I don’t actually remember when I first got into the franchise, but the anime began airing in the U.S. in early September 1998 when I was nine years old.

We had a VCR attached to every TV in the house (sometimes two of them!) and were big on shooting home videos with my dad’s clunky video camera, so we had a stockpile of empty VHS tapes. At some point, I began recording every single episode of the Pokémon anime, as if documenting this cultural milestone was one of the most important I could do with my free time.

Did I even rewatch episodes? Probably not. I hate rewatching things.

Those tapes are also a total mess, with none of the episodes in the correct order.