I remember one Christmas way back in the ’90s coming home and collapsing into my brand new beanbag chair with a box of M&M cookies and my brand new Pokémon Game Boy and falling asleep playing Pokémon Yellow.
I grew up with Pokémon. I watched the show, got the toys, dabbled in collecting the cards, and I can still name almost every one of the now 807 Pokémon. So I blame Pokémon for my love of collectible monsters.
While it’s not the first franchise to make us of that concept, its explosion in the West helped to popularize a genre of shonen adventure franchises revolving around highly collectible monsters. Way back in 1999, us American kids could watch Pokémon, Digimon and Monster Rancher on TV.
Not all of these series focused on collecting all the monsters. In fact, that was primarily a Pokémon concept, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to, in some way, collect every single monster from these franchises.
And this genre continues today. All of these series tend to be based on or inspire a video game, collectible card game, toy line or all of the above (see: Pokémon). And the range of this genre is pretty broad. Yu-Gi-Oh! counts, and it’s dark for a kids’ show. Yo-kai Watch is a modern entry into the genre that’s fairly popular (apparently very big in Japan), and it’s pretty light and comedic.
And those two examples both involve series that play the monster concept straight. Zatch Bell! also fits the constraints of the monster-catching genre, but its collectible creatures are mostly child-like dolls with incredible powers.
There a lot more examples over at TV Tropes. This list reminded me that Lilo & Stitch: The Series even did this, and I really like it.
This entry is going to be especially short, but there’s really not a lot I have to say about these series. I’m going to wrap this up. Until tomorrow.
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