A Pokémon of a Different Color

A Pokémon of a Different Color(matthew.verive.me)

137 points by Risse 92 days ago | 25 comments

gyomu 92 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...

charcircuit 88 days ago | |

>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.

NetOpWibby 88 days ago | |

WHAT

WOW

stevekemp 92 days ago |

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.

ctxc 88 days ago | |

Interesting choice, why Pikachu?

I always feel like it's too mainstream, I like the uncommon ones more

orlp 88 days ago | | |

Why do you find it in interesting that someone chose something mainstream? Isn't that the definition of mainstream, that it's a common choice?

stevekemp 88 days ago | | |

I have a child, and I got a sleeve made up of various things that he was obsessed by over the years.

So there's a Moomin character (Little My) because we're in Finland and he loves them, there's Tom & Jerry because he loved those cartoons, a new-life mushroom from the years we spent together playing Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo classic.

But rather than list all the parts, you can see where this is going now, there's also Pokémon because he was obsessed with playing with the cards, memorizing all the evolution chains and stats/types.

When I was planning it was obvious there'd be a Pokémon due to his (continuing) interest in those and to me as a non-fan that's the most immediately-recognizable one.

Plus the colour works well with the colour-choices made in the other pieces. Although ironically the part I like best is the "naked" LEGO minifig. I like to colour him in with felt-tip pens every now and again, or draw a facial expression on him to reflect my mood when bored in meetings.

throwup238 92 days ago |

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.

slavik81 88 days ago | |

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/...

JuniperMesos 88 days ago | |

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.

MPSimmons 92 days ago |

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.

efilife 88 days ago | |

> I know that it has an impact on my life that I’m not aware of

I'm really skeptical about this. Maybe someone who knows more about this could say a bit more about it?

riffraff 88 days ago |

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?

amoshebb 88 days ago | |

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

cluckindan 88 days ago |

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.

fredoralive 88 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.

devanteu 88 days ago |

So which is the shiny one?

cryzinger 88 days ago | |

Ha, I thought it was amusing that the color space/profile mystery involves Pikachu of all mons, since Pikachu is famously part of the "shiny palette that's nearly indistinguishable from its regular palette" club :)