Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon | 
 enlarge | Creator: Joseph Tobin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 218645
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 6.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0822332876
Dewey Decimal Number: 794.8
EAN: 9780822332879
ASIN: 0822332876
Publication Date: January 2004
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Condition: Brand NEW! A MUST BUY!
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Product Description
Initially developed in Japan by Nintendo as a computer game, Pokemon swept the globe in the late 1990s. Based on a narrative in which a group of children capture, train, and do battle with over a hundred imaginary creatures, Pokemon quickly diversified into an array of popular products including comic books, a TV show, movies, trading cards, stickers, toys, and clothing. Pokemon eventually became the top grossing children's product of all time. Yet the phenomenon fizzled as quickly as it had ignited. By 2002, the Pokemon craze was mostly over. Pikachu’s Global Adventure describes the spectacular, complex, and unpredictable rise and fall of Pokemon in countries around the world.
In analyzing the popularity of Pokemon, this innovative volume addresses core debates about the globalization of popular culture and about children’s consumption of mass-produced culture. Topics explored include the origins of Pokemon in Japan’s valorization of cuteness and traditions of insect collecting and anime; the efforts of Japanese producers and American marketers to localize it for foreign markets by muting its sex, violence, moral ambiguity, and general feeling of Japaneseness; debates about children’s vulnerability versus agency as consumers; and the contentious question of Pokemon’s educational value and place in school. The contributors include teachers as well as scholars from the fields of anthropology, media studies, sociology, and education. Tracking the reception of Pokemon in Japan, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Israel, they emphasize its significance as the first Japanese cultural product to enjoy substantial worldwide success and challenge western dominance in the global production and circulation of cultural goods.
Contributors. Anne Allison, Linda-Renee Bloch, Helen Bromley, Gilles Brougere, David Buckingham, Koichi Iwabuchi, Hirofumi Katsuno, Dafna Lemish, Jeffrey Maret, Julian Sefton-Green, Joseph Tobin, Samuel Tobin, Rebekah Willet, Christine Yano
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| Customer Reviews:
Great book March 30, 2006
18 out of 21 found this review helpful
The previous reviewer must have been brain dead herself when she read the book. There is no other way she could have so completely misread this text. The authors are not opponents of Pokemon -- as if that was even the point. In excerpting the statements from Tobin about the "evil" empire of Pokemon, she completely misquotes him. He CLEARLY argues in his introduction that this represents one of the perspectives on Pokemon and then goes on to lay out other perspectives. In the chapter about anti-Pokemon websites, the author is describing the discourse of these websites, not advocating for them. In fact, the author describes these as "moral panics". A moral panic is a misplaced fear that sweeps a society. If this reviewer knew anything at all about the scholarship of the people represented in this book or about the language of cultural studies, she would realize that her reading of them as children's pop culture haters is absurd. I DO use chapters from this book in my children's media studies class exactly because it represents thoughtful and sophisticated scholarship. To look at the complicated ways the Pokemon as one representative of children's popular culture circulates both as part of the global economy and as part of the childhood identity economy, I recommend this book.
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