The upcoming Pokémon anime for this year, simply titled Pokémon, is introducing a new Pikachu, one that fans definitely hope will be appearing in the Pokémon video games, and maybe other media very soon.
As reported by Serebii, the anime is introducing a new Pokémon Professor named Friede (originally translated in the tweet as Freed), who is described as being very proficient at fighting. The Fighting Pokémon Professor has a Pikachu of his own, known as Captain Pikachu. We see in the image below that Captain Pikachu sports a new sea captain hat, complete with the image of an anchor in the front.
Pikachu is one of the most popular characters, not only in the Pokémon franchise, but in all of pop culture.
While the Pikachu most Pokémon fans remember the most is the one who has followed Ash Ketchum for all these years, The Pokémon Company have seen it fit to make all sorts of variations of Pikachu.
First came Pichu, who was retconned into being the original form of Pikachu. These are the impossibly tinier Pokémon that certainly look like they were the spawn of Pikachu (try to get that visual out of your head).
And then, 2014’s Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire introduced us to Cosplay Pikachu, a female Pikachu with a penchant for wearing different costumes. Each costume gives Cosplay Pikachu different abilities, with her most popular costume being Pikachu Libre, a masked wrestler. Pikachu Libre would go on to become a playable character herself in Namco’s strange but fun Pokémon themed Tekken spinoff, Pokken.
In 2016, smaller Nintendo studio Creatures surprised us with Detective Pikachu, a Pikachu that could not be collected at all.
Detective Pikachu is the star of his own game, his deerskin cap suggesting his connection the world famous detective of classic literature, Herlock Sholmes.
Detective Pikachu is a real detective, and in fact has the unusual ability to talk with both humans and other Pokémon. Detective Pikachu would go on to star in his own Hollywood movie, voiced by Green Lantern and Blade 3 star Ryan Reynolds.
Each of these other Pikachu have made their own impact in video games and pop culture. And so, it’s somewhat a big deal when The Pokémon Company reveals they have made a new Pikachu.
For now, we don’t know what Captain Pikachu’s abilities are, or if it can talk or solve mysteries or perform wrestling moves. But The Pokémon Company conceives of characters that they know they can carry over to other media. We know they have a plan for Captain Pikachu in the future. Whatever it could be, we can tell that this early, a Captain Pikachu plushie would easily become the best-selling toy in Japan this holiday.
