I was born in 1996, the same year Pokemon came out, so naturally, I too was caught in Pokemania. I dressed up as Jigglypuff for Halloween, watched the animated series religiously and bought several licensed Pokemon books. These books purported to be “real life Pokedexes” when in actuality there were cheap mass produced pocket books that mostly just regurgitated in game statistics. These had descriptions ranging from monotone verbatim copies of the descriptions to corny over enthusiastic asides from the poor saps muscled in to write this hack work...

They’re also the books my little brothers use to hunt pokemon in Pokemon Go. Rereading them brought up some interesting thoughts on oddities of pokemon evolution. So come on everybody, let’s enter wild and wacky world of Pokemanz!

Ok , maybe that enthusiasm was unwarranted, mostly because the main thing I learned was pokemon evolution is boring! Seriously, the main thing evolution does is make your pokemon bigger, give them a metallic coating, extra limbs or in a few cases a conjoined clone of themselves. Nothing really revolutionary.

However, considering in your quest to be the best, like no one ever was, you force your beloved pokemon to ingest several strange medicines and dubious powders. Surely some of those would force them down some kind of evolutionary dead end, right?

Oddly enough the only pokemon I could find like that is Polliwag. Ostensibly a tadpole, one would assume Polliwag would grow into a frog like Pokemon. Instead it balloons into a giant, aggressive blue monstrosity that is somewhere in between a tadpole and a frog. Ironically, it is only by tapping into the eldritch powers of a mysterious rock that you can indunce the seemingly more natural transformation of tadpole into a frog

As mentioned before the pokedex books were cheap and riddled with errors. One of the more common was printing the evolution charts in reverse, that’s what drew my attention to the evolution of Swinub. Swinub starts out a guinea pig only to transform into a mammoth, after ingesting the aforementioned Ancient Powder. This gives raise to both the funny image of it reeking havoc as someone’s pet suddenly transforms into a prehistoric beast, and the image of the mammoth gradually “evolving” into a hamster like creature.

However, my favorite evoulutionary line is that of Porygon, the pokemon created by computers as an arcade prize. Since Pokemon was released in ‘96 the “highly advanced” Pokemon was marketed to children to look like a character from a Nintendo 64 game. What late nineties children’s product was more advanced than that: 3D animation. Porygon 2 then looks like something out of early Pixar. In 2008 Porygon gained a new form: Porygon Z the “glichy” version, that looks like what happens when you pause a video game at the wrong time or some of the early mods of pokemon floating around Youtube at the time.

However, since Assassin’s Creed Unity has come out with its infamous “no faces “ glitch and “glitch horror” has been on the rise, Porygon Z seems tame. But really corrupting its data could turn it into something truly unsettling which could be called ”Pry_gone”. Or for a lighter transformation, make it into something like a sprite off the original Gameboy and call it “Porygon 0” in honor of Pokemon’s 20th anniversary.

Pokemon is obviously creative and vibrant for it to have survived two decades. I just wish that creativity would come in the form of some evolutionary curveballs for its imaginative creatures.