#Sony D-350 Discman

[arcadebroke]

[team-moraine]

Poké Balls in Icebound

As I was linearting recent pages, that showed the modern-day Poké Ball, I suddenly remembered Sammy from the Celebi movie, who had a ‘primitive’ Poké Ball and would have been from roughly the same time period, if not a little earlier, that Franz grew up in.  Needless to say, my desire to learn and apply the knowledge as accurately as I can kicked in, and I went to hunt down some Poké Ball info. I figured I could share what I found out and the conclusions/headcanons I’m going to use in Icebound, since there’s always the chance someone else could find it interesting too, and it’s not going to hurt to shed a bit of light on my thought processes, and the level of detail I reach when writing these things. It’s a bit of a long post, so brace yourself for a wall below the cut. :’D 

Starting off with a disclaimer: While I’m trying to be as accurate as I can, and  to present this logically, there are a LOT of holes in Pokémon lore, and I work on the basis of believable plausibility, meaning that I try to be accurate right up until I can’t, starting with canon info from the series, then filling gaps with real-world knowledge, and finally any further holes are bridged with my own common sense. This definitely isn’t a be-all-and-end-all, but rather a headcanon that I’ve worked out to be accurate as it can be.

Without further ado, onto the Poké Balls!! My first order of business was finding out when exactly the modern Poké Ball was initially invented/produced, to know whether or not Franz would’ve been able to use them. Various relics and artefacts have been used to control and/or seal Pokémon away since the ancient times, such as the relics from Pokémopolis (the giant Gengar/Alakazam/Jigglypuff trio) and the macho-brace-looking armour attached to the Pokémon in the Arceus movie. At approx. 300 years prior to present day, the anime has shown that the concept of the modern Poké Ball was present, although the insides visually appear to lack the mirrors seen in todays ones, implying that they had minimal functionality beyond capturing.  It is a bit hazy when the current version was invented, but the Pokémon Daisuki Club encyclopaedia gives us a development year of 1925 by Professor Westwood at the Celadon University, and a B2W2 Memory Link titled ‘A New Light’ has Drayden stating that Poké Balls “didn’t exist yet,” which would imply that the modern Poké Ball took its sweet time reaching other regions.  Given that Drayden appears to be somewhere around 60-70 years of age, that’d put him roughly in 1940-50 for year of birth. With Franz born in 1968, it can be easily accepted that the modern Poké Ball as we know it had made its way to the regions beyond ‘Japan’ by the time Franz was around to use them.

My next concern however, was with the production of the Poké Ball as a commercial product. Its value, market prevalence and whether variations such as the Great Ball existed yet. We do know that in the Johto region, Apricorns were hollowed out and fitted with capture-tech, and were commonly in use by most Trainers until Poké Balls became widespread thanks to mass production by companies like Silph.

In all of the games, we’ve known the standard Poké Ball to be 200P or roughly 200¥/$2 USD if we’re talking real-world money. Sammy’s Poké Ball is likely an Apricorn Ball, or an cheaper alternative, implying that Poké Balls were not necessarily cheap when introduced to the markets. All new technology is expensive and takes a long time to become cheaper and more commonplace, so I have no doubts that the Poké Ball was no exception to this. So how much did it cost then? At this point, we have to make a little bit of a logical leap - If each new iteration of Poké Ball strength brought the standard price down, then we could argue that the Poké Ball could have at one stage cost the same or more than the Ultra Ball, which is 1200P (¥)/$11 USD. Doesn’t seem like a lot, so we should probably adjust for inflation and check the value of a dollar back then.

Going through a calculator for commodity worth, $11 in 1975 works out to $50. WHAT? $50 per Poké Ball?! Okay, we need to see if we can find a comparable product to see if that price is justified and how quickly the price dropped over time. Obviously, we do not have monsters or monster balls to capture them with, so I’m going to look at portable music players instead.

Let’s consider the portable transistor radio, first made available in 1954 as our standard Poké Ball equivalent. The next revolution in portable music came in 1962 with the first version of the Cassette player, so let’s make that our Great Ball. The cassette dominated the market for 20 years, but it took the arrival of the Boombox and the Sony Walkman in 1979 to become mainstream, giving us a good idea for when the Great Ball was ‘standardised’ in production and made commonplace. In 1982, CDs, our Ultra Ball equivalent, hit the market with the first Discman player hitting shelves in 1984, and holding pride of place until the MP3 format came along in 1998, and the subsequent explosion of MP3 players being equivalent to all of the specialised Ball variants, like the Timer, Quick and Premier Balls. Obviously, this isn’t the best comparison, as Poké Ball tech clearly didn’t become obsolete with each new version, but it definitely had the means and reason to drop in price while the technology continued to improve.

Now to initial pricing of this tech (in USD to stay consistent). Brace yourself, this is going to hurt. 1954 - Portable Transistor Radio $49.95 ($450 today) and by 1962, this had dropped to $15 ($119 today) 1979 - Walkman $150.00 ($500 today) 1984 - CD Players $350 ($825 today) 1998 - MP3 Players (MPMan) $400 ($590 today) which by 2001 was the iPod at $399 ($550 today)

...Suddenly $50 per Poké Ball doesn’t seem so unreasonable anymore, especially when you would also have to budget for food and other necessities while travelling. If we go by roughly the same timeframe as the music players for the introduction of each new strength, then Poké Balls were definitely an adult purchase; something that kids would not have been able to easily afford in the ‘70s, starting to becoming reasonable from the early ‘80s with the Great Ball, down to the 200P Price by the ‘90s with the Ultra Ball’s appearance (the ‘90s being the time that the original Pokémon games were set in, coincidentally). They would have continually gotten ‘cheaper’ as well, as places like the Kalos Poké Ball factory automated production, and the price for these three standard Balls hasn’t risen with inflation in the Pokémon world throughout 25 years of games (or about 10-15 years time if we consider the story timeline that’s been thrown around), not to mention the dozens of specialised variants introduced since then. 

So at the end of the day, how is this knowledge going to affect my comic? Well, when Franz started his journey he would have not have had the means to catch a full team right away, and Poké Balls were something precious to only use when you were certain of a capture. That would’ve changed as the years went on, but that mentality of just catching whatever Pokémon you saw and rotating them around on your team was just not an affordable option for most people, and that in itself affects the attitude of the whole world around him. This really puts into perspective the seemingly little prize money Trainers awarded out in the earlier games as well, and why it never seemed to amount to much. 

Being a Trainer isn’t cheap.

Sources: Poké Balls, and History of Pokéballs on Bulbapedia Inflation Calculator A Short History of the Evolution of Portable Music Portable Audio Players on Wikipedia

[ocaeblog]

SONY Discman D-50 (Also known as D-5, D-5A, D-14, CD Compact Player, Sony CD Compact Player D-50) - The first portable CD player. Released in 1984 on 10 November in Japan. The player sold very well in Japan and USA, despite its high price - 49800¥ (350$). Sold in black, white and red colors. The weight of the player - 590 grams (without battery). Size - 127x36,9x132,5 mm. The player is very strong, so most of them are still working.