How the ORIGINAL Pokemon Theme Song Changed a Generation

0:07 [Music] any child of the late 90s will recognize these synth chords drums kicking in that unforgettable melody going off the vocals pumping you hey you leave josie alone the vocals pumping you up and then pokemon gotta catch them all the catchphrase that defined a decade plus of cartoons video games toys card games and an entire generation of kids a catchphrase that actually almost wasn't gotta catch em all came from norman

0:53 grossfeldt who was the head of production at for kids entertainment because that became their line and so uh we jammed it in there i don't remember what we did but we got it in there that's john siegler a musician songwriter slash producer who is one of the driving forces behind some of the most iconic american theme songs of the late 90s and early 2000s we'll get back to him in a bit but first how do we get gotta catch him all well you see he was very loosely based off the japanese tagline for the show pokemon get todaze which loosely translates to something like get those pokemon so with some tweaking and localization we get gotta catch em all norman grossfeld who was the head of productions for four kids entertainment

1:39 at the time said the company went through a bunch of different slogan ideas including the extremely underwhelming catch him if you can they even used ketchum if you can for some early iterations of a theme song that never was and it's probably a good thing they change their minds because catch him if you can just doesn't sound as motivational just imagine if you're a young child setting off on a vast adventure risking life and death to catch him if you can like all right maybe i'll catch him maybe i won't gotta catch him all though yeah some urgency behind it to understand the lightning in a bottle that is pokemon music you have to understand the conditions that created it prior to his long tenure as the music director for four kids from 2000 to 2009

2:27 and long before he had ever even heard about pokemon john siegler already had a long and successful career as a professional songwriter and musician like many musicians in new york city siegler was introduced to the jingle business a once thriving industry that relied heavily on talented studio musicians who could waltz in knock out a few riffs and move on to the next gig new york was especially fertile ground for this type of work given its denser concentration of high profile advertising agencies the agencies would employ jingle houses to create 30 second ear worms for tv and radio some of which became synonymous with the brands themselves one of these companies was rave music headed by ceo john weffler a producer composer and

3:12 advertising veteran who ended up producing music for 16 seasons of pokemon at that time rave music had already scored several tv shows for four kids so they were the first choice when pokemon came around the jingle business was what kind of drove the studio business in new york because you got you went and did a jingle at 10 and you did another one at noon so when norman was looking for people to write music for his tv shows he wanted people who wrote quote unquote the big hooks which was guys like us and so we all drifted into that business the new york jingle scene is also where siegeler met and worked with many of the vocalists whose voices would eventually become synonymous with the u.s pokemon people like james d train williams a renowned rmb

4:00 singer producer and songwriter who ended up singing the hooks for the poker rap he too had found his way into the jingle business by 1989 after the advent of the synthesizer gave birth to new jack swing and forever changed the music genre he loved speaking of poke rap that was actually written by lefleur and ziegler who spent hours figuring out how to wrap all the little pocket monster names other session musicians included beloved singer-songwriter and voice actor bobby floyd who performed the actual poker rap and the pokemon theme song vocalist jason page there's this whole community we were all making our living doing jingles but also playing on records and writing records and doing that kind of thing so all those singers vicky sue bobby floyd

4:47 d train i still work with d train now bobby passed away i don't know if you knew that curtis king there's another guy i knew him all that's how i knew uh katie mack and then i had people coming in vanished thomas and dennis collins all those people were singing in the background groups it was the same crew the only difference was that we weren't working with that many musicians i played all the instruments except for guitar i didn't play guitar i played guitar but not well enough we were all doing it ourselves in case the names don't ring a bell they're all immortalized forever in the annals of pokemon music history actually actor slash singer vicky sue robinson can be heard on pokemon dance mix from the 2ba master soundtrack she is most well known as the vocalist for the 1976 disco classic

5:33 turn the beat around love to percussion singers like katie mack and curtis king provided backing vocals on a number of classic tracks many of them co-written by siegler and leffler when you stop and think about it it's not surprising that one of the most enduring theme songs of a generation sprang out of the world of commercial jingles it was an industry dominated by extremely talented composers and musicians who knew how to crank out a tune that would get stuck in your head for the next week or so how many american kids can sing the oscar mayer jingle from memory or o'reilly's auto parts owl not even american i knew that these musicians whole job is getting songs stuck in your head so the

6:19 next time you know you're trying to fall asleep or something you're just thinking about that auto parts place in a way it was a relief to move into the tv side of things we weren't stuck writing 29 second commercials and we could actually write a full-length song even though they all had to end up being 60 seconds so that was another thing that we were good at was we knew how to cram it all into 30 seconds or 60 seconds but out of those ear worms came some truly enduring classics even surprising ones like the poker rap whose sole purpose was to name all 150 original pokemon and it was something that fans genuinely look forward to ash would say don't go away the poke rap is next and a lot of kids would just all stay glued to their tvs wondering which pokemon would be

7:05 featured next just for context they'd list 30 pokemon each episode and by the end of the week you know you'd have all 150 pokemon electro diglett needle king jolteon dragonite ghastly ponyta period polygraph butterfly catch em catch em gotta catch em all gotta catch em all pokemon out of all the pokemon music the poker rap is actually one of siegler's least favorite in 2014 interview with the week he said it wasn't really a song it was more of a way of saying 150 odd pokemon names so it wasn't particularly musically interesting to me it was just a groove and people yelling pokemon names but it stuck fans loved it and it became

7:51 an intrinsic part of the pokemon franchise even international versions of pokemon just localized and adapted the poke rap for their local audience here's the poke wrap in germany here is a small sample of the polka rap and danish [Music] it wasn't just the poker rap the american adaptation of pokemon was so standardized internationally

8:36 that all of the music basically carried over here's the american pokemon opening theme in swedish [Music] seriously for a fun exercise just type pokemon intro plus almost whatever language you want and you'll get a localized version of the pokemon music here's the localized korean pokemon intro by the way what a bop fun fact there's actually more covers that you seagal's versions then don't we got russian bulgarian serbian hebrew arabic macedonian catalan

9:22 and uh you know you get it you could say that the opening theme song is one of the most enduring legacies of the american adaptation of pokemon we connected with jason page the singer of the legendary song to discuss the song's humble beginnings and how he became the voice of a generation well it was a jingle house that i worked for numbers of times before i had a couple year history doing spots like domino's pizza delivers and other interesting projects and each project is totally unique in individual and i try to embody the motive of whatever the client is they're selling pizza i really want to make that pizza advertising so it's all embedded in the

10:09 lyrics what is this about what are we selling who are we and what are we trying to communicate the character who is singing we determined was ash and it was representative of his thoughts and his process even though we didn't really know the pokemon story very well they were crafting the lyrics hand-in-hand with the company so that they could represent what the company wanted at the time we were watching clips and looked a lot like a speed racer to me which i related to that was one of my jams back in the day go speed race circle speed racer go but it looks uh he looks kind of like a younger speed racer and then we just move things around in the session change your melody here and there augment a riff gotta catch em all gotta cut your model

10:54 gotta catch em all variations happen musically and uh it's just a bunch of really skilled craftsmen working together to satisfy the motive it didn't matter that no one in the room knew or understood what pokemon was they had a solid catchphrase no unintended talented composers and once they understood that the show was about friendship that's all they needed we didn't know but if we had read the lyrics it made it all made sense it's just that pokemon themselves were not familiar to us but friendship is very familiar in individuality and our unique way of doing things is all familiar to us and now that's embedded in the lyrics and teaching each other everything else is just sort of the generalizations of good living facing challenges with

11:41 courage and teaching each other all of that good stuff fast forward several months and pokemon was a verified hit in the u s the games were selling like hot cakes and all the kids were glued to the screen watching a yellow rat with red cheeks electrocute a 10 year old and singing along to the localized english opening theme song but behind the scenes another big part of the localization process was creating the scoring of the anime in the us version of the show about one third of the music was original japanese scoring the other two thirds were done by artists john lasauer and manny carollo and all the tracks were used in the eight seasons that john siegler was involved in also have to give credit to ralph shuckett who was the composer for the pokemon movies and while most fans would mostly remember the songs

12:28 we have to give thanks to the hard work these musicians put in to help create the sound of the pokemon anime world by april 1999 the franchise had pulled in over 200 million dollars in revenue in just the united states alone with dozens of licensing deals for products like action figures lunch boxes toys and just about everything in between naturally a lot of these commercials also used the theme song so that started getting a ton of air time ironically turning the song back into a jingle so four kids did what any company sitting on a wildly popular theme song would do it decided to put out an entire album of original music and thus to be a master was born

13:16 they went back to rave music with joan weffler and john siegler and asked them to start laying down tracks the entire album took less than a month to make and had 13 original songs sung by a bunch of different session vocalists we had a hit television show we had that song we had a music company and in that company there were five composers we all just said look we got to write songs about pokemon and norman again was involved and actually wrote lyrics for some of the stuff that i wrote and made suggestions about well why don't you write a song about this and why to write write a song about this aspect and so guys we're looking at a list of song ideas not necessarily actual lyrics or anything a song about jigglypuff or

14:03 a song about this or a song about that and there was a long list and everybody just sort of cherry picked one song that i did had already existed called pokemon dance or something like that that song i wrote for the original sales film in fact that might have been written before the big theme song that might have been the first thing we wrote it was completely different then i repurposed it and made it into like a dance song at that time i think like cher had that really big hit you know the song but anyway different guys wrote different songs if you look at the uh album cover you'll see uh names of all the guys that were in our company at the time everybody got at least one song in there and i got five because i was one of the bosses so the album was officially released on june 29th 1999. it immediately shot to the top of

14:48 the billboard charts for kids albums beating out a couple of uh walt disney's tarzan reed and sing-alongs the phantom menace read-along and the first veggietunes album surprised with that one how could they beat the juggernaut veggietales anyhow to be a master spent 46 weeks on the charts selling half a million copies in the us in four months within four years that number would climb to three million copies worldwide the album featured full versions of the pokemon theme song the boppy together forever with session singer jp hartman and a funky rap track called what kind of pokemon are you that taught aspiring trainers about pokemon types with

15:34 educational lyrics like good luck with mukunets poison gas make one wrong move and it'll kick your grass that was also the title track to be a master pokemon master co-written by le effler and singer russell velasquez who also did the vocals for the second pokemon theme pokemon world russell velasquez is another incredibly accomplished musician he has since done a emmy nominated composition work for the muppets oh uh in case you're wondering yes the entire soundtrack was dubbed into other languages too you know in case you ever wanted to listen to be a master in russian [Music]

16:20 nice part of the appeal was undoubtedly tied into the appeal of the pokemon franchise itself but some of these songs have really held up it helps that they were written to be reflective of the popular songs of the time and not just generic kid songs well our intention and one of our things and and this was a john leffler thing what he always said and he said look we're writing songs for cartoon shows that are meant to be watched and listened to by children but that doesn't mean we should play down to them and pull out the marimbas and the ukuleles and we want to play up to them we want to make current pop music that's also very tuneful and sing-alongable and all those things that you want but we don't want to play down just because

17:07 you know the kids are whatever the demographic was we want to play up to it if anything you know that was always our intention to pretend that we were like writing pop records you know that was what our intention was with all that success you would think everyone performing would be making bank well not exactly sure 2ba master soundtrack was wildly popular worldwide but that money didn't exactly trickle down to the artists for the session singers who were paid to show up in the studio and belt out a track that was pretty much it for the in-series music four kids paid per season without residuals the singers receive a buyout every six months for a couple of years and that was it when the show went into syndication

17:52 none of the singers received additional compensation even jason page whose voice was used in dozens of commercial spots was never monetarily benefited from the theme's runaway success since his contract didn't include royalties from any licensed product that used the theme many of the vocalists tried to sue but nothing really came of it paige eventually entered talks with seven different pokemon related companies who used his voice to promote their products but in the end a settlement was negotiated out of court to an amount in the mid five figures it was a decent chunk of money for a song that took about four hours to record but it was a drop in the pokemon bucket which was worth about 10

18:38 billion dollars worldwide in 2000. well sadness aside hot on the heels of the success of the pokemon and to be a master four kids went full in on the music for the franchise the soundtrack for the first pokemon movie mewtwo strikes back was released in november 1999 and that saw some contemporary stars like britney spears nsync 98 degrees and vitamin c that one singer that every old high school graduation played as we go on [Music] the opening theme song was re-recorded as a dance track featuring vocals by pop singer billy

19:23 crawford [Music] it was an absolute hint the album hit number eight in the u.s billboard 200 and went double platinum even though entertainment weekly called it a sticky sweet grade school party the following summer saw the release of the second movie pokemon the movie 2000 the power of one it didn't make as much money in the box office as the first one but it still did reasonably well the soundtrack repurposed the second season theme pokemon world with a cover

20:08 by youngstown and nobody's angel who performed it live to a screaming crowd at the premiere of the film like the first movie soundtrack this one also has songs from contemporary stars like we're all yankovic the b-52s and reality showboy band oh town it did worse than the first soundtrack only squeaking to a billboard high of 85. meanwhile plants are being laid for an even bigger pokemon music takeover culminating in what would eventually be the music for the third season the johto journeys and the accompanying studio soundtrack totally pokemon instead of using a slate of session singers though it featured johto a sextet made up of three guys

20:54 and three gals hand-picked by john loeffler and the team and rave music from auditions that were held in new york in the summer of 2000s to create the greatest pokemon pop group that ever was the intention was to build a pokemon pop group like s club 7 i guess for pokemon there were even plans for a promotional tour but it just never happened the tour was cancelled and even though the album contained some certified bops the next time it was released in january 2001 it barely made a blip by then people had just simply lost interest in pokemon even as early as june 2000 pokemon as a franchise was showing signs of a slump between the spring and summer viewership

21:39 for saturday morning broadcast was only 1.8 million down by almost a million viewers from just the first quarter network execs hope that it was just the summer slump and crossed their fingers that the release of the second pokemon movie would give their ratings a boost in time for fall but by the end of the year it was clear that the kids had already moved on sales for the trading card game plummeted with hasbro reporting substantial losses for the winter of 2000 which continued well into 2001 with first quarter losses totaling 25 million dollars collectors who poured all their lunch money into rare cards just a year earlier suddenly found themselves sitting on

22:25 nearly worthless rectangles of cardboard of course 20 years later we can see pretty clearly that pokemon never really went away in the us the show is in this 23rd season now with the most recent streaming on netflix the games continue to do very well and it'd be hard to find a kid who doesn't know who pikachu is and of course there's the wild mainstream popularity of pokemon go which hit all the right nostalgia buttons for an entire generation raised on pokemon and for the collectors who pour all their lunch money into rare cards well if they kept those rare cards in rare mint conditions well looks like they made it to the big leagues maybe it is nostalgia that keeps the first season forefront in everyone's minds even now after 23

23:12 seasons of music it's arguably still the first opening theme that people remember the best despite all the legal headaches that jason paige went through with pokemon he seems to have come to terms with the experience google them now and you'll find dozens of interviews with them mostly about pokemon it helps maybe that he had a full career of composing singing and touring you can't see him here but he's in the pit rapping in the middle of mj's black or white at the 30th anniversary show at madison square garden and there's all the commercial jingles you probably didn't even know was him [Music]

24:02 but he's come to appreciate his role in the pokemon phenomenon go to his youtube channel now and you'll see plenty of pokemon related content including a recent video of him in the studio belting out the theme he even recorded a parody in 2012 that went viral in support of presidential candidate ron paul using a fresh karaoke track he had created for a scrapped guitar hero level when you ask him now if it's surreal to be known as the pokemon guy though he's the first to agree i was trying to frame this idea yesterday or two days ago when i was listening to tonight's the night we'll make history honey you and i a stick song rocking the paradise that was embedded in my 10 to 15 year

24:51 old self in a way that is the only thing i can compare to pokemon except that was just one band and one album that music that i listen to in that song rocking the paradise moves through my body triggering the memory that's embedded in me of how i felt when i listened to that song and what i did and it just brought me to tears and i thought wow this is probably similar to what people who experience pokemon 10 to 20 years later have feel this thing that has moved them in so many ways because they've spent so much time living the lyrics in the gameplay that they experience in my case i knew it was dennis de young and styx and i knew what they looked like but in their case they didn't know who i was or what i look like or

25:36 maybe not even thought that i was a person but just this voice that drove the tv show and their ideas with the lyrics the lyrics that drove their ideas even more so when they find out that i'm a real human being a lot of times they don't believe it like they can't believe that they're meeting this person that they first didn't even think really existed because they never really i was never represented in a visual way nor was i represented in it as a name either on much of the credits so when they find out they just are struck in this way that's not really star struck because i'm not a star but this is a star of your imagination it's very very unique i don't think it really exists in any other form uh if i met the guy who sang the speed racer theme song i

26:22 would just be like oh that's cool but speed racer didn't dominate my life and it didn't exist for 20 plus years extremely surreal now though with the enduring popularity of the song and his willingness to embrace his legacy as the pokemon guy there is finally a face to the voice with pokemon go's release in 2016 there was a renewed interest in the song believe it or not that year was actually the first time paige ever even performed the song live as a guest at la comicon i think i came at it at the right time

27:08 in 2016 pokemon go came out and it's till then besides the ron paul remix i didn't spend 16 years singing it as much as i have in the past three years so i didn't get sick of it however i also didn't spread the word of who i was for 16 years and i think that that's sort of part and parcel with the success because it was not about a person who has this song out he's out there trying to promote himself through the song like an artist like every other artist you see this is about the the motive of the show so all i'm really doing in 2016 is responding to that success and that's one of the other unique things about it i knew how popular it was but i didn't know how embedded it was in people's

27:54 experiences and how much they got from it until the internet started leaving comments and and letters and i started getting invited to comic cons to sing it and see people's response to it since then he's been performing at comic conventions and video game concerts around the world where crowds may not know who he is but they definitely know the song it's an amazing sight hearing him get drowned out by exciting crowds in qatar or malaysia where everyone still knows every lyric by heart [Music] it's an incredible experience they've done all the work and now i'm just trying to catch up all

28:40 of these people who have been into the pokemon ecosystem have done all the play and the more they play the more it becomes the part of their experience and the more impactful is when i perform for them so for me it's just this wonderful reuniting with people that i didn't know were my fans and it's them reuniting with this best friend that they didn't know they have they had because it was not represented as a human being but just as a voice it's phenomenal the pokemon fans are so so sweet so nice and so giving the autograph sessions are fabulous confessions of each person's unique experience with the ecosystem and somebody does art and some other person

29:27 is doing cosplay and somebody else is now making video games and like somebody's bringing their kids when their parents are in the background going yeah i introduced them to a 20 years old now i'm you know three generations in they're taking pictures of their kids taking pictures with their kids it's really spectacular [Music] all right thank you so much for watching and uh please be sure to subscribe and press the bell icon press the you know the rectangles and the squares that come up by the way they're called end cards yeah that's the youtube tip i'm giving to you guys um yeah i'm gonna end this with um i'm just gonna sing that that what kind of pokemon are you playing

30:13 what kind of pokemon are you how do you do the things you do share with me your secrets deep to catch crunchyroll subscribers is our real test and to train them is our cause