What did bother me, is that there seemed to be a couple of episodes randomly that like... took place before the episode number they were. If that makes sense.
I don't remember which, off the top of my head, but there were two snow episodes where Ash used Charmander, even though it had already evolved into Charizard. I skipped them because they obviously weren't important to the story if they took place so far before.
OT: Ep. 72.
Being a Pokétard, I can actually explain that. The episodes
Holiday Hi-Jynx and
Snow Way Out were held out of the original American broadcast because they would have played in October and Kids' WB (the station airing Pokémon at the time) wanted to shift them to play in winter and the actual Christmas season since the two episodes have snow and one is about Santa. Unfortunately, Jynx looks like she's in black-face makeup and the censors didn't like her so the episode was scrapped altogether (so was the subsequent
Ice Cave episode from MasterQuest which never saw the light of day in the English-speaking world because of Jynx). No one is exactly sure why
Snow Way Out was scrapped too, but it was probably because WB was going to do an hour-long Pokémon holiday airing with
Holiday Hi-Jynx and they couldn't do it anymore with the Jynx episode scrapped. Instead of just playing the one, they scrapped both until the following year's Christmas season after they (presumably) got the go ahead to play it.
When
Hi-Hynx did air, it caused enough controversy about racism that Nintendo officially changed her color scheme to give her a purple face and purple hands in both the games and in the show. She first starts being purple in the Gold/Silver/Crystal games outside of Japan (Japan's sprites were still blackface until Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald) and her last blackface appearance in the show is
All Things Bright and Beautifly (which she was cut entirely out of in the English version).
Hi-Jynx has only played a handful of times on TV because of all that.
*cough* So the short answer is that Jynx was racist and made TV censors uncomfortable. Also, I believe my fandom might be showing.
Oh, and
Hi-Jynx is well worth the watch btw. It's so utterly ridiculous to watch Ash and Pikachu team up with Santa to save Christmas against Jessie, who has a beef with a Jynx that came down her chimney as a kid and stole her doll. It's one of the more memorably bizarre episodes for me.
Ouran High 13!
