Just a short thread with a few things I noticed about base set today.
A little background. In 1996 when Pokemon Red/Green were created, artwork for all 151 pokemon (and some trainers, items etc) was drawn for use on merchandise etc. They are watercolor and drawn by Ken Sugimori. They can be found for example on all carddass part 1/2, all of the topsun gum cards, and almost all merch at that time. Bulbapedia has a nice page for this early art, and some of Sugimori’s original drawings for this art were included in the British Museum’s Manga exhibit, see below (bottom-left is not part of this set, that is the 20th anniversary Sugimori art):
After the Red/Green art, another 151+ artwork set was made around the release of blue version, which is used for example on Sealdass and Topsun holos. It is also visible on Bulbapedia.
Anyway.
Recently, I noticed that quite a few cards in the base set also use this “Red/Green” artwork, though with some added background (I am sure that many have noticed before me). So I was interested to see which cards were actually original/exclusive art, made specifically for the base set. The Pokemon cards which have original & exclusive artwork in the base set are:
01 bulbasaur (Arita)
03 venusaur (Arita)
04 charmander (Arita)
05 charmeleon (Arita)
06 charizard (Arita)
07 squirtle (Arita)
13 weedle (Arita)
14 kakuna (Kinebuchi)
19 rattata (Arita)
25 pikachu (Arita)
33 nidorino (Arita)
50 diglett (Kinebuchi)
51 dugtrio (Kinebuchi)
63 abra (Arita)
66 machop (Arita)
53 magnemite (Arita)
66 machop (Arita)
81 magnemite (Kinebuchi)
82 magneton (Kinebuchi)
84 doduo (Arita)
87 dewgong (Arita)
92 gastly (Kinebuchi)
93 haunter (Kinebuchi)
101 electrode (Kinebuchi)
109 koffing (Arita)
100 voltorb (Kinebuchi)
114 tangela (Arita)
120 staryu (Kinebuchi)
121 starmie (Kinebuchi)
129 magikarp (Kinebuchi)
130 gyarados (Arita)
137 porygon (Imakuni)
148 dragonair (Arita)
In total that is 33 out of 69 cards. You can see a real difference between the Red/Green art cards and those with exclusive art. Starting a card from scratch, it was possible for Mitsuhiro Arita to draw each pokemon fully blended in with its background. The exclusive art cards include much of the most beloved art like Dragonair and Abra:
Meanwhile there is a visible contrast between these exclusive art cards, and the cards which use the Red/Green set artwork:
I love the Red/Green artwork itself, but you can see that this card does not blend into the background. Poliwhirl is one of the worse offenders in that sense (Magmar is less obvious, for example).
If you look at the list above, you will see that Sugimori actually did not make any of the original base set artwork! So what was he doing? He had to draw all 151 pokemon for the pokemon blue artwork set, and in addition to this, the Carddass Part 3/4 sets had yet another set of 151 artworks (each of which is very unique)! Although Carddass Part 3 was released in April, some of the Carddass Part 3/4 artwork actually premiered in the Jumbo Carddass Part 1 set, which was released on December 1 1996. Thus he could easily have been working on these artworks in mid-96 or earlier.* For reference, Japanese base set was released on October 20, 1996.
*actually, dating the artwork on Carddass part 3 and 4 is a very interesting subject to me, because some of the artwork variants are extremely early. Pikachu’s white belly and kakuna’s arms are two examples of a style which was only used in the very beginnings of Pokemon.
Lastly: I did not mention the art by Kinebuchi or Imakuni. There is a clear trend that geometrically simple pokemon were done by them, as they are 3D pokemon artists. That means they got all of the spheres… gastly, voltorb, electrode. In my subjective taste, the watercolor art is much more meaningful than the 3D artwork, but I’m sure there are some big Kinebuchi fans out there. He certainly played a major role in the early days.
Maybe many of you already knew this, but I’m sure not everyone does, so I thought I would share since I found it interesting. Thanks to pokellector.com and reddit for the pictures I used in this post.
