Jynx · Base Set (BS) #31

3 comments

1. 

   Tokiwa City Smuggle

   (1 year ago)

   Who knew that this card predicted what Jynx would look like nowadays?

   Reply
2. 

   Ambassador

   (7 months ago)

   There are a couple of deliberate changes to this card as compared to the original – one is very obvious, as Jynx’s face has been colored purple due to an alleged controversy in the 1990s. (As Tokiwa pointed out above, this eventually ended up becoming Jynx’s official design.) The other one is less obvious.

   JP card Pokédex entry: 人間のような言葉を話すが、まだ何を言っているのか不明で、現在研究されている。
   JP card entry (suggested translation): It speaks using a language that sounds human, but it is unclear what they are saying, and it is currently being studied.

   This card’s JP Pokédex entry is taken from Pocket Monsters Red & Green¹, as are most of the entries for cards from the first few sets. The localized Pokémon Red and Blue adapted all of their Pokédex entries from Pocket Monsters Blue, which are all different from the RG entries, so that a lot of these entries were necessarily being translated by WOTC for the first time ……right? No. Rather than doing that, WOTC copy and pasted the entries from Pokémon Red and Blue. But hey, knowing how bad WOTC really was with their translations, I’m actually totally fine with this, since we have entries that match the video games in some way.

   Exceptions can be found in sets like Team Rocket, where WOTC could be bothered to translate the TCG-original entries, and with this card. If they handled Jynx like they handled the rest of Base Set, we would assume this card would have its Pokémon Red and Blue entry;

   “Appears to move to a rhythm of its own, as if it were dancing. It wiggles its hips as it walks.”

   …and that’s clearly *not* the entry we have here.

   “Merely by meditating, the Pokémon launches a powerful psychic energy attack.” is a wholly brand new entry for the time, and it’s nothing that shows up in any of Jynx’s later Pokédex entries in any game. You might notice that the entry seems to come from someone looking at the card itself – i.e. Meditate is the more powerful of its two attacks, and it’s obviously a Psychic Pokémon – which leads me to believe it’s original copy that someone at WOTC (or possibly NOA) came up with in all of 2 seconds.

   I’m not really interested in saying anything about this in the context of the perceived controversy, though it seems a likely motivator for this entry, so much as documenting a wholly original dex entry that I’ve kind of noticed as matter of happenstance. Cross-referencing dex entries strikes me as an overly tedious and boring task, so I won’t do it for its own sake, but if I happen to notice any other completely unrecoginizable entries, I’ll do some digging into it.

   ¹ The entries are identical for both versions. They are later reused again for Generation I Pokémon appearing in Pocket Monsters FireRed and Pocket Monsters Y. You will find those games’ English counterparts provide reasonable translations of the entry.

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3. 

   Ambassador

   (5 months ago)

   This is one of the cards I ended up writing an even longer entry for on my blog. What was interesting to realize was that this card and its recoloring of Jynx, which released as part of Base Set in January 1999, predates the airing of the episode that set off the media controversy – Holiday Hi-Jynx debuted in October of 1999.

   We do have (currently unpublished) confirmation that WOTC did this recoloring of their own volition, but a question about it still stands: if WOTC felt so strongly about this being a problem, did they approach NOA about it or not?[1] While I can readily imagine a scenario where NOA would brush any concerns being raised[2], I’d say WOTC would’ve still had both an ethical burden – plus, as an invested “franchisee” slash licensee, a motivating business interest – to escalate their concerns, rather than quietly edit the card’s artwork and release it without telling NOA they’d done so.

   There’s a very wide window of time from January to October of 1999 where the controversy could’ve been almost entirely avoided, and it was either WOTC or NOA that fumbled the ball in not taking sufficient preventative action to avoid it.

   [1] For the sake of this conversation, let’s agree the recolor was the right thing to have done. The question is, did they do the right thing but go about it the wrong way?
   [2] Characters with similar designs existed in other first/second-party games NOA had previous published and no spectre of a controversy had ever been raised. I think it’s possible WOTC *could’ve* raised this to NOA and they’d dismiss it, off the basis of their own experiences. https://ambassadortcg.substack.com/p/how-are-pokedex-entries-on-pokemon#footnote-6-110627736

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