I’m pretty sure everyone (or at the very least, the majority of the people reading this site) are very familiar with the Pokémon theme song, so it’s interesting to note that it was almost very different from the finished product.
Speaking in an interview with The Huffington Post, theme co-writer John Siegler and 4Kids Entertainment head of production Norman Grossfeld reflected on the creation of the iconic theme song, stating that it was was almost ‘Catch ‘Em If You Can’ rather than ‘Gotta Catch ‘Em All’.
“It was always my intention to come up with a tagline for marketing purposes that would also be included in the theme song,” said Grossfeld. “‘Catch ‘em if you can’ was one of the original contenders and did make its way into an early version of a theme song.”
“Lyrically, it changed a few times, because they kept changing their hook line. ‘Gotta catch ‘em all.’ Before that it was something else,” added Siegler. “It was incomprehensible to us what the show was about. Finally, we talk a little bit, “Well, it’s about friendship, and you know, loyalty, and blah blah blah,” and so we just wrote a song. My thing has always been that I’ve really loved pop hits. Like really hooky pop hits. That’s always been kind of my favorite thing. And that really served me super well in the jingle business because it was just my instinct to write a quick pop-sounding, hooky melody for whatever lyric we were assigned.”
Relive the final Pokemon theme song here…
Originally published June 4, 2017. Updated April 15, 2018.
