Top 10 Pokemon Mistakes Left in the Show

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the Top 10 Mistakes Left in Pokemon Anime.

For many of us, the original Pokemon opening theme is something that’ll be ingrained into our brains forever, but there’s one very strange oversight that’s left us scratching our heads. Towards the end of the song, there’s a moment where Pikachu rides on top of Pidgeotto, Bulbasaur has his vines wrapped around Butterfree, and Zubat is just… carrying Squirtle somehow, despite having no arms. We’d say Zubat is pretty strong for carrying a Pokemon almost twice their size, but how exactly is he holding onto Squirtle? Perhaps the two found some incredibly adhesive double tape!

Pokemon’s epic debut on the big screen had quite a few errors here and there, but this was probably one of the most glaring ones. After Team Rocket somehow find themselves in Mewtwo's cloning room, the computer screen starts showing silhouettes of all the Pokemon going through the process. When Scyther pops up, the two proudly proclaim that it’s Alakazam, despite the two looking nothing alike! Now Team Rocket aren’t exactly the brightest out there, so you could argue they’re likely to make this sort of mistake. So we guess this is one mistake that kinda worked out in the end!

First appearing in “Mewtwo Strikes back,” the cloned Nidoqueen makes a reappearance in the sequel movie “Mewtwo Returns.” What’s absolutely bizarre about this scene is that Nidoqueen has offspring: tiny little baby Nidoqueen. Why is this such a big error you ask? Well first of all Nidoqueen is a part of a group of Pokemon that do not have the ability to breed. Secondly, even if Nidoqueen did have this ability, its offspring would be Nidoran, not the last member of its evolutionary line. Perhaps something went strangely wrong during Mewtwo’s cloning process!

Misty’s phobia of bug type Pokemon was well established all the way back in the third episode when Ash caught a Pokemon for the first time: Caterpie. Her fear is on display in full force once again in the episode “Tracey Gets Bugged” after a wild Pinsir suddenly pops out of the bushes. Immediately following this scene, the gang discuss what a good team Tracey's Marill and Venonat are, only for Misty to make this weird proclamation. We’re not exactly sure how on earth she made this mistake, considering Venonat has all the key features any sort of bug would have, including its big compound eyes and long antennae. But if this is a coping mechanism against her phobia then we guess we’ll just let her get away with it!

Ash’s adventure lasted well over 1000 episodes, so we can’t blame the 10 year old for forgetting some of the many Pokemon he encountered, but honestly this one kinda stings. In the episode “Rocking the Virbank Gym” Ash meets Roxie, who has a Koffing by her side. Ash immediately takes out his Pokedex as though he’s encountered this Pokemon for the first time, forgetting that he encountered James’ countless times in the original series! Now we can forgive the show for explaining recurring Pokemon over the years, and a good chunk of the audience is often too young to have seen everything, but in this particular case it made Ash look like he had the memory of a Goldeen.

Back in the original season of Pokemon, the early episodes would close with the iconic and ever catchy PokeRap. It was actually a great lesson for all of us Poke-beginners who were still learning all the names to all of these creatures. Unfortunately there were two glaring mistakes within the song. When Poliwag pops up, the singer brazenly mentions Poliwrath. You could just overlook this as a minor mistake but they make yet another mistake by calling Geodude, Graveler! There were only 151 Pokemon back then, so we can only imagine how many mistakes they would make if the PokeRap was sung today!

We know it’s hard to keep up with all the Pikaclones that keep popping up in every new iteration of the Pokemon game series, but this mishap certainly takes the cake! In the fifth episode of the Sun and Moon series titled “Yo, Ho, Ho! Go, Popplio,” the titular Pokemon displays its balloon skills to everyone. As Ash gets caught in it, at the very bottom of the screen you can see that Togedemaru has been miscolored as Pikachu. This is despite the fact that Pikachu is already in the same scene! This error would later be corrected in the english dubbed version version, but for a short time you could have claimed that this was some rare regional Togedemaru variant that just so happened to swim into this very shot!

In the episode “A Ninja Poke Showdown” Ash battles it out against Aya and her Venonat, sending out his Bulbasaur. During the showdown, the Ninja girl tells her Pokemon to use Stun Spore. Ash counters by telling his Bulbasaur to use Whirlwind, a move that he cannot legally learn. Apparently this was a dubbing error, as in the original version Ash told Bulbasaur to just “blow it away”. While not exclusive, Whirlwind is often a move associated with Pokemon with wings, so seeing Bulbasaur pull this off was bizarre to say the least.

In the Diamond and Pearl episode “Regaining the Home Advantage,” Dawn sends out Mamoswine to battle against a rampaging wild Metagross. This scene is notorious due to that fact that Ash mistakenly has not one but two Pikachu with him, one on his shoulder and one standing on the ground. To make matters worse there’s an animation issue where it appears as though the gang's feet are merging into the sidewalk. Now we can’t explain that error, but perhaps the second Pikachu is the clone from the Mewtwo movie? Or maybe there’s always been a second Pikachu and we just didn’t notice!

As the Pokemon series went on, the show tried to spice up the original “Who’s That Pokemon” with a “Trainer's Choice” segment. Here we’d be treated to a sort of trivia game with multiple choices. The segment in “A Fan with a Plan” however, left a lot of Pokemasters scratching their heads when it asked what does Seviper evolve into. This is already a huge mistake as Seviper doesn’t evolve into anything! To make this segment even worse, the answer was presented as Arbok, who has absolutely no ties to Seviper and instead evolves from Ekans. We hope no one took this segment seriously, otherwise they’d be wasting a lot of time trying to evolve their Seviper!

Are there any mistakes that only you noticed in the Pokemon Anime? Let us know in the comments below!