Trivia / Pokémon: To Be a Pokémon Master

• Milestone Celebration: The English dub was made available in the US on September 8th, 2023, twenty-five years exactly after the English dubbed version of the first episode of Pokémon: The Series debuted in the US. To be technical, the English dub debuted one day earlier, airing "Battle Aboard the St. Anne" out of sequence.
• Never Trust a Trailer : The first teaser implied that this arc would start with Ash talking to Gary and the latter getting Ash to ponder what it means to be a Pokemon Master. Gary doesn't appear in the first episode with this title. In fact, he didn't appear until the very last episode, which also means that the trailer overplayed the aspect of Ash questioning what it means to be a Pokémon Master as he only pondered that at the end and not throughout the arc.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants:
  • While the heads of the series had long decided that a Pokémon Master was not a title Ash would ever gain simply by winning something, they never gave much thought to what it actually was, so it wasn't until they got to this string of episodes that they sat down and decided what it truly meant and even then, they decided to not be too specific as Ash decided that becoming a Pokémon Master was simply becoming friends with all Pokémon.
  • Executive director Kunihiko Yuyuma also admits in this interview that most of the episodes from this miniseries were simply born from various ideas the writers came up with to fill out the remaining few slots. For example, "Getting to the Heart of it All!" came to be simply from the crew wanting to do an episode about a Ghost-type, while episodes like "A Squad's Worth of Passion!" and "Ride, Lapras, Ride!" serve little importance beyond the writers and directors wanting to see Ash's Kanto starters and Lapras one last time.

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