The process was very difficult from several aspects. While we were awarded the Pokémon license, we didn’t get much help at all from Nintendo of Japan (NOJ). In fact, they didn’t like us very much and didn’t see our value in expanding the Pokémon brand into the toy market. They felt [that] our toy product line would take away sales from the Game Boy game which wasn’t the case at all.
I focused on the Pokédex because it looked cool and it was in every episode. I finally did get a basic data sheet on each of the original 151 Pokémon so that helped a lot [with] bio information. We were strictly forbidden to have any type of graphic game function because of the Game Boy game. I wanted to at least have an image of each Pokémon just to give it some fun visuals as opposed to just a complete text-based toy. So, I had my art team come up with a simple 2 frame animation of each of the 151 Pokemon characters. That turned out to be a big mistake and almost killed the entire toy. When NOJ saw the screen animations they freaked out and said we couldn’t do that and it was too close to the Game Boy game. We disagreed and said the toy needed it [but] NOJ would not let us move forward. We did have Nintendo of America (NOA) and the licensing group 4Kids Production on our side but it was Nintendo of Japan that [got] the final call on everything and final approval. For almost 6 months the project was put on hold. I was so frustrated I didn’t even want to work on it anymore and wanted to get back to working on Star Wars toys.
