>>37622009Rebranding the Pokémon anime had more significant effects than rebranding the Dragon Ball anime.
Dragon Ball is a manga series, and it was adapted into the Dragon Ball anime which later got rebranded as Dragon Ball Z. However, this rebranding did not affect the manga whatsoever and may as well be cosmetic.
Pokémon is a video game series, and one of its many adaptations was an anime. Unlike Dragon Ball, the core Pokémon games aren't one continuous story. Every adaptation bases itself around what is current in the core series of games. When Platinum was coming out in 2008, the movie at the time had Giratina in its Origin Forme because that was relevant. If HeartGold and SoulSilver came out before Platinum, the 2008 movie wouldn't have had Giratina. The TCG, various manga, anime, spin-offs, and merchandise styles itself over what is current. So even if the Pokémon anime continues to have the same core cast of characters over 22 years, each series is essentially in its own bubble. You can say that XY Ash had the Metapod battle with the Samurai, but it's so absolutely irrelevant to the XY series that it may as well be ignored. It "happened", but it may as well not have. Children aren't expected to have over 1000 episodes and 21 movies of knowledge. Each new Generation is a new generation of children who have Pokémon as a concept in their mind from a young age, and are going to grow up with that anime series. And each series has its own fundamentals. XY had more battle shonen vibes because the point of even Gens is to build upon the previous soft reboot Gen. So people watching XY were expected to be coming from BW and be at least somewhat knowledgeable, but the same can't be said for starting AG, BW, or SM.
