Original Series Foriegn Language Release Dates

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I’m currently trying to update TCGDex with every release date for promos I can find, starting with the oldest cards. As even major releases often had different release dates in each language, tracking down elements such as individual cards has proven to be difficult especially due to the language barrier, so I’m starting this thread with hope that the community will be able to help in the search.I’ll start with what I have, and edit more things in as people find them.

2-Player Starter Set:

French: 1999-11-20? The source only specifies “mid November” as far as I can tell.
Spanish: ?
German: ?
Italian: ?
Dutch: 2000-02-24
Portuguese: ?

Base Set:

French: 1999-11-20? A mid November advertisement as a source for this date, However I’m unsure if this applies to Base Set proper because the advert only shows the 2 player starter set.
German: 1999-12-?? bisafans.de provides a month, but with no source
Spanish: before 2000-03-23? A chat log mentions someone buying Spanish cards from a pack and wanting to process a return due to card damage, this implies Base Set was already out in Spanish, however a later chat said they were starting “soon” in europe. This implies that either it came out in LA first, but then why wasn’t it mentioned, or they are confused
Italian: 2000-03-?? pokemoncentral.it provides a month, but no source
Dutch: 2000-02-24? There’s no indication that base set release separately to the starter set, however a separate article on Parajis mentions the Tuesday after as a release date It could be that this is simply a case of different locations getting different dates, but it might also be that the base set proper was released with a delay.
Portuguese: 2000-03-?? See Spanish, except Brazil is marked to have a local language release in march instead.

Jungle:#

French: 2000-07-01 Pokepedia provides a date, but no source
German: 2000-06-?? bisafans.de provides a month, but with no source
Spanish: ?
Italian: 2000-07-?? pokemoncentral.it provides a month, but no source
Dutch: ?
Portuguese: ?

Fossil:

French: 2000-11-01 Pokepedia provides a date, but no source
German: 2000-10-?? bisafans.de provides a month, but with no source
Spanish: ?
Italian: 2000-11-?? pokemoncentral.it provides a month, but no source
Dutch: ?
Portuguese: ?

Team Rocket:

French: 2001-03-?? Pokepedia provides a month, but no source
German: 2000-12-?? bisafans.de provides a month, but with no source
Italian: 2001-02-?? pokemoncentral.it provides a month, but no source

Promos:

Pikachu 1:
German: ? Unknown source, possibly a league promo
Portuguese: 2000-09-12 from the Pikachu World Collection.

Movie 1 promos 2-5:
These were distributed with the film in all regions, meaning we can simply use the box office day.
It’s possible that the french cards were printed earlier in Canada, but I have heard nothing about canadian french wizards cards and will assume they don’t exist until proven otherwise.
French: 2000-04-05
German: 2000-04-13
Spanish: 2000-04-14
Italian: 2000-04-20

Pikachu 4:
Dutch: 2000-09-12 In addition to the movie promos, Pikachu 4 was in the World Pikachu Collection in Dutch

League Promos? 1?,6,8,9,14,20,24,25,26,28,29,30,31,32,33,35,36,37,39:
I do not currently have any idea how or when EU league promos were distributed, or if they were even distributed as promos. From the wizards website though, it seems to have started in October 00 however it continued saying that players were preparing for season 2 until the site shut down due to changeover.

From a chatlog hosted by Team Europe seems to imply that Series 3 was ready to start in Jan 03, but was then rushed within a few months as changover loomed and wizards forced a move to series 4.

However the numbers confirmed to exist in EU languages do not match the US distributions for early years, so the schedule may have been very different.

24 is special as it was also tied to a create a card giveaway, but was also part of the Pokemon league event, so is likely part of the schedule.

Mewtwo 14:
This Promo was distributed as an insert for the Mewtwo Strikes Back movie VHS/DVD, so we can just use the release date of that.
French: 2000-11-14
German: 2000-11-08
Italian: 2000-10-06
Spanish: sometime in 2000?

Movie 2 Promos 21-23:
Assuming this was given out with the movie release in all languages, we can just check the release dates for the film.
French: 2000-12-20
German: 2000-12-14 or 2000-12-21: Switzerland is listed as having a German release 1 week before Germany proper got it, so may have gotten the cards early
Italian: 2000-12-22
Spanish: 2000-08-04 or 2000-11-24 Was released in LA much earlier than Europe, but I don’t know if the cards were given out there.
Portuguese: 2000-07-21 as above, but with Brazil this time, however it’s pretty likely in this case given Brazil has AFAIK always been the primary source for Portuguese wizards cards

Pikachu 27
This was released in Italian in the world pikachu collection
Italian: 2000-09-12

Unown 38
This was in the home release of movie 3
French: 2001-12-13
German: 2001-11-08
Italian: ?

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Nice info already, thanks for sharing.

As someone who’s Dutch, I was aware of that Trouw-newspaper article mentioning February 24th, 2000, but not of the Pokémon-Paradijs page mentioning a Tuesday (March 1st, 2000). :slight_smile:

Regarding Portuguese, we’ve recently tried to figure out the release dates of all Portuguese sets, but unfortunately for the WotC era sets, it was hard to find information. Your March 2000 does correspond to the initial WotC planned release date for Brazil. But if those were the actual release dates, we don’t know for sure.

Two small corrections regarding the Pikachu promos:

There are two different Dutch #4 Pikachu promos. One with stamp that was indeed in the Pikachu World Collection 2000 nonet of September 2000 from Sydney, Australia. But also another non-stamped version (with also slightly different translations - although the meaning is the same), from the VHS of the second movie in October 2002. I’m gonna quote my own collection part of it:

The #27 Pikachu artwork was only released in Japanese, English and Italian. French, German, and Spanish copies of this promo doesn’t exist a.f.a.i.k. The Italian version of this card was also available with stamp from the Pikachu World Collection 2000.

Greetz,
Quuador

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Regarding Portuguese, we’ve recently tried to figure out the release dates of all Portuguese sets, but unfortunately for the WotC era sets, it was hard to find information. Your March 2000 does correspond to the initial WotC planned release date for Brazil. But if those were the actual release dates, we don’t know for sure.

Yes, that was the thread i found that info from, i did try to dig up what I could here before compiling everything and asking for more info.

There are two different Dutch #4 Pikachu promos. One with stamp that was indeed in the Pikachu World Collection 2000 nonet of September 2000 from Sydney, Australia. But also another non-stamped version (with also slightly different translations - although the meaning is the same), from the VHS of the second movie in October 2002. I’m gonna quote my own collection part of it:

Yep, I was mostly interested in the first dates because that’s what would be fed into the API for the time being, but this is good info to have around.

The #27 Pikachu artwork was only released in Japanese, English and Italian. French, German, and Spanish copies of this promo doesn’t exist a.f.a.i.k. The Italian version of this card was also available with stamp from the Pikachu World Collection 2000.

Good spot, that might be why i could not find film home release dates, there probably weren’t any. Editing to fix.

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This post also shares some timelines if you haven’t read it yet.

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You might also enjoy the timeline HERE and HERE.

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