A Pokémon of a Different Color
matthew.verive.me125 points by Risse 4 days ago
125 points by Risse 4 days ago
Reminds me of when the internet collectively realized that the Sugimori watercolors for the original 251 Pokémon had been scanned and reproduced with the completely wrong colors in western media for over 20 years:
https://kotaku.com/pokemon-ken-sugimori-original-art-red-blu...
>How did the low-quality Pokémon scans circulate for so long?
Japanese people take copyright more seriously which would explain why there would be literal interest in creating illegal scans of them.
I got a Pikachu tattoo a few years ago, and after agreeing the design/placement the artist held up a series of coloured inks and made me do a binary-search, saying "This one, or that one?" and I think there were about six to choose from.
To me it was obvious there was one correct colour for Pikachu to be, she approved of my choice and said "Ahh yes the original design" which puzzled me at the time, but I guess there a nuances to the shades and versions of characters like this, which evolve over time (pun intended).
As for me? Tattoos fade over time so the colour is different than it used to be, but everyone who looks at it knows exactly what it should be so that's fine.
Interesting choice, why Pikachu?
I always feel like it's too mainstream, I like the uncommon ones more
Whats the deal with this artwork? I got into Pokemon as a kid in the late 90s* including all the Gameboy games through Sapphire/Ruby and I don’t remember any of this washed out art (like the Ditto example, it’s always been pink!).
Did I just miss this phenomenon entirely because I grew up right before it became big on the internet?
* I think I’ve still got a VHS tape of the promo material Nintendo used to originally introduce Pokemon to the US.
It was in the manual and the Player's Guide. You can find ditto on page 47 of the latter.
https://www.scribd.com/document/586237858/Pokemon-Red-Versio...
https://archive.org/details/NintendoPower1998PokemonRedBlue/...
I definitely remember seeing Gen1 pokemon art as a kid that seemed, not washed out exactly but a bit less saturated compared to, say, the Pokémon anime that aired on American TV. To the extent I thought about this, I guess I assumed that when the original creators of Pokemon in Japan were first working on it (I doubt I had heard the name Tajiri Satoshi at that point in my life), they were doing hand-drawn experimental art, still trying to get the final design correct.
Interesting article!
As an aside I just had a realization: how can this typical representations of color spaces (larger blob of perceptible color and the smaller polygon of the color space) work?
Isn't the image encoded in one of those color spaces? That should make the perceptible-but-not-in-space colors impossible to represent, shouldn't it?
The gradient in blob is the same as the one in the polygon, it’s just there as art to hint at what’s missing
I am eternally grateful to media people who care a lot about this stuff. I know that it has an impact on my life that I’m not aware of, but I can’t bring myself to dive into this. I am glad that there are people who are into it, though.
Wasn’t this posted like three days ago? The OP says ”7 hours ago”.
I remember seeing most of these comments too, even though they all seem to have been posted just a few hours ago.
The posters’ own comment lists seem to agree that the comments were posted three days ago.
Hacker News does weird stuff to post / comment timestamps if a post is resurrected from the second chance pool. Makes both the post and comment look new even though they’re not. Not sure why, it’s kind misleading, I guess they want to hide the necromancy for some reason.
So which is the shiny one?
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Maybe people are paying attention to those things because there's a need to disconnect from the real world and its problems for a while.
The issue is that we might have disconnected from the real world and its problem for a few decades already.
As a side note, this is actually akin to my favourite Slashdot troll.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kadin2048/Slashdot_Trolli...
> The Get Some PRIORITIES! troll began to appear after the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks. A classic offtopic troll, it employs highly hyperbolic language to criticize the other posters and Slashdot in general for discussing trivialities like new gadgets or changes in U.S. copyright law in the wake of such a horrific event. ([0]).
[0] https://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=114139&cid=967092...
You're right! Therefore society should collectively stop having fun, playing games and propagating culture, until all of our problems are dealt with. I bet that will go just swimmingly.