>>58895670This isn't totally true. Back in the late 90s, television was the best advertisement there was. Pokémon's brand image in the west was heavily based on people's perception of the anime. The anime didn't cost money to watch. It had catchy songs filled with marketing slogans and memorizing Pokémon names. It aired regularly and had a marketing blowout. People thought of Ash as the main character of Pokémon. Ash and Pikachu were the faces of Pokémania, that's why Pokémon on Ice was based on the anime rather than any games.
To put it in perspective, the Game Boy sold more than half its lifetime sales in the last 5 years of its life, not the first, and that's because of Pokémon's anime being such an effective advertisement for the games, cards, and every piece of merchandise. Even kids who already had a Game Boy and could already play Gen I and II asked their parents for a Game Boy Color, Pokémon brought the Game Boy back to life 7 years into its lifespan.
The problem became two-fold over time though: Ash as a character seemed to lack the fundamental progress people craved and felt they were promised as he went on seemingly forever while changing out everything you recognized about him every few years, and TV as a medium fell off a cliff as the 00s and especially 10s progressed. The Pokémon anime stopped being an effective advertisement in a terminally-online world. Covid killed the yearly July movie, and nothing of value was lost. All in all, it's probably much healthier for the franchise to not be bound to the anime, which always had a different worldview to the games. But back then, sticking to an established formula that works (especially when you're Japanese) just seemed like the logical choice. Milk it until it's bone dry. People weren't sad because the anime finally completed its story after decades of build-up, they were sad simply because a staple character of their childhood stopped being around, like if The Simpsons ended.
