The Great Topsun Debate : Looking at the History of Pokémon

Yeah the more I go through things the more obvious it is, if this isn’t the clearest example I don’t know what else I can show people. The Topsuns have the later corrected height and weight for Charizard which again makes it impossible to be the 1st printed:

7 Likes

I completely agree with your other comments and found sources thus far, and imo the order is Bandai Carddass → No Rarity Base Set → Topsun No Number Blue Backs. But as for the 70.5kg instead of 90.5kg above, the 70 could simply be a typo. We for example also have a Drowsee card instead of Drowzee in the English EX FireRed & LeafGreen set of 2004, even though all Drowzee are correctly spelled in the sets before and after it. Mistakes and typos happen sometimes.

And although it has already been said a few times before, the ©1995 copyright dates on the Topsun cards (or any Pokémon card for that matter) doesn’t mean a thing. On the English (non-Shadowed) Base Set cards it also mentions “©1995, 96, 98 … ©1999”. The first date is the license date of Nintendo, the second the release date of the set. Japanese Base Set cards don’t have any copyright date at all. Topsun cards have only the License date. It varies, and that it varies isn’t all too uncommon. The only date that’s important, as others have already mentioned, is the release date.

Another example of why copyright dates on the cards themselves doesn’t mean a thing:

The Build-A-Bear Workshop stamped Snorlax from the Flashfire set has a copyright date of ©2014 (which is the date the set was released in), but this stamped card itself was released more than FIVE years later in August/September 2019:

Maybe they were already working on designing the Topsun cards in 1995; maybe they had already printed some in 1995. The same could be said about the Bandai Carddass or No Rarity Base Set. They also were designed and printed way before they were actually released.

Regardless of what happened behind the scenes, Topsun was released in March 1997, so it comes after the Bandai Carddass set of September 1996 and No Rarity Base Set set of October 20th, 1996 (or Pikachu & Jigglypuff CoroCoro Comic promos of October 15th, 1996).

(But regardless of this conclusion, feel free to continue the discussions about which were PRODUCED first in the factories. It’s pretty interesting to read through all these pieces of history and documentation. :blush: Maybe we can dig up some pre-released data on the Bandai Carddass and No Rarity Base Set cards as well somehow?)

Greetz,
Quuador

3 Likes

@quuador , Awesome info I agree! I actually went through all the 1995 and 1996 corocoro comics there is no Pokemon mentioned at all in 1995, here is the first advertisement of Pokemon in Feb 1996 (Released Jan 1996). Pretty cool:

4 Likes

There were also collector cards contained in the Pokemon Kid’s boxes that were released by Bandai in October 1996.

1 Like

I just came across this as I was researching. I literally wrote soomthing so similar to your post yesterday in the most recent post for this debate… It blows my mind that you wrote this 4 years ago!! And way more detailed seeing as though i was struggling to remeber specific things and explaining them. Im on my phone but i was trying to tag this post into the newer post. I know im not suppose to bump old threads but can one of the devs please put this OP into the new post? Sorry and thank you!!