I'm at the part in Shudo's Anime Style blog where he starts talking about Porygon. I say "start" because Shudo has a habit of derailing his own blog through digressions, most often about Team Rocket. But a few interesting things came up. When Porygon happened, Shudo was not only the series composer, but was also writing the script for the movie, Team Rocket's image song (only found in Japanese), and the novel.
On the novel, he says it was a chance to write for a slightly older audience (middle and high schoolers), so he could flesh out his worldview of the Pokemon world through it. He mentions that in the hypothetical third novel, he was planning on adding elements of Einstein's relativity to the "reference" sections he added to the end of every chapter. Shudo gives a tease that he'll talk about why there was no third novel when the incident that led to it not happening comes up, which is clickbaity as fuck, but I'm in for the ride. The second novel ended with Lt. Surge, so the third presumably would've contained Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle's catching, and maybe Bill, since he wrote the screenplay for that episode. Shudo says that the changes from the anime to the novel were basically how he "reimagined" episodes that he didn't write. He says something to the effect of, "Using other writer's words can be complicated legally, and also, I wanted to."
Apparently at the time of his writing the blog, the reference sections of Shudo's novels (which had "harder" vocabulary) were being used as language instructional tools in classrooms. That's neat.
Blogs:
http://www.style.fm/as/05_column/shudo157.shtmlTeam Rocket image song, first played during the Jigglypuff episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iloR-ElB6I