Let's Review The Soundtrack To Pokémon The First Movie (aka I Was Prepared For Trouble, But Not For This)

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 that it'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.)

1. "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.
   
2. "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?
   
3. "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.
   
4. "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.
   
5. "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.
   
6. "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.
   
7. "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.
   
8. "(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.
   
9. "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?
   
10. "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 in Pokémon 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).
    
11. "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.
    
12. "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.
    
13. "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.
    
14. "(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.
15. "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".
    
16. "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 the Pokémon 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.