At first, you almost instantly fall in love with the show, mainly because of its overall premise, Pokemon, and the need to catch 'em all. Its that feeling of nostalgia, or for the sake of all the kids who are playing the games now, the feeling of being able to watch what you're doing while you also play your game. I had that same feeling too, all the way up to the episode where Sabrina, the Saffron City Psychic Pokemon gym leader, decided to turn Brock and Misty into dolls. After that I skipped through a couple of episodes because I felt boredom creep up.
The first episode has Ash Ketchum scrambling to wake up to get his new Pokemon and start out becoming a Pokemon trainer, but little do we know that the further this show goes on, the further we realize he is an extreme dumbass. Granted, he may be 10 years old and a newbie, but can, and I quote from an episode, "can this kid really be that dense?" But I digress, throughout the series he does gain an incredible amount of experience ad he does grow up to the point where he's not a complete idiot. But that still doesn't help out the entire series as a whole.
The story is simple: Catch Pokemon and train them. To further elaborate: Make sure to have an adventure in between and fight off two imbeciles who want to steal your Pokemon. That's it in a nutshell. And I know, this is a kids show, but honestly, I was hoping for a bit more considering that both the manga version and the actual videogames seem to have a better story. Its like every episode, there's always one person who needs help with something, and its usually an easy task, or if its a gym leader problem, he needs outside help to beat them. Either way, it became too repetitive for me. I will say though, one episode made me want to punch the computer screen because it was different, but it was designed to make little kids cry: Ash's loss of Butterfree.
The characters are usually one-dimensional. I wish that they would expand on these one-shot characters to have me actually care for them. Like Samurai. He's just there to further the plot and says he wants to battle Ash again after his failed attempt at battling him with a Metapod. Characters like these show up often, and it gets annoying. I hear that later episodes past season 2 they change, but I didn't feel like watching anymore to find out.
Since I watched the American Dub, and growing up with it, I like the music. Most of the background stuff remained the same as it was from the games, just not 8-bit sounding. And the 4kids songs, well....as I said, I grew up with them, so they still have a soft spot with me.
Now, as angry as I am about the show, its not to say it isn't enjoyable. There are times when you can crack a smile because of either how cute or how awesome it was to watch Ash actually do something without having a treat handed to him or being offered assistance, it can be fun. I liked the Sabrina episode til about halfway, because it became too predictable, Haunter was just funny. So, I give this show a solid 6. It could have been better, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. At least it wasn't as bad, in my personal opinion, as Sailor Moon.
