>>37312473Pokemon cared less back then, and threw the anime to whoever would make it and have fun with it. People knowing Pokemon was more important than any one message.
Now the anime needs to serve the larger pokemon brand. THIS pokemon needs to have X minutes of screentime over Y episodes to go in line with our plush and figurine production.
Basically, Pokemon was a more broad advertisement before, which gave it more freedom. Brock could be the lovable guy he was, because they cared less about how Brock would affect how much merch the pokemon he had would sell, if that makes sense.
The show was still a bland cashgrab, nostalgia is a powerful drug, but the liberties the show was allowed to take made it so much better than it is now.
Another similar show you can see this in, Yu-Gi-Oh. Early Yu-Gi-Oh was the shit, because the game was played by the seat of its pants, and bullshit rules and effects were in play because it was fun. Later Yu-Gi-Oh followed the real rules too closely, so was less fun, and had a harder time keeping you entertained with whatever crazy bullshit was about to happen next.
Last point, we give 4Kids a lot of shit now, but a lot of dubs of kids shows at the time injected a lot of soul into what is otherwise bland bullshit for kids.
Not 4Kids, but I think Digimon was the best example of this being done well, basically an entire episode's worth of background characterization managed to be squeezed in to the american dub using the dead air and silences present in the original, including a lot of interaction between characters that otherwise barely interacted at all.
