An Agressive Tamagotchi
The year 2000 was very special to all of us, after surviving that horrible Y2K catastrophe which wiped out 97% of the planet’s population, we couldn’t help it, we felt hopeful, and what ever jolly bubblegum pop song in the radio was our everyday’s soundtrack.
The Pokemon Mania had taken over the Toy Industry and there was no rival to be seen anywhere around. Nintendo’s video game franchise was unstopable after the anime had been exported to the rest of the world and kids just wanted more and more of it.
Trading cards, plushies, pokeballs, everything you could ever imagine, even little pokeballs with a very tiny pokemon inside tied to an even tinier shaft, when thrown the pokemon would come out of the pokeball like in the anime, or maybe I dreamed this, sorry.
Pokemon was the King and there was absolutely no one there to challenge it...until emotions arrived
Something that was missing on Pokemon was real character depth, or at least an stronger feeling of relateness to all that is happening within the show. This wasn’t a problem for the Monster that was rising from the depths of the cyberspace, a Monster that delivered a new kind of adventure for kids to relate
Kids were shocked by this new show that seemed to came out of nowhere. An striking, stunning artwork inspired by 90’s marvel comics and a wider variety of characters to relate to, there was just enough of what all kids wanted back then, awesome non slave pets you could call your friends. The Digimon anime was created as a promotion for the playstation Digimon World game, but it became something far beyond that, stronger and much more important than all of its games.
Nontheless, it did work as promotion for some incredible and very memorable toys!
Digimon was created by Bandai, a Company we’re going to be naming a lot on this blog ( don’t worry, you won’t get tired!) They figured the Tamagotchi toyline wasn’t very atractive to the boys audience, so they created a Tamagotchi for boys, which you could feed, train and use for battles.
The person responsible for the creation of Digimon is Akiyoshi Hongo, but hold your japaneses horses right there, this is actually a nickname used by Bandai to adress the group of people who actually made the original concept and designs for the franchise (In video games and anime) It includes; Tamagotchi’s creator Maita Aki, toei’s animation designer Katsukyoshi Nakatsuru, and the guy for Tamagotchi in Bandai, Takeichi Hongo.
wha..Source
The Digimon Virtual Pet was only the first toy in a huge pool of endless content the franchise would end up developing. It was a very interesting concept, but the kids in america (wo-oh) weren’t really up for it, kids wanted something a little bit more radical, kids wanted action, and action they got; endless action figures, convertible toys, battle cards, video games, Digimon had it all, and it still does.
Not many people relates Tamagotchi to Digimon, at least not to its original core, but it turns out these two franchises had a lot more in common than what one would usually think. Digimon digivolved to become a multimedia franchise, while tamagotchi kept being succesful in the way it always has.
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