Pokemon It is a franchise that has accompanied entire generations of fans in its anime format for decades. What has also been the point of origin of curious stories of all kinds.
There we have the most popular and representative case, where the original series applied a series of visual effects that ended up triggering a series of induced epileptic seizures in photosensitive children.
But it turns out that this is not the only dark story in the anime mythology of this saga. In fact, there is a much less well-known case, but still somewhat twisted.
It is about the story behind the production and loss of two lost episodes of Pokemon: Black & White. A couple of episodes that were ready to air but ended up being left in limbo due to a national tragedy.
In the end, they would have passed 12 whole years since the time when both stories should have been broadcast on TV channels in Japan, but since then it is only known that they are out there, complete and canned.
Today we finally managed to take a relatively important step to recover them. But not everything is as perfect as it might sound.
The 2 lost episodes of Pokémon: Black & White are recovered: in the form of their original script
The story goes more or less like this. By the spring of 2011 the anime of Pokemon: Black & White he was building up to a dramatic arc that involved Team Rocket trying to use meteorite-weaponizing technology to take over Unova.
This arc was reaching its final phase of closure composed of two episodes, which received the title of Team Rocket Vs. Team Plasma Part 1 and Team Rocket vs. Team Plasma Part 2. In the plot, the leader of Team Rocket, Giovanni, obtained a mysterious and powerful rock called meteonite, with the intention of using its power to appropriate the Unova region.
Team Plasma stole the Metheonite, but they lost control causing a meteor from a nearby museum to set off a series of catastrophes across the city, destroying entire buildings until our heroes saved the day.
So far everything looked pretty ordinary for a Pokémon episode. The small great detail is that just before the broadcast of these two episodes, the country was a victim of the Great East Japan Earthquake and its subsequent tsunami that year 2011 that caused great devastation in several cities.
So the TV network suspended the broadcast of both episodes as a gesture of mourning and respect for the catastrophe. The supposed promise is that in the next repeat lap they would now show them, but that never happened.
Recently, a fan found someone with copies of the episode scripts, and said person was willing to sell them for $4,000. The Pokémon community organized and raised the full amount, but then the subject decided to donate the scripts free of charge.
The organizers of the collection refunded their money to those who cooperated and translated the scripts from their original language to be accessible to more fans. And here they are now free for download:
The animated episodes are still missing. But this is better than nothing.