700 kids in the emergency room because of Pokemon! This episode of censorship in France 27 years ago had completely unexpected consequences

It’s December 16, 1997, 6:30 p.m. And in Japan, in many medical emergency services, the phone starts ringing: throughout the country, at the same time, several hundred epileptic seizures, discomfort or temporary blindness are noted in young children.

What do patients have in common? They were all in front of their television screens, watching episode 38 of the Pokemon animated series when they developed symptoms.

• Pokemon: 5 things you (maybe) didn’t know about the animated series

Virtual soldier Porygon

A very popular video game franchise available in many formats, the license created by Satoshi Tajiri in 1995 has been talked about many times. But this unfortunate event is undoubtedly one of the least glorious stories ever told.

Titled “Virtual Soldier Porygon”, the episode in question followed the new adventures of Sasha, Pierre and Ondine. This time, the three young heroes of the animated series had to break into a computer system (Tron style) to stop Team Rocket.

At the twentieth minute of the episode, when Pikachu caused a huge electrical explosion, things went seriously wrong and a lot of colored flashes followed each other across the screen in a stroboscopic manner, increasing the number of images transmitted from 3 per second. until 10 According to research.

700 children are in an emergency situation

The result: About 700 Japanese children were taken to emergency rooms (and 208 of them were hospitalized), according to the journal article. Science and Life Junior It was published at the time. But in total, about 12,000 children would be affected in one way or another by images from the episode, according to a recent article slate (Even the possibility of collective hysteria was mentioned to explain the scale of the phenomenon).

The horrific accident, which is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the record for epileptic seizures caused by a TV show, led to a 4-month blackout of the series in Japan and outright censorship of the famous episode in France and other countries. of the world.