Megumi Hayashibara is one of Japan’s most iconic voice actresses. Besides her singing work, she’s voiced characters including Team Rocket’s Jessie, Rei Ayanami from Evangelion, and Kitty White from Hello Kitty.
The most recent episode of the Pokemon TV anime pays homage to some of those characters.
林原過ぎる・・・ #アニポケ pic.twitter.com/FUlJBmIaeY
— ポケモア (@moa151) October 21, 2018
they just did a tribute to all the characters megumi hayashibara has voiced im dying pic.twitter.com/Oud57olYMd
— Kiana Mai (@kianamaiart) October 21, 2018
Can you identify all the references? pic.twitter.com/7TYsoA26R9
— Ashita (@AshitanoGin) October 21, 2018
How many can you name?
All of them? Some?
Check your answers below!
How many could you recognize? pic.twitter.com/ZRLD55Iry7
— Dogasu (@DogasusBackpack) October 21, 2018
Comments
9 responses to “Guess All These Anime References In This Week’s Pokemon Episode”
Off the top of my head…
Nuku Nuku, Rei Ayanami, Minky Momo, Lime, Faye Valentine, Paprika, that girl from Detective Conan, Girl Ranma, Lina Inverse.
I can’t figure out who the leftmost character is, but I feel like I should know it.
Yeah I drew a blank as well on that one, but I never saw that series (the last tweet has the answer). Also no idea about the characters at the start of the video. I want to say Rose of Versailles but Megumi Hayashibara didn’t work in that one.
So I found out later that the character is Himiko Shinobibe from a show called Mashin Hero Wataru. It was a late-1980s super robot show that was wildly popular in Japan but basically unknown outside of it (although it was popular in China in the 1990s).
Perhaps the most notable thing about it is that a tie-in game was made for the PC Engine that got released as a pack-in title for the US version of the PC Engine, the TurboGrafX-16. The game was renamed “Keith Courage in Alpha Zones” for the US market.
Got any clue on those Rose-of-Versailles-esque characters at the beginning of the video?
I… assumed they were Pokemon characters.
Well, that’s Jessie posing in costume, but it may well be just random epoch costumes before the cosplay galore. She also appears in a full Noh theatre actress garb right after that, after all.
Man, it’s been at least 15 years since last Nuku Nuku came to mind, but I recognised her right away. Funny how memory works.
There were a couple there that I’d have replaced with what I feel are some more iconic of Megumi Hayashibara’s characters, like Pai from 3×3 Eyes, Ai from Video Girl Ai, or Piyoko from Digi Charat. Momiji from Blue Seed was another great character but sadly her character design is super bland.
It’s probably worth noting that what we think of as ‘iconic’ anime characters may not be so well-known in Japan. 3×3 Eyes falls into this category to some extent, as it was always much better known in the West than in Japan.
Definitely, that goes to explain why they included that character from Mashin Hero Wataru instead. Still, Piyoko! Digi Charat was huuuge in Japan. Basically half of 2ch was DigiChara memes back then. I guess she was not included because she was not the main female character like the others.