The Pokémon Episode Too Violent For TV
Many '90s kids no doubt have fond memories of rolling out of bed entirely too early on a Saturday morning, pouring themselves a bowl of sugary cereal, and flipping on the TV to enjoy their weekly cartoons. If you were up at the right time, you could catch the latest installment of the "Pokémon" anime, which told the story of Pokémon Trainer Ash Ketchum's quest to be the very best, like no one ever was. However, some chapters of Ash's journey never made it stateside.
These episodes were destined to become playground rumors, whispered among kids who loved the show and were curious about the stories they never got to see. For various reasons, a handful of "Pokémon" episodes have been banned from North American broadcast over the years. While some of these have eventually seen the light of day in edited form, like "Beauty and the Beach," others have essentially been lost to time. One such episode, "The Legend of Dratini," was never aired in North America after concerns were raised about its surprising violence.
Due to some shocking visuals and out-of-character behavior from some of the characters, Broadcast Standards & Practices and 4Kids Entertainment — the company in charge of the English dub in its early years — made the decision to drop it from the series. Scrapping the episode created a hole in the season's storyline, which begs the question: What was so bad about "The Legend of Dratini" that kept it from airing in the United States?
The Legend of Dratini went too far with gun violence
"The Legend of Dratini" sees Ash and his friends running afoul of Kaiser, the cranky warden of the Safari Zone. Clearly modeled after Clint Eastwood (and Dirty Harry in particular), Kaiser takes a trigger-happy approach to law and order on the Safari Zone's grounds. If anyone breaks the rules — by using regular Poké Balls instead of specialized Safari Balls, for instance — he'll take them out with his trusty sidearm, Thunderbolt.
One scene that has become particularly infamous involves the warden pulling a gun on Ash and his friends and pointing the barrel between the young Pokémon Trainer's eyes. Not to be outdone, James of the typically-tame Team Rocket also holds a gun to the warden's head in an interrogation scene. It's truly jarring to see, especially when compared to some of the show's more kid-friendly episodes. Though the episode eventually has a sweet ending, with the warden being revealed to have a sentimental side and a friendship with the episode's titular dragon Pokémon, the pervasive use of firearms was too much for the folks producing the series in the US.
The unfortunate side-effect of banning this episode wasn't entirely obvious until a little bit later in the series, when Ash started using his Tauros in battle more frequently. Since "The Legend of Dratini" was the episode in which Ash first caught the bull Pokémon, English-speaking audiences were a little bit confused when the stampeding pocket monster entered regular rotation. Surely, 4Kids was aware of the plot hole that this created, right? And surely, there were at least some attempts to fix that issue, weren't there?
The myth of the missing English dub
Rumors persisted for years that the English dub cast had recorded dialogue for "The Legend of Dratini," only for the recording to get canned when it was decided that the threat of violence was too great and the episode would not be released. This rumor was finally debunked in 2015, when actor Eric Stuart — the longtime voice performer for Brock and James in the English dub, along with many other characters — revealed in a Q&A that no English dub had ever been produced for "The Legend of Dratini." He explained to the audience at the Anime Midwest convention, "'Pokémon' was network television ... An episode where someone's pointing a gun at someone's head might work on a Japanese anime, it might work on Adult Swim, but not for [an American] kids' show."
Stuart added, "There was never an English dub because when [the network] saw the original footage, they pulled it ... from that year's series." The episode never even made it to the scripting process at 4Kids, let alone recording sessions. When it comes to the English dub, "The Legend of Dratini" will forever remain just that: a legend.