As a result, Christmas has been featured several times in the anime, with one episode even revolving around Ash and his friends saving Santa Claus from Team Rocket. While the various holiday specials won’t raise too many eyebrows, there is at least one Christmas-themed Pokemon item that DOES raise an eyebrow: Pokemon Christmas Bash! Despite the dozens of Pokemon soundtracks that have been released over the years, this holiday-themed soundtrack for Pokemon would cause the most debate, ridicule, and outright confusion as to why it exists.
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What is Pokemon Christmas Bash?
Pokemon Christmas Bash is a Christmas album that is primarily geared for kids who are fans of the franchise. It features reworked versions of classic Christmas songs as well as original tunes. Despite the Pokemon theme, you don’t hear many Pokemon in the tunes and the album primarily features singing by the English cast members of the dub that was produced by 4Kids Entertainment.
The cast members included Veronica Taylor, Rachel Lillis, and Eric Stuart. Unlike other Pokemon soundtracks produced, it was the rare album of the franchise to feature no music featured from the TV series it was based on.
What is the Origin of the Album?
Already you may be seeing why this album continues to raise so many eyebrows today: the idea of a Pokemon Christmas album is about as crazy as the idea of a Ninja Turtles concert album. Yet despite how nutty both of these sound, they were both produced and were real things you could buy. So what was the thought process from 4Kids Entertainment behind this release? To begin with, you have to put yourself in the time period when it came out. The album was released on October 23, 2001. While some younger readers may have a hard time wrapping their heads around this, this was a time when there was no Spotify or Apple Music.
The Compact Disc (which shall be referred to as the CD from this point on) was the primary delivery method of buying and listening to music. One of the biggest industries in the music business was the holiday genre. You need to understand that while albums would come and go, there were always a few months in the year when everyone wanted to buy Christmas CDs. While a normal release could be popular for a week and never be in demand again, a Christmas album had the potential to be in demand every single year. These albums were so profitable for the record companies that many artists were contractually obligated to produce one. If you want to know how big this business still is, you may notice that many stores that sell music no longer sell N’Sync albums, but every November their Home for Christmas album still pops up in stores.
While there were no Christmas songs in either the English or Japanese version of Pokemon, 4Kids Entertainment wanted a Pokemon Christmas album for the simple fact that it was something that could potentially be sold a couple of months every year in stores. 4Kids wanted to have a holiday CD that would become a staple of the genre for kids for many years to come, and they hedged their bets that Pokemon Christmas Blast would be huge. Course, the only problem is that since none of the music was featured in the show many kids were not aware the album existed, and while sales are hard to come by, the rarity of the CD suggests that the sales were not especially impressive, and it came and went before many realized it was there.
Availability Today
Buying Pokemon Christmas Bash on CD is going to set a Pokemon fan back a couple of hundred dollars due to the rarity of the album. We would like to take this moment to mention that you don’t have to spend this money, as it is available to stream on Spotify (as of this writing). Is it worth listening to? Honestly…its kind of hard to say. For many listeners the album is strange, nonsensical, and strangely doesn’t have much to do with the Pokemon themselves. There is also a lot of debate on whether or not the English voice actors were singers capable of carrying a full album, but that is a topic bigger than what this article can cover.
That said, despite the strangeness of the product, there is a small set of vocal fans who did get the CD as kids and sing its praises to this day. Like many things, the quality can certainly be debated, but there will always be someone who loves the end result none-the-less. And hey, since it IS a Christmas album, if it brings someone joy – whether organically or ironically – then that likely makes the release a success on some level. So if you’ve got Pokekids at home, it might make for an interesting listen!
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