The Legendary Pokémon of Johto, Lugia, was originally created exclusively for the movies, but ended up being brought to the Pokémon Gold and Silver games.
The relationship between the anime and the main Pokémon games is very close. We were able to see Ho-Oh in the first episode of Ash’s series, and the movies have always maintained the golden rule, until now, of showing the world some of the Unique and Mythical Pokémon from different generations, with one exception: Lugia is a Legendary Pokémon that was not going to appear in the games.
Takeshi Shudoresponsible for the first Pokémon movie, had carte blanche to make the second one after the success it achieved worldwide. In this way, he wrote the script for a new movie whose only requirement was that it had the phrase “explosive birth” in the name. Without further ado, Shudo got to work and created the story of The Three Legendary Birds and Lugia that we all knew in Pokémon 2000: The Power of One (Pokémon: The Explosive Birth of Lugia in Japan).
The most curious thing about this work is that, when creating the Johto Legendary, The Pokémon Company only provided the name, so Shudo created Lugia as an anime-exclusive Pokémon. At no point did he think of creating it with Game Boy games in mind, in fact, he thought it would never appear in them.
However, Game Freak decided to integrate it into Pokemon Gold and Silvergames that I had been working on for some time after the success of Pokemon Red, Blue, Green and YellowIt was a strategy that took the person responsible for both films by complete surprise, especially when he discovered not only that he would be in both games, but also that It would be the legendary counterpart to Ho-Oh.
If it weren’t for that decision, we wouldn’t have had the Tower Duo and the covers of both games would have been different. Another pokemon myth Gold and Silver denial. Was Shudo right in creating Lugia only with the anime in mind? Absolutely.
