- “I felt my body tense. I don’t remember what happened next,” said a 15-year-old girl from Nagoya, quoted by The Guardian.
- The symptoms occurred while watching the 38th episode of the first season of the anime series “Pokemon” – “Denno Senshi Porygon” (“Electric Soldier Porygon”)
- In some children, symptoms appeared only in the following days. Years later, scientists realized that they were “much more characteristic of a mass sociogenic disease than photogenic epilepsy”
- The “Pokemon” series was taken off the air for almost four months. The episode never made it to television again
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Some children lost consciousness or had blurred vision, others felt dizzy or nauseous. Seizures and temporary blindness also occurred. On December 16, 1997, at 6:51 p.m., hundreds of children in Japan experienced an epileptic seizure. A total of 685 children were taken to hospitals. Over the next two days, 12,000. children reported ailments. It all started with an episode of the cartoon “Pokemon”.
“I felt my body tense up. I don’t remember what happened next.”
This is the 38th episode of the first season of the anime series “Pokemon” – “Denno Senshi Porygon” (“Electric Soldier Porygon”). At some point, a computer virus attacks and an explosion occurs, with alternating red and blue lights flashing at a frequency of 12 Hz. It lasted six seconds and immediately triggered epileptic seizures in several hundred children.
“At the end of the program there was an explosion and I had to close my eyes because of the yellow light that looked like a camera flash,” said 10-year-old Takuya Sato, quoted by The Guardian. “I felt my body tense. I don’t remember what happened next,” said a 15-year-old girl from Nagoya (a Japanese city in the southern part of the island of Honshu).
The phenomenon was dubbed “Pokemon Shock” by Japanese media. The producers of the cartoon were questioned by the services, and the ministries convened an extraordinary meeting.
This was the end of Porygon
For four years, it remained a mystery to doctors what actually happened. Benjamin Radford of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in the United States, together with medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew, discovered that hundreds of children actually had an attack on December 16, but most became ill only after hearing about the effects and watching the episode. These patients presented with headaches, dizziness, and vomiting and, according to Radford, were “much more characteristic of mass sociogenic disease than of photogenic epilepsy.”
He was referring to MSI, known as mass hysteria: “MSI is complex and often misunderstood, but the basic idea is that anxiety manifests itself in physical symptoms that can spread through social contact. […] The symptoms are real – victims are not faking them or making them up,” Radford explained.
The “Pokemon” series was taken off the air for almost four months. The character of Porygon never appeared in production again, and the episode was never aired again.
In 2020, a post was posted on the official Pokemon Twitter saying that “Porygon did nothing”, the post soon disappeared.
Source: “The Guardian”, Kotaku
2023-12-16 12:08:33
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