Interview with Pokemopolis
Interview with Pokemopolis
An interview with Pokemopolis, a satirical fansite which began in 1999
Pokemopolis was a satirical Pokémon fan site, targeted at older Pokémon fans and adults due to its wide use of innuendo and profanity. The focus of the website was to highlight how Pokémon was anything but a children's show. Pokemopolis was popular for its anime episode guides, written with a humorous twist on the original episodes. The history of the website dates back to late 1998 when it was called “Pokémon Pokémon”, a simple fansite created by Dodgemaster Brandon on the popular free web hosting service GeoCities. Shortly thereafter on January 13th, 1999, the website was handed over to two of his friends named Tim and Lex, and Pokemopolis was born! Towards the end of its life, Dodgemaster Tim was the only person left on the team, and on May 11th, 2014, the website officially stopped receiving updates.
I was able to track down Dodgemaster Tim, who I am happy to be interviewing for Johto Times!
Editor note: This interview contains profanity: Reader discretion is advised.
Thank you for joining me for this interview, Tim! Let’s begin with some introductions! Tell us about yourself and the website you ran.
Tim:
Hello! So yes, I'm Tim, who went by Dodgemaster Tim during my time running Pokemopolis... where everybody just called me Tim anyway! Pokemopolis was the invention of myself and my friend and fellow animation student at the time, Lex, and we co-ran it essentially from 1999 through to 2014. We divided up our roles between writing episode guides, maintaining the site, interacting with fans of the anime via contests, community building (in particular the forums we instituted), and trying to foster an atmosphere of silly, not particularly serious fun. But technically it existed before then as a fansite called "Pokémon, Pokémon", which was created in 1998 by our fellow student, Brandon.
Dodgemaster Brandon originally created the website in late 1998, but it truly became Pokemopolis when you and your friend Lex took the reins and reinvented it from January 13th, 1999. How were you first introduced to the website?
Tim:
So Brandon had taped a number of episodes of the show to a VHS tape (because we are oooollllllddddd as balls) and was watching them in the student lounge one day, and I settled in to watch along [with] him. I was struck almost immediately with the show's humour (at least via the English dub, done by 4Kids at the time) offering some absurdist leanings, like Misty and Pikachu settling in to sunbathe while Ash and his rival, a fat samurai cosplayer, were engaged in a thrilling and dramatic battle of... two cocooned animals sitting perfectly still in place. Lex popped in as we were watching and laughed her ass off at a line, something like, "You really know how to handle your Butterfree!" that she immediately interpreted in a far from innocent light, and we got to talking about how some of the humour in the show was somewhat "dodgy".
Brandon, who liked to tinker with HTML as a hobby, had created a fansite called Pokémon, Pokémon on GeoCities and tossed up a few silly things including, from memory, some sketched out fanart imagining what Diglett might look like under the ground. Lex and I became enthused with the idea of sharing our thoughts on the "dodginess" of Pokémon and asked if we could put some stuff up on the site, and Brandon – who was largely already moving on to experimenting with other things – had no problem with that. I sat down and wrote up minor paragraph synopses of some of the episodes I'd watched, almost entirely from memory since it wasn't like you could just go online and look up detailed episode guides for some random cartoon... as if the Internet could do that! Lex and I dashed off some fanart when we should have been working on animation assignments, and before we knew it Pokémon, Pokémon was 90% our own material. We decided to rename it to Pokemopolis after an ancient city mentioned in the anime, purely because we both liked the name. We had no grand aspirations at the time, no plans to make this anything more than a bit of fun pointing out the perceived undercurrent of slightly "off" elements of the world of the anime.
During this era, many Pokémon fan websites were popping up, offering similar content such as news, information, and guides. Pokemopolis was a very different kind of website, which took a satirical direction. What was the reason behind this decision?
Tim:
Yeah, there were a lot of Pokémon fansites at the time, and more cropping up constantly, albeit mostly very simplistic GeoCities pages with "under construction" gifs and rotating skulls. The Internet was still comparatively new and nobody really knew what they were doing, but people wanted to share their thoughts and feelings on stuff, to inform people, to be in some way a part of the things they all enjoyed participating in, and Pokémon was no different. I guess where we wanted to be different, and I do want to stress we were hardly unique in this regard and likely not the first to take this approach, was to just kind of be silly and nonsensical.
Sites like Serebii and Bulbagarden were out there doing more serious work, more informative work, more up-to-the-date and I assume certainly far more researched work. We were talking out of our asses, but we were having a great time, and why else do this in the first place unless we were? We weren't really interested in being "informative" or even particularly accurate. The games didn't really interest us beyond being fun things to play. We didn't care about statistics or strategies or type-advantages or even the logistics of the world as it was portrayed in the anime. We just wanted to make each other laugh, and hopefully make others laugh too, and so we set out to be ridiculous and mildly controversial by taking a more satirical approach. Professor Oak wants to bang Delia Ketchum in peace so he's dumped his research workload onto a 10-year-old and sent him out to bum around the countryside cockfighting! James' family won't accept he's gay and Jessie is half fully accepting of him and half kinda low key thinking they'll get married one day by default while she strives to remind everybody that she's not some old hag. Brock's father is a crack addict! Togepi is an evil energy-leech with dreams of world conquest! Charizard is better and stronger and tougher than all other Pokémon in the world without exception!
Well, okay, that last one is serious and true, though.
The mascot for Pokemopolis is Koffing! Why did you choose that Pokémon specifically to represent your website?
Tim:
So the mindset of the site was to have [fun]. To just be silly and over-the-top and, yes, celebrate the dodginess of it all, and we wanted a mascot to match. [Celebi] or Mewtwo or Pikachu or even Charizard would have made more sense; they're the more "important" Pokémon after all. But look at Koffing. Just look at him! Look at that giant goofy grin and those rolled back eyes! He's just out there having the time of his life, he's so happy, he's just radiating simple joy at being alive! THAT is the spirit of what we wanted Pokemopolis to be, just pure happiness and silliness even if we're not actually achieving anything or in fact are completely falling flat on our faces. Koffing was the perfect representation for Pokemopolis, just a big dumb thing that doesn't really know what's going on but is really happy to be taking part in it all.
One of the main features of the website were your anime episode guides, written with a humorous yet vulgar twist, for episodes between the Indigo League and XY series. Over eight hundred episodes and fifteen movies had guides written during your time running the website. What was it like to write those?
Tim:
I mentioned wanting the site to be all about having fun, but that isn't to say it didn't also require an enormous amount of work... because Jesus, did it ever. Writing the episode guides got completely out of hand, from initially being a single paragraph to lengthy troves that dove deep into episodes scene by scene, with full dialogue at points and long digressions that often just ran wherever I felt like running at the time as I was watching. I wouldn't have kept doing it if I didn't enjoy the process, but it was also a very time-consuming one. I'd watch an episode, formulate some initial thoughts on what I felt about the episode by itself and from the perspective of being part of the larger season or the show in its entirety, and then start writing. I'd re-watch as I wrote, stopping and going back to make sure I had the sequence of events right, that I mostly had dialogue correct, etc. I didn't need to go into that much detail, but it seemed to fit in with what the story demanded, and often such silly things happened in an episode or with a character that I couldn't help but go off on ridiculous tangents to explore those ideas through to their (il)logical end. One guide might take hours to write, though sometimes when I was being "efficient" I could get it all done in 1-2 hours, though these always felt somewhat rushed to me and like missed opportunities to have gotten the most out of things. That wasn't even getting into the formatting (all our HTML was done in Microsoft Works, because once again I'm oooollllllddddd as balls), coming up with satiric titles, deciding on ratings, explaining the "moral" of the story, picking out the appropriate screen-grabs, etc.
What were some of your favourite guides and why?
Tim:
I wrote hundreds of those guides so it's hard to pick out "favourites", but I think the one that stands out most in my memory is from the Johto League: Episode 252: Why? Wynaut. That whole "league" story began with Ash being told by Professor Oak that he had to get his ass to Johto and out of his childhood home that Oak mysteriously has spare sets of clothes in because the Johto League was "quickly impending". Ash then made a tortuously slow journey through Johto, taking a ridiculous amount of time to get the 8 badges he needed for entry into the league, over two years of episodes before he finally qualified for entry... and was told in Episode 252 that the League started 3 months later. When I got to that episode and heard that I basically snapped, and decided to incorporate that into the guide itself. It was very meta and incredibly self-indulgent, but then it was my damn website so I could do as I pleased! I really found writing that guide cathartic, as I incorporated myself being beaten by the corrupt Officer Jenny police force and replaced as writer by a series of crudely drawn stereotypes of characters, actors and writers all trying to lay out the events of the episode while themselves getting distracted.
Looking back on that guide now, there's elements of "humour" that I cringe at, like the "campy" dialogue of a "flaming homosexual". I'm not making excuses for the humour; I thought it was funny at the time and now it just comes across as mean-spirited. But it also caught me by surprise because it isn't what I remembered about that particular guide: I remembered the jokes about bad fanfics, the impersonations of celebrities, etc., and re-reading them again I remember how I was feeling in the moment I wrote it and it brings back pleasant memories of posting it on the site and chatting with people about the episode on the forums. But then there's also this crappy "camp" narrator that makes me wince to read, and makes me wanna grab the younger me by the shoulders and say, "C'mon man, really?" while he screams at me to give him lottery numbers.
I'm sure there were more guides (and more things I have forgotten and [would] dislike now) that I could pick out if I went back through them. But I guess what I most enjoyed about the guides is that I got to develop recurring themes, ideas and character quirks (like the anime!) and play around with those in fun ways even with the pre-existing structure of the actual episode content itself. It was a fun thing to do, even if it was time consuming, and that's part of why I kept it up for so long.
In addition to guides, the website offered a space for fan works, providing a creative outlet for staff and visitors of the site, fondly referred to as “Dodgers”. What were some of your favourites?
Tim:
Oh, it's hard to pick a favourite! That's like asking who your favourite kid is (Melody), when you love them all (but especially Melody) equally and you don't dislike any of them (except Tobias). But we had some immensely talented people who produced some tremendous fanart in particular. Sniffadoodledoo was (and is) crazy talented and her artwork both inspired and terrified me, in that I felt like I could never be as talented as she was in terms of composition, colour, framing, etc. Doc Charizard was just incredibly silly and his humour had this wild quality to it that was kind of frenetic and uncontrolled. But there were so many more, some who only shared the odd piece here and there, others who were constantly sending us things, and there were artists who had very crude, simplistic styles that still demonstrated a great sense of comic timing. Plus of course the ones who were just very adorably earnest about "shipping" and would draw completely innocent pictures of stuff like Ash and Paul holding hands and blushing. Very wholesome :)
The Pokemopolis forum was another way for the community to come together and share their creativity, but also a place to talk about the website, Pokémon, and engage in general conversation. How would you describe your community of Dodgers?
Tim:
I mentioned all the work that went into the episode guides, not to mention other areas of the site like the fanfics, various "articles", contests, etc. Beyond the fact that I enjoyed it and had fun doing it, part of what kept me going for so long was a sense of (non-begrudging) obligation. We had fairly early on built up a very loyal group of regular forum-goers we called "Dodgers", and though by the end their numbers had declined from our earlier highs, I enjoyed regularly chatting with them via our forum and getting their feedback on what they were enjoying about the show and the site.
Initially Lex and I had put up one of those old visitor counters because we wanted to know if people were actually coming to the site or if we were just throwing stuff out into the void. Then we added a guestbook so we could get comments, and we straight up just had our personal emails (and a few times on the forums I even posted my full name and home address at the time) because the Internet was a VERY different thing back then. It was nice to get feedback, and sometimes quite funny to get hatemail or angry comments from people who were just FURIOUS about what was a silly little website about a silly little cartoon. But the guestbooks were limited, emails were by nature a one-on-one thing, and creating a web forum seemed to make the most sense to allow people to communicate with us out in the open and also bring like-minded people together. Our early forums were very basic, easy to spam or for guests to just throw any old crap up, and moderating them was frustrating, though at least we didn't have anything near the scope of madness that goes on with social media and the like today.
After annoying experiences with some of the basic and largely unsupported forum software we were using, we got a somewhat more robust system in place, pushed for registered users instead of the free-for-all guest system we'd had before, and largely our only concern was in catching and blocking bot accounts - it was nowhere near the issue it is today, but still very annoying, especially as a great deal of these bot accounts didn't actually post, just registered and then sat there, the result of some automated process that was likely running completely unsupervised and potentially largely forgotten by the people who had set them up. But we had a place where the Dodgers could congregate and chat. We set up sections based around site-specific and more general-purpose sections, and people got to know each other, take a more active part in competitions, share art and writing, [and] talk about their lives. It was really nice; we had a lovely community of users who were largely in it because they enjoyed the site, liked the atmosphere, and wanted to be part of it.
While we never hit anything near the popularity of Serebii or Bulbagarden, we had a good number of regular users and more registered users who were intermittent users of the site. With growth like that comes more potential for issues, unfortunately, which was something I never really understood because honestly I didn't know how anybody could take any of this seriously. We were a bunch of random people making dumb jokes about a cartoon series; it wasn't important, it was just... fun! Fun is important too, but I was co-owner and operator of the website and I wasn't as invested in the "proper" running or the "right" way of interaction as some people were. Some forum users didn't like the way the forums were being handled and decided to split off and do their own thing (I don't know how it went, but I hope it went well; I liked most all of the regular Dodgers who used the forums and only want good things for them) so we ended up with a [smaller] regular userbase, though less drama. This is not to say the people who left were the cause of the drama, [but] rather that one half of the users who were an equal part of the clashing philosophies were no longer there so there wasn't really anything for those left to get upset about. If all this part sounds vague, it's because I didn't really get it at the time and I still really don't, which was probably a big part of the frustration for those who left, beyond knowing that the forums as they existed were a way for me to keep up with the regular site users and shoot the shit with them about any ol' thing, and I didn't personally think things needed to be any deeper than that.
On April 13th, 2014, you posted an update to the website to confirm its closure, and on May 11th of that year, a further update was made to confirm the forums had closed, and an unofficial one had opened up so Dodgers could continue to chat with one another. Can you explain why you decided to walk away from the website after all those years?
Tim:
I'd like to say it was something dramatic, but really it just felt like the time was right. By 2014 I just found myself with less time and energy to devote to keeping up with the site. There are a lot of reasons for that, including increased demands on my time in my career and less downtime in my personal life that I could devote to the site. But perhaps the biggest thing was how much the situation re: the anime had changed from 1999 to 2014. In 1999, it was incredibly difficult unless you were a tape trader to get the original Japanese language version of the show, so the dubbed version was the go-to unless you were willing to find incredibly bad realplayer avis in 320x240 resolution and bad translated subtitles. I'm based in New Zealand, and through some quirk I believe the early 4Kids dub aired far ahead of what was on American television. So we were rather uniquely placed, multiple episodes ahead in the episode guides that went up on the site to what a lot of people in the English-speaking parts of the world had ready access to.
By 2014 all that had changed. Properly translated subtitled versions of the episodes in the original Japanese were available and in very good quality almost as soon as the episode had aired in Japan. New Zealand was now a long way behind the American airing of the show, meaning I had to rely on sourcing the episodes for myself, and as I'd started with the dubbed version it didn't feel quite right to make the shift to subtitles, especially as the character beats were kinda different as a result. So Pokemopolis was well behind other sites; when the guides came, people had already seen them weeks or months earlier and already talked to death about each of them, and it was getting harder to avoid spoilers. I started asking myself if there was really much point to keep things going when I was so far behind, beyond just having a reason to continue shooting the shit with people on the forums who I also felt might have just stuck around out of their own sense of obligation.
So I decided the time had come to call it a day. I didn't want the site to go, but I did know it couldn't continue running with regular updates, and certainly I couldn't invest the time in the forums anymore, especially as the whole reason for their existence in the first place was now being taken away. I decided to strip out all those sections I felt had become redundant or might cause bandwidth issues, the fanart in particular, and cut everything down to just the episode guides, which represented a tremendous amount of work that I didn't want to just blink out of existence. The Dodgers were understanding, though keen to retain their community, creating a standalone forum which I left a link to on the site page for others to find. It was very touching to have some other sites reach out both to say farewell to Pokemopolis as an ongoing site, but also to offer to host the guides themselves once the hosting I'd paid for ran out so that it didn't disappear from the Internet. So I put up the farewell message, noted the date when the site itself would no longer be accessible online, and moved on to other things in my life.
Despite claiming the website would shut down, the website is still online, and continues to host the anime guides the team wrote. What is the future for Pokemopolis, and do you think it could ever make a return?
Tim:
I had in all seriousness figured that once the hosting for the site ran out, that would be it. There was a little itch at the back of my head saying maybe I should get back in contact with one of those who had reached out offering to archive the site... but also it didn't seem particularly pressing. Then as the date arrived for my hosting to end, I received a note saying it was time to renew my hosting package or the site would no longer be there and I figured... What the hell? Why not keep it going? The major reason for this was that happily the hosting costs are essentially nil, or at least so negligible that I don't notice them. During the height of the site's popularity, I'd agonised but finally relented on putting ads on the site, something I'd been keen to avoid forever if I could. That had essentially wiped out the cost of keeping the site up, and I figured that as traffic dropped the revenue would too, the costs would become annoying again and that would give me the impetus I needed to cancel. Instead, though advertising revenue dropped down significantly, the hosting costs themselves were basically not enough that it felt worth the effort to shut it down. So I figured I'd renew another three years, see how that went, and maybe shut it down then.
I don't think I ever will now, unless my financial situation takes a sudden horrific plunge. At one point the domain name expired as I'd forgotten to update my credit card on the hosting service we used, and when that happened I realised I still wasn't ready for Pokemopolis to go. I renewed the domain, made sure the hosting package was secure, and here we sit today, with the site still up and accessible even if it hasn't been updated for a decade now. I like that it's there, a weird little time capsule of a far different time in both Pokémon and Internet history, with hundreds of largely nonsensical guides written by an animation student in their early 20s who was just fucking about with a couple of friends. I don't think it will ever "return" because my work and personal life eats up most of my available time even more now than it did in 2014, but I also get to make use of a lot of that creative energy that went into the guides and the site in my work now, which is a wonderful thing not everybody gets to say.
At the time of the interview, over a decade has passed since the website ended. We now have nine generations of Pokémon, over 1000 monsters and dozens of Pokémon forms. In the anime, Ash’s adventures have come to a conclusion, and the franchise continues to move forward. What have been your thoughts on the franchise in recent years?
Tim:
I kept up with the Japanese subtitled version for a little while out of curiosity, as I felt I finally had an excuse not to wait for new episodes. Eventually time and other obligations got in the way and I just fell away from watching the show entirely. However, in 2019, long after I'd stopped actively being involved in the site or keeping up with the show, I was idly browsing my phone on the way to a meeting when I saw on CNN (CNN!) that one of the lead stories was that... Ash Ketchum had FINALLY won a Pokémon League! I stepped into the meeting, filled with a number of people in their early 20s, and without thinking I just declared,"Ash Ketchum just won a Pokémon League!" and... everybody in the room cheered. They cheered!
This fictional idiot 10-year-old battle savant from a Japanese cartoon designed to cash in on the popularity of a game made by a dude who really digs bugs had finally won a fictional cockfighting league after two decades of failure, and everybody in the room knew who he was, what a big deal this was, and were happy for him. Hell yeah, Pokémon, you brought people together in wonderful ways, and you still do, and it was in that spirit that Pokemopolis was made and I am so glad to see that spirit is alive and well.
Which other Pokémon fan websites and communities did you enjoy visiting during your days running Pokemopolis?
Tim:
I never really engaged much with other Pokémon websites and communities while I was running Pokemopolis; that ate up far too much time. The exception would be in the early days when Lex and I had taken over from Brandon; we would go to the Universal Pokémon Network forums and share some of our thoughts on the "dodginess" of Pokémon, ending with an exhortation for them to "run.to/pokemopolis", which was the url redirect service we were using at the time for our Geocities page. That was a fun experience, since Lex and I would pop down to an Internet cafe during breaks in our animation study since there was no other way to do anything online if you weren't at home (the world was once a very different place!) and jump on a computer together and post responses to the conversations happening there. The fun part was the little conspiracy theory that came out of this, as some bright spark declared they had done some Internet sleuthing and figured out Lex and I were one person masquerading as two, since we shared the same IP address, and we had OBVIOUSLY chosen our names from the kids in Jurassic Park. This was very amusing, because the idea that one person would go to such lengths was ridiculous to us (perhaps not such a ridiculous thought in 2024) when Occam's razor applied: we had the same IP because we were on the same computer at an internet cafe. We were on the same computer because we were poor as shit students. Our names were Lex and Tim because our names are... Lex and Tim!
Other than that, every so often I'd make use of the work of Bulbapedia or Serebii to double check I had some key points right in a guide I was [writing]. The most time I spent on Serebii was for an April Fools' prank where I pretended Serebii had purchased Pokemopolis and were adjusting it to be a more wholesome and kid-friendly website, so I could get the formatting and use of imagery/font correct. Looking around there I was very impressed by how much work they put in, and of course how threadbare and jury-rigged Pokemopolis was by comparison!
What kind of Pokémon merchandise and items do you own that mean something to you?
Tim:
I picked up various bits of Pokémon merchandise when Pokemopolis was in full swing. Perhaps the most ridiculous was a giant Pikachu plushie that Lex bought me as a birthday present, which I loved dearly but also used up an enormous amount of space. I had to do away with it in a house move, but I was very happy to give it to a child who immediately loved it more than anything they had ever seen before in their life, hugging it and carrying it around with them even though it was even bigger than they were. Other than that, I had some Team Rocket toys, a couple of little Koffing plushies, and in a personal triumph, an autograph from Veronica Taylor given to Lex and I when we met her that proclaimed, "Pokemopolis is right!" - She had no idea what Pokemopolis was or what we were right about, but she was a lovely, warm and friendly lady who was happy to chat with us both and do us that favour.
What are you and the rest of the team up to these days?
Tim:
Nowadays I'm working in a field that is enormously creatively fulfilling but also extremely time consuming, and am currently working on a PhD in a part-time capacity. Lex and I still keep in touch, though she is also very busy and we can go some time between catch-ups: I asked if she wanted to chime in on these answers or get in touch with Johto Times directly, but she hasn't had a chance to respond, unfortunately. Brandon I haven't seen in a few years, but I imagine that much as he was back in our student days, he's finding amusement in exploring different ways of testing and developing his skills in a variety of areas.
Looking back, what were some of your fondest memories of running the website?
Tim:
I have many fond memories of running the site, but probably the best is that I met and had a fairly lengthy relationship with one of the Dodgers. Though our romantic relationship eventually ended, we remain great friends to this day and I will always appreciate that Pokemopolis is what helped make that possible. Beyond that, I of course loved shooting the shit with the Dodgers on the forums. Particular contests stand out to me from that time too, like the ones where we'd each write a paragraph for a story and try (and fail!) to keep it as a cohesive narrative, or get Dodgers to take turn drawing parts of a Pokémon without knowing what the others had drawn and then turning the resulting monstrosity into a character-designed Pokémon (they were ALWAYS eldritch abominations). We had contests where a 19th-century British explorer would vaguely describe Pokémon he'd seen from various regions and the Dodgers would draw it from description before we compared it to the actual thing. Lots of little community building group activities like that were always a blast and often resulted in completely unpredictable but always delightful messes.
Tim, thanks very much for taking the time to speak to us and share your memories. Do you have any closing comments you would like to make for our readers, and for any Dodgers that visited Pokemopolis over the years?
Tim:
Finally, to all the Dodgers out there who might read this, I hope you enjoyed the site while it was active! For any who might have found it after the fact, I hope you enjoyed what you saw, and for both groups, don't forget that the entire thing was all designed to just be a lot of nonsense. Fun nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. Continue to take that spirit into your own lives, careers, relationships: we're all here on this planet for a limited time, but while here we're supposed to enjoy ourselves. Pokemopolis while it was active was a very enjoyable time in my life, I hope it was in yours too, and I hope you're enjoying yourselves wherever you are and whatever you're doing right now. I know I am, and I can't wish for better than for you to know that joy too.
A huge thanks to Tim for answering my questions, and sharing the history and memories of Pokemopolis and its community with me. I wish him and the rest of his team all the very best and hope they continue to retain those cherished memories the website gave them.
Interview conducted on August 18th, 2024
Interview published on October 10th, 2024