took to Twitter to apologize for his lawsuit. While he was angry at Nintendo and the Pokémon Company, he was convinced to change his mind by the many fans who wrote to him, asking him to let the Pokémon come back into circulation. Today, you’ll find Kadabra back among the other Pokémon in his rightful place in the packs of cards.
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More About Pokémon
Today’s Bonus fact: Kadabra wasn’t the only Pokémon character to vanish. In December 1997, a Pokémon anime episode called Dennō Senshi Porygon (“Electric Soldier Porygon” in English) aired in Japan, featuring a Pokémon called Porygon. It also featured a sequence where Pikachu unleashes a bunch of lightning, but for reasons which made sense in the episode, the animators didn’t use golden lightning bolts. Instead, according to Kotaku, 'the animators used a rapidly-strobing technique that flashed red and blue lights on the screen.” Unfortunately, many of the kids watching at home were photosensitive and reports of dizziness, blurred vision, and nausea came rolling in. The bad press was so bad that Dennō Senshi Porygon has not been reaired since, and Porygon — despite not being the culprit — rarely appears in the Pokémon TV series.
From the Archives: Pokémon Go to Jail: Pokémon are so popular, people counterfeit popsicle sticks!
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And thanks! — Dan