Pokemon's Satanic Panic

What if your child brought something home from school… and it wasn’t a cold, wasn’t a detention slip… but a pocket-sized portal to the underworld? Bright colours. Catchy theme song. Creatures evolving before your very eyes. The playground is chanting. The Game Boy is glowing. The cards are being traded like contraband. What do you do? If you answered “check for pentagrams in the instruction manual”, then you might just be onto something...

Join Linz and Chris as they travel back to 1999, when Pokémon ruled the schoolyard, and somewhere — somehow — certain very concerned adults decided Pikachu was in league with Beelzebub.

On Pokémon’s 30th anniversary today, we dig into the moral panic that accused adorable pocket monsters of corrupting children through evolution, occult symbolism, Japanese culture, and the unspeakable horror of trading cards.

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