I suppose I'm unusual in that my own first-hand experience with the short-lived clear cola craze of the early 1990s was rooted exclusively in Tab Clear, ie: the contender that generated zero nostalgia and, as per later revelations, was never built with longevity in mind. Its principal rival, Crystal Pepsi, might have suffered a swift demise by '94 but has clung to a degree of relevance as a fuzzy cultural memory from a bygone era - enough so to have eventually become the subject of several internet petitions, which in turn led to a series of limited revivals in recent years. Tab Clear, meanwhile, remains stranded in Stagnation Ville, a mere footnote in the Crystal's more illustrious (by comparison) career, albeit one that certainly left its mark. Nowadays, it's public knowledge (thanks to the divulgings of ex-Coca-Cola marketing officer Sergio Zyman) that Coca-Cola formulated Tab Clear not with the intention of competing with Pepsi's hot new product, but of nipping it in the bud - the idea was that you would see this uninspiring product on the shelves beside Crystal Pepsi, assume they were all much of a muchness and bypass them altogether. That's why they used the lesser Tab brand, and not Coca-Cola, so as to not risk muddying their flagship beverage with another high-profile fiasco, following on from the then still relatively recent business with New Coke. What made the Tab (or TaB, if you prefer) juxtaposition particularly lethal to Crystal Pepsi was that Tab was a sugarless drink whose particular market niche had already suffered a severe diminishing with the introduction of Diet Coke in 1982. Pepsi's strategy revolved around promoting a sense of wellness in a way that circumvented the usual ignominy of being a diet cola - its great boast, from a nutritional standpoint, is that it was caffeine free (the idea behind the clear cola fad being that consumers were intended to associate clarity with purity, regardless of how much merit there was in that particular equation) - whereas Tab Clear was only too eager to hype up all of the attributes that made a cola appear strictly for the calorie-conscious, with "Sugar Free" and "Calorie Free" being right there in big bold lettering upon the side of the can. Coca-Cola set out to sabotage Pepsi's clear revolution by wilfully producing a soft drink to look as uncharismatically dorky as possible, and apparently it worked like a charm. Not that dumb and not that smart, say you?
And there's an extent to which all of that leaves me with quite a bitter taste in my mouth, because as a child I was positively enthralled by the novelty of Tab Clear, a product whose own creators, unbeknownst to me, regarded as ingeniously lousy, and were busy basking in their own duplicitous cleverness right while I was pestering my parents to buy me a bottle. Crystal Pepsi had slipped right under my radar, but Tab Clear felt like big news - a soft drink that tasted (somewhat) like Coca-Cola, but was incongruously transparent. At the same time, there was something about the beverage that struck me as somehow profoundly unnatural. Its very existence seemed like a freaky distortion of the laws of reality. It's so-called purity - the fact that we were being called to regard sugarless and colourless as synonymous - struck me as somewhat hard to swallow. Tab Clear was not a product I especially trusted, and yet my morbid curiosity compelled me to swig the dubious substance into my digestive tract anyway. My fascination was intense, but short-lived, and I'm not convinced I even noticed when the product was quietly withdrawn from the market soon after. But for a moment there, it really had me.
With hindsight, it's not exactly a mystery as to why Tab Clear should have caught my eye while Crystal Pepsi didn't - the former's ad campaign was significantly stranger. And for a product supposedly earmarked as a sacrificial lamb from its conception, I was certainly bombarded with ads for Tab Clear incessantly enough throughout the spring of '93 - in particular, the one claiming that Bigfoot, as glimpsed in the infamous and much-debated Patterson-Gimlin footage, was really German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, on the run from the fall-out of World War I and leading a secret life as a tourist attraction in the Oregon wilderness (not actually where the Patterson-Gimlin footage was filmed, but perhaps that's unimportant), and that Tab Clear was supposedly at the centre of life's sticky web of perpetually unravelling chaos. It seems a world apart from the Crystal Pepsi tactic, which was to roll out as much cheerful imagery and trite reassurances ("Right now only wildlife needs preservatives") the average eyeball could take to the sounds of Van Halen's "Right Now" (the premise of the ad, with its use of evocative subtitles, was modelled upon the song's original music video). Pepsi's campaign was built on an overflow of colour (somewhat ironically, given the product's most prominent attribute) and on the exaltation of a glorious present where anything was possible, while Tab Clear looked back to the unsightly mess that is human history, played with a tongue-in-cheek fondness for urban legends and conspiracy theories, and steeped in a sense of flippant paranoia. Both of them made some parallel between the transparency of their product and a dawning age of heightened enlightenment, but the Tab campaign was much more openly at ease with the fact that what it was spouting was absolute drivel. Tab, for one, embraced the notion (which had seemed so obvious to the younger me) that there was something inherently warped and off-kilter about a clear cola - the "Chain of Mystery/Sinister Connections" campaign was built around that intrinsic sense of wrongness, effectively positing the product as the unfathomable cosmic energy fuelling a parallel universe that, among other things, seemed to follow a confoundingly different temporal sequence to our own (there, the fall of the Berlin Wall apparently occurred before the disappearance of Flight 19). Secondly, there is something tauntingly ironic in the very idea that Coca-Cola would use a campaign poking fun at conspiracy theories to market a product they had conceived with the dirty ulterior motive of failing and dragging a rival initiative down with it. Were they possibly daring us to see through their baffling razzmatazz and comprehend exactly what they were up to?
On that note, we might assume that the campaign, in line with everything else we know surrounding Coca-Cola's conception of Tab Clear, was not expected to win the public over to to the merits of the beverage - and I have seen criticism of "Chain of Mystery" centred on how the product it's supposedly hawking gets sidelined for so much of the ad that the viewer never has a chance to get a firm grasp on what Tab Clear is and what it actually has to do with any of this, beyond the most arbitrary of connections. Yet, while I didn't exactly become a Tab Clear loyalist in the long-term (or as long a term as the drink's brief shelf-life would have allowed), I can credit the campaign in that I never forgot it, or just how confused it made me feel as a child. My callow brain could barely comprehend anything going on in those purported chains of mystery - I had a limited understanding of the bulk of the historical occurrences and conspiracy theories to which they alluded, and I was still too young and inexperienced to have a handle on just how crazy the adult world could be about that sort of thing. To me, it was just a lot of weird stuff that happened, and from a thematic standpoint it made a vague amount of sense, because Tab Clear the product was also weird. A clear cola? Now that's just twisted.
I'm aware of at least three TV ads in the "Chain of Mystery/Sinister Connections" series. There's the aforementioned one speculating on a perceived connection between Kaiser Wilhelm II's reckless foreign policy, UFO sightings in Idaho and alleged Bigfoot encounters (the Kaiser's fortunes were caused by a reaction to drinking Tab Clear, which set everything else in motion). Another posits that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the alligators reputed to roam New York City's sewers were revealed to be Soviet submarines, which were consequently abandoned and - somehow or other- caused a squadron to go missing over the Bermuda Triangle (though they later showed up alive and AWOL in a bar in Vegas). Naturally, Tab Clear had a hand in all of this too. Finally, there was an ad linking the inexplicable popularity of Australian media star Bert Newton (turns out, Tab Clear was the secret of his immense sex appeal) to a cosmonaut disappearance and the creation of Kata Tjuṯa - you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'll hazard a guess that that last one was made exclusively for Australian television, as I doubt the late Bert Newton was prominent enough elsewhere for the joke to have played with international viewers. There was also a radio ad with a droid at Stonehenge monologuing on the beverage as one of the great paradoxes of human existence (and how interesting to note that mobile phones were regarded as frivolous technology back in 1993).
The paradox, as depicted in the campaign, was that Tab Clear represented such a disturbing deviation on our preconceived notions of what a cola should be while still retaining that same robust and familiar cola flavour. Turns out, we were not actually expected to swallow that, no more than we were expected to seriously ponder if Bigfoot might really be an exiled German emperor caked in moss. Still, there is something strangely poetic about the campaign's ideation of an alternate universe in which the off-centre attributes of the transparent cola made it the driving force behind all of the important events and legends of the century past, while in this universe, it wasn't meant to be. Tab Clear was an abhorrent interloper that was rapidly ejected from our own timeline, but not without having altered the trajectory for cola consumption in the years ahead. The clear revolution was halted outside the gate, and while we'll never know for certain that Crystal Pepsi wouldn't eventually just have fizzled out at its own pace, Tab Clear ensured that it never got the chance to gain a stronghold in the market. But I suppose with Crystal Pepsi's current status as a beneficiary of nostalgia, it remains to be seen if Coca-Cola really had the last laugh. It sure did have the tangier campaign, though.
Incidentally, I distinctly remember finding the taste of Tab Clear to be close enough of that to regular cola to have me satisfied in 1993, but I was still a young kid and I'll concede that my palate was probably a lot less sophisticated back then. Although that does account for why I would end up losing interest in the product anyway - if it all went down the same to me, there probably wasn't much to keep me requesting Tab Clear once the novelty had worn off.
This is a post it was on my mind to make all the way back in March of 2019, following the death of Luke Perry at the tragically young age of 52, but it got placed on the back-burner on account of the fact that I couldn't locate an English-language upload of the ad in question. Three years later, and I've finally figured out where one was hiding, so let's proceed.
Dreamboat Luke Perry was best known for his work in such teen-orientated fare as Beverly Hills 90210 and Riverdale. He also made memorable guest appearances playing animated versions of himself in The Simpsons and Johnny Bravo. But if you were watching TV in Europe in 1997, you might also remember his as the valuable face associated with Pizza Hut's hot new product, The Sicilian, a pizza marketed on the virtues of its particular herb combination, and the presence of corners, although that particular virtue isn't touted until the end (what are the advantages of having a square pizza anyway? Easier to hold?). Somewhat unusually for a celebrity endorsement, Perry does not, himself, explicitly sell us on the pleasures of The Sicilian; in fact, he has no dialogue whatsoever. He is represented as an idealised dining companion, every 90s romantic's wildest fantasy, the punchline being that he ends up playing second fiddle to The Sicilian, here depicted as the kind of impossibly perfectly perfect pizza that should exist only in fantasy, much as the average person's prospects of ever dating a celebrity of Perry's magnitude could happen only in the very idlest of wool-gatherings. The ad, developed by Abbott Mead Vickers, follows a young woman who describes how her ideal date would play out - Luke Perry would appear at her door and accompany her to Pizza Hut, where they would order the exciting Sicilian, only for both objects of her girlish desire to collide in an explosive conflict. A love triangle develops between the protagonist, Perry and The Sicilian, prompting the protagonist to reassess where her loyalties lie and to eject Perry from her fantasy - or, rather, she assigns him a new role, one where he is unable to come between her and her Sicilian.
There is an implicit narrative, of sorts, underpinning the protagonist's charming flights of fancy; as the ad opens, we see her seated in a prosaic living room beside a man we might assume to be her actual partner, although this is not made explicit. We're shown just enough of this scenario to conclude that her dreams of Perry and The Sicilian represent the escapist fantasies of a woman bored out of her skull at the prospect of what we suppose to be an umpteenth evening on the couch. That she dreams of running away to something as mundane as a Pizza Hut feels almost comical within itself, which leads me into what I ultimately find most fascinating about this ad - how it succeeds in creating a sense of unreality from such a banal situation (the presence of Perry notwithstanding), which functions on a more immersive level than the protagonist's ability to change the details of her date with a snap of her fingers. That Perry himself remains entirely silent certainly helps to reinforce the sensation that he is, in spite of being right there in the flesh, somehow not real - he registers as only a surface representation of himself, an uncanny replica to be used and repurposed at the protagonist's whim.
The real driving force behind the character of the ad, though, would be its choice in low-key background music, which carries overtones of the mirage. I am, regrettably, unable to put a name to the composition in question (if it turns out to be something by Cocteau Twins, then my apologies in advance), but it has a distinctively Muzakian flavour, the kind of audio one would expect to hear whilst riding up a shopping mall escalator or following announcements on the weather channel. Muzak, which commonly answers to the derisive moniker of "elevator music", could be described as the soundtrack of corporate banality, the kind of music to which were not necessarily primed to listen, but which meets a supposed subconscious need. It is as inconspicuous as it is omnipresent. The music's close associations with consumerist culture have made it one of the building blocks of the vaporwave movement, which seeks to shine a spotlight on the raw underbelly of the sonic encounters we are ordinarily conditioned to ignore. The term "elevator music" regulates the form to its allotted role as music to occupy the backdrop of various functional scenarios, but also alludes to the manner in which it accompanies us through life's "in between" moments - transitory moments where we're shifting from Point A to B, and which, in themselves, seem to offer so little in the way of substance and consequence that they seem destined to evaporate from conscious memory. The function the music plays is in appearing to plaster over life's numerous voids, whilst shepherding us ever onward down our unending path of consumption (usually the cause of said voids), but in a manner so anodyne that this process is not designed to register. The overriding sensation of elevator music is one of uncanny reassurance, but also uneasy artificiality, its purpose being to effectively numb us to the vapidity of our surroundings. In the Pizza Hut ad, such music is used to imply a disconnection from reality, with the fusion of fantasy and consumerism here suggesting the overwhelming inescapability of corporate culture. Dreams can themselves be viewed as "in between" moments, fulfilling the same function as that elevator music in that they cover up the vapidity in between the portions of life that command our active engagement. Dreams, though, are assumed to be driven by personal agency, but here they are clearly serving the ends of the corporate. There is an undercurrent of irony in the implication that the protagonist evades the tedium of an inert existence dictated by the television set by disappearing into a television commercial.
There are two moments in the ad when the music does not feature and we are faced with a soundtrack of silence - at the opening of the ad, when the protagonist's fantasy has yet to be established, and during the punchline, to emphasise the abruptness of Perry's departure. Silence is equated with reality; a date with Luke Perry might be an out there prospect, but the ad ultimately posits it as less valuable than the readily obtainable Sicilian, which anybody can wander into a Hut and order. The protagonist finds empowerment in the rejection of the idle wool-gathering embodied by Perry, and in the embracing of concrete consumption, with the trio of woman seated behind the protagonist acting as a kind of subtle visual echo to her epiphany - notice how they suddenly all seem to be smiling in her direction when she figures out what she really wants. The theme of female solidarity is expanded on in the ad's sister spot, in which the protagonist fantasises about a dream night in where, in lieu of providing her with dining companionship, Perry (clad in black leather, no less) is delivering a Sicilian straight to her door. Again, she expels Perry from the scenario so that she can focus on the pizza, but here she seems less adverse to having to share The Sicilian - a group of friends appear in Perry's place and they gather around the pizza together. The ad can thus be seen as celebrating friendship, and a contentment with every day pleasures, so long as there's enough corners and oregano to go around. In the original ad...I suppose it also celebrates self-sufficiency. She pays her own way.
When Pokemania gripped the West in the dying embers of the 20th century, the then-callow Japanese import swiftly gathered infamy for being totally irresistible to kids and beyond incomprehensible to adults. Certainly, no addition to the Pokémon canon emphasised this division more than Pokémon The First Movie, the American treatment of the anime's premier big screen outing, released in theatres in late 1999. This was the first real occasion on which a significant number of non-converts were forced to sit down and watch a Pokémon adventure from beginning to end and, as soon became apparent, it wasn't the most agreeable way they could have popped their Poké cherries. For years, Pokémon continued to be something the adult crowd simply didn't get, but after the movie I couldn't help but notice that the discourse shifted from one of general bemusement to outright resentment.
Among other things, parents were unpleasantly surprised to discover that Pokémon The First Movie was actually a double bill, a practice all but dead in the US - despite Quentin Tarantino's valiant efforts to re-establish it in the late 2000s - but still pretty standard in Japan, particularly for children's pictures. The first film on offer was the 20 minute Pikachu's Vacation, a head-spinning fluff piece centred on the cuter Pokémon that might have been palatable had it been about 15 minutes shorter. The juicier part of the package, and what most fans had come to see, was Mewtwo Strikes Back, which promised to go up close and personal with what was (at the time) the biggest and baddest monster of the lot, the titular Mewtwo. A fiendishly powerful, genetically engineered Psychic-type Pokémon resembling a bipedal Sphynx cat, Two entered the world "For Science!", briefly finding himself under the control of local crime lord Giovanni, before going rogue, blowing up a building or two and retreating to a secluded island to get to work on nurturing his own team of cloned Pokémon. (Note: Pokémon, like Care Bears, are best regarded as androgynous, at least for the purposes of this film, which came about before genders were implemented into the games' mechanics - but since Mewtwo was given such a distinctly masculine voice, courtesy of Philip Bartlett (or Jay Goede, as I believe he's actually called), I intuitively see him as a male). Some time later, he lures a group of specially selected trainers to the island, with the intention of harvesting their Pokémon's DNA and using it against them. Meanwhile, the source of Mewtwo's own corrupted DNA, the elusive, kittenish Mew, has arrived there under its own steam, edging toward an inevitable confrontation between original and clone.
(I sure hope you didn't get your hopes up about that so-called "Pokémon Match of All-Time", incidentally. When Mew and Mewtwo finally do come to blows, all they do is slam into one another a few times in cheerful-looking rainbow-coloured bubbles.)
Pokémon The First Movie proved a hit with Pokemaniacs the world over, but was critically reviled and secured a lasting reputation among parents who were dragged along for the ride as one of the worst and most confusing children's pictures of all time. Myself, I have to admit that while, going in, I was absolutely stoked to be getting a big screen Pokémon adventure, my sympathies have always been with those parents. I did not particularly enjoy the actual watching of Pokémon The First Movie. To me, it was awkward, leaden and above all, not much fun. The most entertaining part of the experience was this little kid who insisted on loudly name-checking each Pokémon as it appeared on screen, but got at least a third of them wrong (mind you, so did the movie itself - there were a few incredulous murmurs during that one moment where a trainer addresses his Pidgeot as "Pidgeotto"). I was a lot more satisfied with Pokémon The Movie 2000, which, obnoxious title aside (by the time it came out in the UK the year 2000 was nearly over and most people were sick of seeing that number arbitrarily plastered across everything) was more in line with what I'd expected from a Pokémon feature; nothing groundbreaking, but a cheesy adventure story made to a somewhat bigger scope than the anime. It also fared marginally better with critics (but only marginally), although box office receipts told a different story. At the time, it was easy to dismiss Pokémon as a passing fad that would be all but forgotten in a couple of years, and from a western perspective (I can't speak for the situation in Japan) that certainly seemed to be the way things were headed at the dawn of the new millennium - each theatrical film made significantly less money than the one before it (to the point where they eventually stopped exhibiting them in theatres altogether), the toys were increasingly becoming bargain bin fodder, and the anime had few loyalists by late 2001. Nevertheless, the franchise would endure - not only is Pokémon still alive and kicking in 2022, but is now regarded as a quintessential part of millennial nostalgia.
A beneficiary of this bolstered goodwill has been Pokémon The First Movie, currently a fondly-remembered childhood classic for those who'd subjected their nonplussed parents to it back in 1999. Ask numerous old school Pokemaniacs, and they'll tell you thatit's the best of the Pokémon movies, though I've a sneaking suspicion that a number of these devotees are privileging it for being The First and haven't actually kept up with the many Pokémon features that followed. I myself have only seen a slim minority, but of that sample, I certainly wouldn't rate Mewtwo Strikes Back above the likes of 2000 and Heroes. Then again, it's not as though I've been in a rush to revisit it since that awkward theatrical screening I attended at the turn of the millennium - for the longest time, my opinions of the film were based predominantly on the listless first impressions I'd formed as a teenager. I only recently made the effort to get properly reacquainted, just to see if it would play any better to my nostalgic adult sensibilities and...for the most part, it doesn't. The last eight minutes or so I quite enjoyed - there is some delectable cheese to be had from Ash's "death", his Pokémon tears-enabled resurrection (puts me strongly in mind of the "We care!" sequence from The Care Bears Movie II), and Mewtwo's abrupt eleventh hour change of heart. But everything leading up to that is so fucking drab, despite Team Rocket's valorous attempts to sneak in a little levity with their comically wonky Scandinavian accents. Even at a skimpy 75 minutes, it drags on for way too long.
What did leap out to me more on this particular viewing is what a jarring experience the film is sonically. See, when I say that this was only my first time revisiting Pokémon The First Movie, I should be clear that I am referring strictly to the English dub; I saw a subbed version of the
Japanese original some time during my uni days, and while I couldn't
vouch for the accuracy of the subtitles themselves, the film certainly sounded much more coherent. Nowadays, it's common knowledge among western Pokemon buffs that the version of Mewtwo Strikes Back they received (courtesy of media company 4Kids) was a poor representation of what audiences in its native Japan had seen. The most egregious alterations, from a narrative perspective, are that the English-speaking Mewtwo was given loftier, more overtly murderous ambitions that put him better in line with your archetypal Hollywood villain (in the Japanese original, Mewtwo was less concerned with genocide and world domination than with demonstrating - to himself, as much as anyone else - that his Frankenstein genesis didn't make him inherently inferior), while the moral of the story was changed significantly to impart the message that "fighting is wrong" - a message which, as many critics were quick to point out, was just about the last one this particular franchise was qualified to be making. No less impactful were the various soundtrack switcheroos, with the English dub having a lot of teen-orientated pop shoehorned in, sometimes in truly baffling places, purely for the purposes of compiling a tie-in album they could flog to the same crowds who'd lined up for cheap Pokémon freebies in their Kids Club meals. The resulting soundtrack has very little sense behind it other than synergy - of the total sixteen tracks, exactly half are featured in the film itself, and while the cover brazenly claims that the remaining eight were "inspired by the motion picture", if there was a Pokémon influence on any aspect of their production, I'll eat my hat. The first track, the "Pokemon Theme" performed by Billy Crawford, is the only place in the entire compilation where you'll actually hear the word "Pokémon". It's also one of the few tracks where you'll find even the vaguest references to what the franchise is about - ie: capturing, battling and exploration. The rest are mostly either soppy love ballads or would-be party anthems - which goes along with the territory of teen pop, sure, but what does any of it have to do with a story about a vindictive mutant Sphynx cat searching for its place in a culture dominated by inoffensive cockfighting?
The most positive thing to be said for the Pokémon The First Movie soundtrack is that, on its own, it does make for quite a nice little time capsule of the pop music scene back in 1999. There are a few obscurities here and there, but overall the round-up of names is fairly impressive - Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, *NSYNC, Billie Piper, B*Witched, an ex-Spice Girl and a Backstreet Boy's kid brother - so if you like that sort of thing I'd imagine this would be quite the nostalgia trip for you. As a companion piece to a film about "oddly unpleasant creatures" (in the words of Halliwell's Film Guide), it is, at best, bemusing and, at worst, a textbook example of how arbitrarily-placed pop music can seriously undercut whatever emotional gravitas your flick has been carefully germinating. As noted, a total of eight tracks from the album are heard throughout the film. The "Pokémon Theme" is obviously there, and that one gets a free pass. Two of the insert songs, "Vacation" by Vitamin C and "Catch Me If You Can" by Angela, occur during the Pikachu's Vacation segment and, besides the "Pokemon Theme", are the least harmful of the lot (it's already a fluff piece; a couple of frothy pop numbers aren't going to hurt it any). There's one insert song during the main Mewtwo Strikes Back Feature, "Brother My Brother" by Blessed Union of Souls, and its inclusion is really quite odious. The remaining four are messily jammed into the end-credits sequence, meaning that there's barely enough time for each song to get going before another abruptly takes its place. This whole practice of trying to tag as many tracks from your tie-in album as possible into the closing credits was hardly unique to Pokémon The First Movie
- The Rugrats Movie followed the exact same formula just a year prior.
The transitioning between the truncated tracks at the end of The Rugrats
Movie was much more skilfully done, however, with none of the awkward fade-outs and slapdash tonal clashes that the Pokémon The First Movie end credits are littered with (Christina Aguilera isn't even allowed to get all the way through the chorus before they chop her). In subsequent Pokémon features, the end credits typically serve as
epilogues to the main conflict, allowing various supporting character
arcs and smaller narrative threads to get tied up. Mewtwo Strikes Back has little to offer visually besides a selection of generic travelling scenes
with Ash, Misty, Brock and Pikachu, followed by a short reappearance
from Mew at the very end, although in the Japanese original these were accompanied by a (single) melancholic track, "Kaze to Issho ni", giving them an unexpectedly haunting quality in their simplicity. Needless to say, this same effect is not preserved in the English dub. Additionally, whereas the final appearance of Mew had, if I recall correctly, originally synced with the closing notes of "Kaze to Issho ni", here it's just a random add-on; rather than attempt to align it with M2M's talk of marital prospects, the English dub reprises the instrumental theme associated with the character throughout the film.
The Pokémon The First Movie soundtrack is such a rollicking mess in general that I feel compelled to dig through each individual track, just to try and make some sense of what in the name of Sam Hill it's actually doing here. Songs not appearing in the film itself are italicised. (Oh, and incidentally, I am aware that the soundtrack changes in Pokémon The First Movie go way beyond the teen pop inserts; the film was also extensively re-scored for the western market, meaning that you'll hear very different background music in each version. For the purposes of this review, however, I'm only going to be sticking to what was included on the official soundtrack release.)
"Pokémon Theme" by Billy Crawford: You all know this one. It's catchy (for better or for worse), it's iconic and inevitably it was going to show up here. As noted above, it's also the only track on here with any genuine Pokémon credentials. Appears soon after the Mewtwo Strikes Back prologue, during Ash's ridiculous battle with the proto-Aqua grunt.
"Don't Say You Love Me" by M2M: The last of the tracks heard during the closing credits, this was also released as the soundtrack's official single, and really, I couldn't imagine a song less relevant to the plot of Mewtwo Strikes Back, or to the franchise in general. Let's see: "Don't say your heart's in a hurry/It's not like we're gonna get married/Give me, give me some time". To which hastily-forged union is this meant to be referring? Mewtwo and Giovanni?
"It Was You" by Ashley Ballad feat. So Plush: It becomes something of a running theme that, with a number of these tracks about relationships and the redemptive power thereof, it's not always 100% clear which of the movie's relationships it's supposed to be reflective of. This one is all about the merits having a close friend by your side, so it seems likely that we're intended to take it as a standard friendship song about Ash and Pikachu. It should be noted, however, that outside of the climax of the film, when Pikachu leads the crying that revives the unresponsive Ash, their relationship isn't amazingly front and centre to the plot of Mewtwo Strikes Back. Since the lyrics describe how life has more meaning with the second person, I'd be half-tempted to take it as a reflection of Mewtwo's renewed perspective by the film's conclusion, but for the fact that he doesn't actually stick around to become anyone's friend.
"We're a Miracle" by Christina Aguilera: Clearly intended as the film's answer to that quintessentially 1990s trend of tacking a rousing power ballad to the end of your feature, a practice that took off with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and just about peaked with Titanic. In general, these ballads tended to be entirely interchangeable and only tenuously linked to the film in question, so it seems churlish to knock Augilera's contribution for following suit. And, to be fair, some of the lyrics do actually fit with the plot specifics of Mewtwo Strikes Back. The references to a passing storm and to a tears-facilitated reunion are fairly generic, sure, but I'll take them over whatever disconnected nonsense is going on in the M2M contribution. This track definitely feels more romantically-inclined than the above Ashley Ballad track, although from a plot perspective it only really works when taken as a commentary on the relationship between Ash and Pikachu, which tickles me. All the same, as these rousing 90s power ballads go, I'd rate "We're a Miracle" as rather a boring one, and I can't say I blame the movie for being in such a rush to get it out of the way and onto the peppier Emma Bunton piece.
"Soda Pop" by Britney Spears: This one I can see being included as a sly little wink to Pokémon buffs, as "Soda Pop" was the name given to a healing item in the original Nintendo games. As a bonus, the lyrics mention Fire and Ice, two Pokémon element types. It's still a very tenuous addition to this tracklist, but I guess Britney was too big a name to pass up in 1999.
"Somewhere Someday" by *NSYNC: As with the Christina Aguilera track, a few generic references to storms and tears keep it from being totally plot-irrelevant. Actually, based on the first verse I was expecting this to tie more heavily into Mewtwo's existential crisis ("And you don't know who you are any more/Let me find what you've been searching for"), only then the vocalist went and addressed the subject of the song as "Girl", and that completely threw me off. Minus that, and the multiple instances of the word "Baby", and I could have bought this one as being about Giovanni's empty promises to Mewtwo.
"Get Happy" by B*Witched: This one squanders whatever credibility it might have had on a Pokémon album straight out the gate, when it opens with the lyrics, "Don't be a brontosaurus..." Yo, this is the Pokémon world, and nobody here has a clue what a "brontosaurus" even is (the rejected plot for Movie 3 notwithstanding), so if you're not going to get with the program and substitute "brontosaurus" with "Aerodactyl", you may as well not play at all.
"(Hey You) Free Up Your Mind" by Emma Bunton: I feel like I'm grasping at straws at here, but the song contains the lyrics, "See me, I had no soul", which might be a reference to Mewtwo's Frankenstein's monster complex. Continues Bunton: "...til I found myself with the rock n roll," and it's not as though the resolution to Mewtwo's conflict was achieved through rock n roll music. So nah, just forget it.
"Fly With Me" by 98 Degrees: A song with near-identical sentiments to those expressed and the featured *NSYNC track, and copious instances of the term "Girl", which make it similarly confusing as to just how it's intended to fit in with the plot of Mewtwo Strikes Back. Otherwise, my best guess would be that this refers to Mewtwo flying off with Mew at the end of the film. Besides Corey's weathering the storm on the back of "Pidgeotto", I can't think of any other particularly significant instances of two characters flying together, can you?
"Lullaby" by Mandah: You know, I'm grateful that the producers of this track were considerate enough to slip in a helpful tip-off in the form of a crying Jigglypuff at the opening, otherwise I would probably be speculating that this alluded to Mewtwo and the various ways he asserts his psychic influence throughout the film. I would probably not have guessed that this had anything to do with Jigglypuff, on account of the fact that Jigglypuff is not inPokémon The First Movie! Well, okay, I think one might have been glimpsed briefly somewhere in the Pikachu's Vacation segment, but the classic Jigglypuff character - the one with the propensity for following Ash and friends around and randomly singing them to sleep, as recounted in this song - is certainly nowhere to be seen. What's more, the lyrics here have a weirdly sexual, borderline threatening vibe that I'm not convinced is terribly becoming for the cutesy Balloon Pokémon - we get yet more disconcerting usage of the term "Baby", although at least here the boot is on the other foot and the subject of the song is identified as "Boy" for a change (since this Jigglypuff identifies as a girl, although I'm not sure if a gender was ever confirmed for the recurring Jiggly in the anime).
"Vacation" by Vitamin C: As noted, I can't take too much umbrage with the tracks added to the Pikachu's Vacation segment. Besides, musically speaking, I would rate this as by far the most interesting track on the album, which has a lot to do with the "Rumba Guitar" sample at the start, and the pleasingly retro 1960s surf rock vibe that intermittently permeates the song.
"Making My Way (Any Way That I Can)" by Billie Piper: The future Doctor Who companion chips in with an upbeat ode to the pleasures of journeying and overcoming obstacles. I can see how that fits into the general territory of Pokémon, although I much prefer the "Viridian City" track from The 2.B.A. Master album, which is more-or-less the same thing.
"Catch Me If You Can" by Angela: This one gets tossed in during the sequence in Pikachu's Vacation where Squirtle and Marrill race one another. It's pretty much the same idea as the above Billie Piper track, with the added bonus that the titular hook also alludes to one of the core objectives of the Pokémon series, which is to catch the little buggers.
"(Have Some) Fun With The Funk" by Aaron Carter: Err, well, the word "vacation" shows up in the lyrics, which is possibly supposed to pertain to the premise of Pikachu's Vacation. Otherwise, I draw a blank on what this track is doing here - much to my chagrin, though, I have to admit that it is insanely catchy.
"If Only Tears Could Bring You Back" by Midnight Sons: Hurrah, a track with conspicuous plot relevance from the outset. Poignant title aside, I find the song itself a bit of a bland one; it plays like the kind of thing you would expect to find nestled away in one of the filler spots on an album by one of the boy bands of the era, one you'll hastily skip past searching for "Pop" or "Larger Than Life".
"Brother My Brother" by Blessed Union of Souls: We round things off with the single most controversial item on the tracklist, a cheesy guitar ballad inserted into the English dub during the portion of the story where the original and cloned Pokémon proceed to beat the living shit out of one another. Some fans like this song, and consider it a cozy part of the wider nostalgia package, while others fervently resent the addition on the grounds that it causes the sequence to play out very differently, tonally speaking, to its Japanese equivalent. I would hazard a guess that 4Kids strategically put this song where it is to counteract concerns that the sequence might otherwise have proven too rough for younger viewers - when the clones and originals go at one another, they fight in a very animalistic fashion that looks worlds apart from the fantasy violence that characterises your regular Pokémon battles (which doesn't make the "fighting is wrong" stance of the English dub feel any less flagrantly hypocritical, mind). They snap, snarl, claw and swat at each other...all in all, it's a very harrowing sequence to watch in its original form. I assume the addition of some gentle guitar music was intended to take the sting off, but it does have the effect of pushing things too far in the opposite direction and making a serious moment seem inordinately goofy. Honestly, my gut reaction when I see Pokemon lacerating one another to this music is just to snicker. It doesn't help that the vocalists has to compete with the incredibly loud screaming of the combatants all the while...surely a more sensible approach, if this song had to be there, would be to have muted out all diegetic sound, instead of having them all play out together in a grand chaotic slurry?
What else is there to be said about thePokémon The First Movie soundtrack, except that it's a baffling product of its time? Something I probably should acknowledge about the picture itself, however, is that there are now even more versions of it out there. So great is the film's nostalgic clout that they went and remade it in 2019, this time in eye-popping 3D animation. I haven't watched the newer take in full, but I did check out the end-credits song for the English dub, "Keep Evolving" by Haven Paschall, and I'll consider it a step-up that they at least picked a track germane to the franchise for this one. I also watched a couple of clips, including one of Mewtwo's sinister Pokémon harvest, and will credit the remake for addressing another issue that stuck out as particularly egregious on my
recent rewatch - the way Misty grabs and runs with Togepi but
effectively abandons Psyduck to its fate (she reacts after the fact, but still). In this version, she attempts to protect it before it gets abducted, and so much the better.
