>>55326649People have brought up Team Rocket and the worldbuilding already, so I'll highlight something different. Shudo's biggest contribution to early anipoke was that he didn't want the show to be about battling alone. Sure there was action, but Shudo's episodes didn't really go into the idea of one Trainer battling another Trainer using Pokemon. He found the idea of the "proxy war" aspect of Trainer battles distasteful. The one exception is The School of Hard Knocks, and in that episode he intentionally sought to subvert the Trainer battle dynamic with Ash and Pikachu winning by street fight tactics, not Pokemon game mechanics. But he never wrote a Gym battle or a Pokemon League episode, because his interest was in fleshing out the world and exploring the relationship between humans and Pokemon -- outside of Trainer battles. All the while, he understood the mission of the show he was writing and he he let Tomioka, who loved writing serious battles, handle the serious battles. It would've been very easy to have Pokemon be the typical children's sport anime where the MC overcomes people far more competent than him at every given point, but even though he never takes credit for it, I have to assume that Shudo's philosophy about winning through strength not being a good moral for children (and adults) led to Ash losing the Indigo League. It's unfortunate that that became a cycle, but Shudo wanted to end the show after the League and start a new series with a new MC and the TRio antagonizing them, so he can't really be blamed for that.
And when people think back to the Indigo League, the episodes they most fondly remember tend to be the ones without a whole lot of battling in them -- Lt. Surge and Blaine notwithstanding. Those were Tomioka products though, which is a different post for a different thread.