also, digimon was bad. it was the poor man's pokemon in more ways than just the title.. and i knew that even as a 10 year old. but for some reason i watched anyway. i guess the characters were cute if bland. granted, the premise was actually pretty good (certainly better thought out than pokemon...) even if it totally failed to live up to its potential.
Really? I've always thought that the contrast with the absolutely horrendous, franchise-driven Pokemon cartoon was striking. It had a serious storyline (with real stakes, as opposed to that "I wanna be da best!!" crap), a good deal of character development, plenty of moments of awesome... Digimon is probably one of the cartoons which most made my childhood.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same Pokemon here...
also notice the conspicuous lack of men on the show. characters rarely have fathers (other than brock's deadbeat dad), normally just mothers. there's not a lot of men around in general that aren't teenagers or old. it's another subtle little clue that something bad happened in the not-distant past again.
Also, in Red/Blue, Lt. Surge comments that his electric pokemon saved him in the war.
