The Mouth Project

[starsystemerror]

This is one that was voted on by the IHA Discord, and I had an initial concept for it very clear in my mind, but it took a while to compile sources, especially since I try to limit sources for these videos to things I am at least tangentially familiar with for the most part. It's track 6 of Mouth Silence, simply titled Pokémon.

This video has some very brief clips showing realistic, but not real, guns.

Artist Statment:

Spoiler

Hopefully you've watched the video already, because here's the main gimmick: there are no Pokemon in this video. The song itself is a tribute to the effect of Pokemon on society, and what people thought of it. So what better to do with that than make a video showing how Pokemon affected my own life?

I actually didn't get into Pokémon until I was about 12, and that was at the very end of the DS era of games. For most of my childhood, Pokémon was just kind of a background influence informing more than I could even comprehend. To this day, people are using the inspiration and ideas imparted on them by Pokémon to make their own media, in varying degrees of sincerity.

There's also a strange religious component to the world's reaction to Pokémon. In fact, the big reason I wasn't into Pokémon when I was younger was because of the religion I was raised in. The one clip used in this video that I had no knowledge of prior to making the video is that of a Christian trading card game that was advertised on Kickstarter as a Christian alternative to Pokémon. I didn't look too much into it, since all I really needed was the trailer for footage, but just the concept I felt was so emblematic of my constant childhood battle to find something like Pokémon that wasn't considered demonic. Fun fact: the clip near the beginning with the little purple thing turning into a knockoff Lugia is from Johnny Test, an incredibly mediocre cartoon that had a Pokémon parody episode that I watched repeatedly as a child in a desperate attempt to be part of the Pokémon craze that was still sweeping elementary schools well into the 2000s.

This statement is already pretty long, but I do also want to note that pretty much the entire Digimon season 1 opening is in there because the timing happened to work really well, but also because once my parents finally decided to give in and let my sibling and I enter the world of the demonic, my younger sibling got REALLY into Digimon. I didn't watch it much, but it was playing around the house pretty much constantly for a couple years.

Oh, and one more thing: the final clip of the video is someone scrolling through all the pet battle achievements in World of Warcraft. I tried to get those, once. All I can say is it tested even my tolerance for monotony.