Start by picking up a palm-size Nintendo Game Boy, insert the proper cartridge and switch it on. Soon, a creature with a lightning-bolt tail bounces through an animated sequence, pops a cute grin and yelps, ‘Pikachu!’ You have met the most popular of the Pokémon, a creature — part cherub and part thunder god —that is the most famous mouse since Mickey and Mighty.
Beware of the Pokemania,” November 1999 Time cover story by Howard Chua-Eoan and Tim Larimer
I.
Imagine yourself as a child enthralled with the Pokémon animated series in the late nineties. You receive a copy of Pokémon Red or Blue, perhaps as a birthday or Christmas present, and of course want to begin your quest to catch them all with the show’s star, Pikachu.
But Pikachu plays only a minor role in the first two Game Boy games. Unlike Ash in the anime, the player character cannot choose Pikachu as a starter. No major characters, such as gym leaders or Elite Four members, use Pikachu on their teams; no NPC mentions Pikachu-related lore or legends.
The player can capture a wild Pikachu in only two locations, Viridian Forest (where it has an encounter rate of only five percent) and the powerplant. Pikachu is just one of many Pokémon, and a good deal less prominent than many of the other 150.
How and why did Pikachu become the most popular Pokémon, the face of the entire multimedia franchise? Of the 905 Pokémon that exist at the time of this writing, Pikachu remains by far the most well-known. Pikachu has appeared on no fewer than 192 Pokémon cards, as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon (every year from 2001 to the present), on the cover of Time and The New Yorker and on the island of Niue’s $1 coin. It has appeared in every single Pokémon movie and anime episode. It became the first internationally known Pokémon after a notorious incident involving the hospitalizations of hundreds of children. The retinas you’re currently using to read this post function, in part, due to a photoreceptor protein called Pikachurin, which was discovered by Japanese scientists and named after the Pokémon. Pikachu is inescapable.
Why? The best place to start is with the name itself. Due to its incredible popularity, Pikachu is one of very few Pokémon to keep its original Japanese name in every translation. That name comes from two onomatopoeic Japanese words: pika, the sound of electrical sparking, and chuchu, a mouse’s squeak. Thus I will begin with these two ideas, Pikachu as an electrical elemental and Pikachu as a mouse. I will then consider the design process of Pikachu, drawing on interviews with the Game Freak developers themselves, before concluding with a comparison between Pikachu and the only cartoon mouse with better name recognition.
II.
A thunderstorm can still evoke numinous awe, even in our modern, sophisticated, technologically advanced society. It can be overwhelming enough from a safe, warm home: flashes of light, booming thunder, pouring rain, dogs barking, frightened babies crying. For someone caught out in the storm, it can be truly sublime, in the Romantic sense, awful in that word’s original sense of ‘full of awe.’
When I was an undergraduate, my classical art history professor once told a story of such an experience during her own student years. As an art history student visiting Rome, she of course made a pilgrimage to the Pantheon, the domed temple built during the reign of Hadrian to house statues of all the Olympian gods. On the day she went a storm broke out over Rome and as she saw rain pouring through the dome’s oculus and heard the thunder echoing she had a profound intuitive sense — connaitre rather the previous savoir, kennen rather than wissen, conocer rather than saber — of why the Romans thought of Jupiter the thunderer as the king of the gods.
This story resurfaced in my mind when I had a somewhat similar experience in Germany. Once, when hiking in the Black Forest, I was deep in the woods, far from manmade shelter, when rain started falling and lightning started flashing, hitting a tall tree more than once. As the thunder came closer and closer my thoughts turned to Jupiter and Zeus and, considering the autumnal forest around me, Thor’s hammer Mjölnir.
These ancient thunder gods continue to influence our lives despite our lack of any actual belief in them. You may, for instance, be reading this on a Thursday: on Thor’s day. The French jeudi and the Spanish jueves both come from the Latin Jovis dies, ‘Jupiter’s day,’ while German speakers call Thursday Donnerstag, literally ‘thunder day.’
Chris Hemsworth’s Thor has of course grossed billions at the global box office, to say nothing of theme park characters and merchandising tie-ins. If you visit Scandinavia, you may meet someone with a name like Thoresson or Thuresson, ‘son of Thor,’ or Thorwald, ‘Thor, ruler.’
And, of course, if you look up at the sky on a clear night you might see the gas giant Jupiter, king of planets. In a wonderful synchronicity of myth and science, the largest storm in the known universe, the Great Red Spot, is on Jupiter. Larger than the earth, this thunderstorm has raged for at least three centuries.
Zeus, Thor and Jupiter are only three faces of a much older, archetypal thunder god whose worship was spread across Europe and Asia by the epic migrations of the ancient Indo-Europeans. In ancient India he took the form of the storm god Indra, who, like Zeus and Jupiter, wields the thunderbolt and dethrones his father as king of the gods. (His father, the god of the sky, is called Dyaus or Dyauspitar, names clearly related to Zeus and Jupiter.) Pagan Slavic mythologies had a thunder god called Perun or Perkunas, again with roots in proto-Indo-European myth.
These gods share a number of similarities beyond the use of the thunderbolt as a terrifying weapon, such as an association with oak trees. Myths about them tend to involve a battle with a dragon or serpent: Zeus against Typhon (as in the illustration by Blake), Thor against the Ragnarök serpent Jörmungandr, Indra against the malevolent man-serpent demon known as Vitra or Ahi.
Of course, divine or supernatural thunder also strikes in many non-Indo-European religions and mythologies. “The Lord’s voice is heard over the sea,” the Psalmist sings in Psalm 29. “The glorious god thunders; the lord thunders over the ocean.” In his apocalyptic vision, the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos sees and hears an angel who “cried out in a loud voice like the roar of a lion. And when he cried out, the seven thunders sounded their voices.”
In perhaps the most famous Japanese myth, the sun goddess Amaterasu — the legendary ancestor of the Japanese royal family — is, depending on the teller of the tale, either so frightened or so enraged by her noisy younger brother, the storm god Susanoo, that she hides in a cave, causing an endless night. Japanese mythology has another storm god known as Raijin, Raiden or Kaminari-sama. (Rai means ‘thunder’ in Japanese; a thunderstone evolves Pikachu into Raichu.) “He is most often depicted as a demonlike creature,” Barbra Teri Okada writes in an exhibition catalogue, “with a scowling face and clawlike hands and feet.” Just as the Norse imagined thunder to be Thor pounding his hammer, Japanese myth identifies it as Raijin beating his drum. In some myths, Raijin is accompanied by a “thunder beast” called raiju, which would inspire the second generation Pokémon Raikou.
The Pokémon Zapdos, one of the three legendary birds, evokes the thunderbird that appears in many different Native American mythologies. For the Lakota, the flapping of its mighty wings caused the sound of thunder in the same way as Thor’s hammer or Raijin’s drum. The Nuu-chah-nulth people of the Pacific Northwest traditionally imagined the thunderbird as a great hunter of whales who would, on occasion, give human whalers some of its supernatural powers. “Some high-status chiefly names refer to the thunderbird,” Alan D. McMillan writes in a Cambridge Archeological Journal article,
thus directly associating the chief with this powerful supernatural figure. Ceremonial performance of the thunderbird dance was a jealously guarded prerogative owned by certain chiefs. Elaborate masks and regalia were part of these performances, along with wooden boxes filled with pebbles that could be rolled to simulate the sound of thunder.
Thunder and lightning remain powerful signifiers of the supernatural in the fiction of a modern, post-mythological world. Macbeth begins with the stage directions “Thunder and lightning. Enter Three Witches;” thunder accompanies each of the witches’ subsequent appearances. “When shall we meet again,” asks the First Witch in the play’s first lines, “in thunder, lightning or in rain?”
“It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils,” Victor Frankenstein recalls in Chapter V of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). “I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” Film adaptations of this scene, from James Whale to Mel Brooks, tend to represent this spark of being as powered by a raging thunderstorm channeled by Frankenstein’s machinery.
These scenes reflect the reoccurring thunder and lightning imagery throughout the original novel, which evokes the myth of Prometheus stealing the fire of heaven from the thunder god Zeus. In Chapter VII, for instance, Frankenstein encounters his creation on a stormy Swiss night:
I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently: I could not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy dæmon, to whom I had given life.
In the Star Wars universe, the use of force lightning is a telltale sign of a Sith. These three examples, the first ones that occurred to me, only scratch the surface of all the magical characters in fiction who can use or are accompanied by thunder or lightning. An exhaustive list of all the lightning-powered characters in film, fantasy fiction and especially video games would take up this entire post and then some. (Furthermore, what haunted house would be complete without lightning flashing in its windows?)
And, of course, the modern world has in a sense its own electric god, the electricity coursing from outlets and batteries to light our buildings, run our machinery, connect us to people around the globe and power the devices of our increasingly digital world.
In sum, we have the first clue as to Pikachu’s incredible popularity, the way its specific special power evokes millennia of thunder and lightning in myth, religion and culture. So much for pika, but what about chu?
III.
Mickey Mouse. Jerry Mouse. Mighty Mouse. Stuart Little. Speedy Gonzalez. Reepicheep. The Rescuers, The Great Mouse Detective, An American Tail, Pinky and the Brain, “Three Blind Mice,” “Hickory Dickory Dock.” Why have mice so infested English-language children’s media?
Except in the eyes of a small minority of pet owners, real-life mice are not cute, cuddly or appealing. We buy mousetraps or hire exterminators to get rid of them. My reaction to discovering mice in the house would be very different than my reaction to, say, a baby or a teddy bear.
This infestation is not limited to the English-speaking world. In countries that use the Chinese zodiac, such as China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam, the Year of the Rat — the most recent being 2020 — is celebrated not with disease-spreading vermin but with cute cartoon mice. It is not new either. “The Country Mouse and the City Mouse” originates with the ancient Greek storyteller Aesop, who wrote several other fables about mice and died more than 2,500 years ago. Centuries before Aesop, Middle Kingdom Egyptians told a fable about a clever, mischievous mouse who becomes vizier. An unjust ruler, the mouse is not only dismissed from office by the pharaoh but banished from the earth’s surface; the story is in part a mythical explanation of why mice live in holes underground.
So, why have stories about mice become such a part of children’s fiction?
I can think of two satisfying, related explanations. First, having a mouse as a protagonist allows many of the aforementioned stories to transform what would otherwise be everyday, unremarkable spaces, such as the rooms of a suburban house, into mysterious landscapes full of danger and discovery. In the Tom & Jerry cartoons, for instance, perfectly ordinary kitchens, living rooms and backyards become weapons-rich battlefields, the sites of epic slapstick wars. The world of these stories is, in other words, much like the world as seen by a small child.
Second, the common house mouse (Mus musculus) is, like Homo sapiens, one of the few species found on every continent. Able to not only live but thrive on close proximity to humans, the mouse has spread to most countries on the planet. Thus, people of many different cultures have had many opportunities to closely observe mice and it should therefore come as no surprise that they appear in folklores from around the world. Walruses, polar bears, caribou and seagulls appear in Inuit mythologies; Egyptian gods take the forms and often just the heads of Egyptian animals like crocodiles, falcons, rams and lions; mice are a globally local animal.
What did the bestiarists write about mice? According to T.H. White’s translation of a 12th century English bestiary, elephants are frightened of mice despite their much larger size. This piece of folklore or myth — in the modern, degraded sense of ‘a widely believed falsehood’ — has proven so enduring that a variety of sources continue to devote time to debunking it. The bestiary entry on the mouse itself, on the other hand, mentions a piece of medieval folklore that has not survived over the centuries: “the liver of these creatures gets bigger at the full moon, just as certain seashores rise and fall with the waning moon.”
The elephant’s supposed fear of mice dates back to the Roman polymath and proto-naturalist Pliny the Elder, whose work was foundational to the bestiaries that appeared centuries after his death. As I mentioned in a previous post, the bestiaries, being the product of a mostly illiterate society, had a specific niche audience, that of priests, abbots and other church clerics. Each hand-copied, hand-illustrated bestiary would provide a compendium of animal metaphors for use in sermons. While not explicitly spelled out in the text, the image of elephants running from mice has obvious applications to a number of biblical passages, especially the story of David and Goliath.
This theme, I think, explains both this bit of ancient Roman folklore’s inclusion in the bestiary and its surprising ability to survive over the millennia, which it has in the form of much more anthropomorphic literary and cartoon mice triumphing over larger enemies. To mix animal metaphors, the mouse is the perfect underdog. As J.R.R. Tolkien writes in “On Fairy-stories,” at some point modern adults, for the most part, stopped consuming folklore, leaving children as its only audience. In this post-mythic age, the folkloric or fictional mouse — as opposed to the real pest — has obvious appeal to the child viewer-consumer. It is the plucky, resourceful David in a world of feline Goliaths, Mickey defeating Pete or Jerry defeating Tom.
Pikachu has inherited many of the traits of its folkloric and fictional ancestors. Like the mice outsmarting cats in American cartoons or the mice scaring off elephants in the bestiaries, the anime and manga Pikachu often triumphs over much larger and more intimidating adversaries. In the anime’s fifth episode, “Showdown in Pewter City,” Ash’s Pikachu loses its first battle against gym leader Brock’s Onix, a gigantic rock-skinned snake that constricts it like an anaconda. Ash and Pikachu win the rematch not through brute force but through strategy. Instead of attacking the Onix directly, Pikachu unleashes a thunderstorm that sets off the gym’s fire alarm, causing sprinklers to rain down onto the area. As a half-rock, half-ground Pokémon, the Onix is doubly vulnerable to water and thus weakened enough for Pikachu to defeat it.
Ash and Pikachu win their third gym badge in a similar way. After first losing to Lieutenant Surge’s Raichu, which overpowers Pikachu, Ash considers using a thunderstone to evolve Pikachu into his own Raichu. Deciding to keep Pikachu as it is, Ash uses its superior agility to outrun the bulkier Raichu, tiring it out and eventually winning the battle.
Similar narratives play out in Toshihiro Ono’s Electric Tale of Pikachu manga, such as Pikachu defeating an attacking Fearow in the first chapter and Team Rocket’s Arbok and Weezing in the eighth. Ono’s manga culminates in a battle between Ash and the much more experienced Drake for the Orange Islands championship. The final chapter sees both trainers down to their last Pokémon: Pikachu for Ash and the much, much larger Dragonite, hitherto undefeated, for Drake. At first, it looks like Dragonite’s winning streak will continue. As the announcer puts it, “Pikachu is giving its all, but to no avail! It’s a total mismatch! It’s almost like a child vs. an adult!” But Ash and Pikachu win, through cunning, over one last Goliath.
With all this in mind, Pikachu becomes a paradox. It is at once a mouse, an often proverbially insignificant animal — “not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse” — uniquely suited to speak to a child’s sense of smallness and vulnerability in a large world, and the possessor of the kinds of powers that have inspired awe and reverence around the world. In the post on Charmander I mentioned Martin Arnold’s analysis of how the dragon has shrunk, sometimes literally, into a child-friendly character in popular culture. This ‘nursery dragon,’ Arnold argues, has a tremendous appeal to children because it represents both their sense of vulnerability and their desire for power and independence.
While the cunning, underestimated mouse played a not dissimilar role in children’s media (and, before that, folklore) for centuries before Pokémon, Pikachu adds a new layer, thunder and lightning. By combining traditional, essential ‘mouseness’ with these incredible abilities, Pikachu is at once powerful and vulnerable, and thus highly appealing as a child’s fantastical friend or pet.
IV.
As mentioned in the last post, Game Freak hired artist Atsuko Nishida to help design cuter Pokémon for the original Game Boy games. In his own words, lead designer Ken Sugimori had up to that point “designed with a boy’s heart,” creating monstrous creatures; he thought that a female designer could create Pokémon that would appeal to girls. Since then, Nishida has had a long and productive career at Game Freak, designing dozens of Pokémon across various generations and illustrating more than 400 Pokémon cards. “With the straight-up cute Pokémon,” Sugimori once told an interviewer, “you can leave those to Nishida and you’ll never go wrong.”
After joining Game Freak, Nishida was given the assignment of designing an electric Pokémon with two evolutions. Initially inspired by Japanese mochi cakes called daifuku, she imagined, in her words, “a creature in the shape of a long daifuku with ears sticking out.” Since it would be an electric Pokémon, she started playing around with pika-pika, the Japanese onomatopoeia for glittering or sparkling, and came up with the name ‘Pikachu.’ Game Freak director Satoshi Tajiri, observing that chu can mean ‘squeak’ in Japanese, suggested that Nishida make Pikachu into an “electric mouse.”
“It didn’t take long for it to take shape,” Game Freak staff member and ‘cuteness supervisor’ Koji Nishino recalled in a 2018 interview. Nishida walked through her design decisions in the same interview:
Since it was an electric-type, I thought it would be nice to have it store electricity in its cheek pouches. At the time I was really into squirrels, and since squirrels store food in their cheeks I thought about giving it cheek pouches. Also, squirrel tails are cute so I gave it a tail as well. However, I did want to give it some kind of ‘lightning’ part to it, so I gave it the lightning-shaped tail.
The dark marks on Pikachu’s ears are remnants of its origins as a daifuku. It gained its back stripes because Nishida found “that its back was lonely without anything on it.” She also designed two evolutions for Pikachu, Raichu and Gorochu, a horned, fanged creature that was eventually cut.
Pikachu’s design was well-received by Nishida’s colleagues, especially Nishino, who felt so possessive of it that he decided to make it rare and hard to capture in the game. This strategy backfired as Pikachu’s rarity piqued interest of players, leading to the publication of guides to catching a Pikachu. This word-of-mouth fame served as the foundation for the creature’s worldwide fame.
The writers and producers of the Pokémon animated series found themselves in a quandary during pre-production. Which Pokémon should the protagonist choose as his starter? The Game Boy players could choose between Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle; if he chose one of these creatures, would the other two-thirds of children feel put out because they’d chosen the “wrong” Pokémon?
The anime protagonist (Satoshi in the original Japanese) would instead oversleep, miss out on receiving one of those three, and have to go with a fourth option. Several small, cute, yet potentially powerful creatures emerged as possibilities, with the final choice being between Pikachu and Clefairy. Pikachu was chosen for two reasons. First, the pink, kawaii Clefairy was thought to appeal primarily to girls, whereas Pikachu was seen as appealing equally to boys and girls. Second, the challenge of capturing Pikachu meant it already stood out among other Pokémon. The anime producers “wanted to feature Pikachu,” according to Game Freak developer and composer Junichi Masuda, “because Pikachu at the time was really popular amongst kids in school. It is a hard-to-find Pokémon, so kids knew about it.”
After receiving a starring role in the anime, Pikachu became the centerpiece of Game Freak’s international multimedia marketing campaign, often as a fantasy pet. The small, handheld virtual pet called the Pokémon Pikachu (1998) — at once a step counter and competition for Bandai’s Tamagotchi — came in a box with the tagline “your friend for life” in several languages. Both the Nintendo 64 and GameCube had their own Pikachu pet simulator. The former, Hey You, Pikachu! (1998 in Japan, 2000 in North America) features the ability to talk to Pikachu with a special microphone controller and came with a manual stressing the importance of communication in building a stronger friendship with Pikachu.
Pokémon Yellow Version (1998 in Japan, 1999 in North America), officially subtitled Special Pikachu Edition, includes a few new features to further highlight Pikachu, including the ability to gauge the player’s friendship with Pikachu via its facial expressions. As in the anime, the player’s Pikachu refuses to stay inside its Pokéball. As the back of the box puts it, “the shockingly cute Pikachu tags behind you as you search the enormous world for monsters to train and evolve.” Yellow, which features a few minor changes to make its world more like that of the anime, sold more than 14.6 million copies on the back of Pikachu’s popularity.
More than 25 years later, Pikachu has never really lost the popularity that sent it to the top of Pokémon’s first generation. When it came time to celebrate Pokémon’s 10th, 20th and 25th anniversaries with special logos, there was only one option:
V.
“I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing — that it all started with a mouse,” said Walt Disney in an oft-quoted, self-mythologizing statement. While not, strictly speaking, true, as Disney began making cartoons eight years before Mickey Mouse’s debut, it does reflect Mickey’s central role in Disney becoming an international, multimedia, synergetically merchandisable brand in the early 1930s.
Despite his name, however, Mickey Mouse almost never behaves like a mouse. In one early cartoon, When the Cat's Away (1929), Mickey and Minnie — both actually mice-sized — lead a group of similar-looking mice into a house, where they engage in various musical antics. This one exception aside, Mickey has behaved much like a human being from Steamboat Willie (1928) to the present. In the words of Walt Disney himself, “when people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human, and that is the secret of his popularity.” Mickey talks, lives in a house, drives a car, has a pet dog, goes out with his girlfriend and pursues a variety of career opportunities, from taxi driver to bandleader to apprentice sorcerer.
Indeed, Disney movies about actual mice — the Silly Symphonies The Flying Mouse and The Country Cousin, Jacques and Gus in Cinderella, The Rescuers — feature characters much less anthropomorphic than Mickey and Minnie. Those two are so humanlike that visitors to Disneyland accept them as played by human beings wearing artificial heads and oversized gloves. Little me did not see any incongruity in an adult human-sized Mickey when I met him in Toontown and got his autograph, but I would have reacted very differently to a similar Pikachu costume. It would have seemed misshapen, grotesque, wrong.
Pikachu, unlike Mickey, is and behaves like an actual animal. None of the Pokédex entries, for instance, mention anything like a pseudo-human intelligence. Instead, they focus on Pikachu as part of a natural ecosystem. “It lives in forests away from people,” according to the Pokémon Stadium Pokédex. “When several of these Pokémon gather, their electricity could build and cause lightning storms,” in the words of the Red and Blue Pokédex. In the Pokémon Adventures manga, Red’s Pokédex describes Pikachu as “forest dwellers… few in number and exceptionally rare.” (Manga writer Hidenori Kusaka seems to have drawn on the creature’s artificial scarcity in the Game Boy games due to Nishino’s possessiveness.) Finally, the Pokédex in Toshihiro Ono’s Electric Tale of Pikachu manga gives this summary:
An electric mouse Pokémon.
Habitat: Forests and woodlands
Diet: Mainly fruit
Distinguishing features: Has an electric generator on each cheek.
Beware of electrocution!
The Electric Tale of Pikachu begins with the title character as a literal wild animal, a creature of a nearby forest that Ash finds gnawing on the electrical wires of his house. In Pokémon Adventures, protagonist Red chases down and eventually captures a feral Pikachu notorious for stealing food from residents of Pewter City. Professor Oak reluctantly gives the anime version of Ash a disobedient Pikachu, who refuses to enter its Pokéball or obey any of its new trainer’s orders. For all three protagonists, then, an early step of the journey is the taming of this wild or semi-wild Pikachu.
This wildness — in contrast to Mickey’s anthropomorphism — speaks to why Pikachu became the most successful Pokémon, bringing together the threads of Pikachu’s design, Pikachu as mouse, and Pikachu as pseudo-thunder god. By combining all three, Pikachu embodies the series’ original inspiration, the natural world Satoshi Tajiri saw disappearing in an urbanizing Japan. Pikachu gained a kind of grass-roots popularity due to its cute design, which draws on real-world animals such as mice and squirrels, and due to its role in the first games as a seldom-seen wild animal that must be sought out.
For the most part, we experience real mice as natural intruders into our artificial environments, an incursion which reminds us that our neighborhoods, shopping centers or campuses are also ecosystems for other animals. (This is how The Electric Tale of Pikachu begins, as previously mentioned.) Finally, Pikachu’s special powers reflect the natural world at its most sublime, most supernatural, most alien: the thunderstorm, the inspiration for many myths.
Pikachu is in other worlds a small, manageable, child-sized embodiment of wild nature due to its combination of the archetypal mouse and the mythic thunder, and to the contributions of Tajiri, Nishida, Nishino, Ono and the anime writers. It is the uncontrollable made controllable and thus the perfect imaginary pet.
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Fascinating insight into Pikachu's origins. Also like how you've cited your claims.
One more thing that's also worth mentioning is Pikachu's voice actress, Ikue Otani. Her cutesy sounding Pikachu voice is borderline iconic at this point. Dunno if Pikachu would still be as popular if it still kept it's 8-bit battle cries from the original games.