WHERE are the Non-Kanto Gen 1 Pokemon REALLY from? (I was wrong!)

I believe you got the wrong Guyana. The Guyanas encompass the ex- Spanish, English, Dutch, French and Portuguese Guyanas, which is now Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, Frenh Guiana, and Amapa in Brazil. See how Guyana and Guiana are spelt differently. In Japanese, Guyana and Guiana are also spelt differently. You even show it at 7:59. Guyana is ガイアナ Ga-i-a-na, while Guiana is ギアナ Giana). And they took the "Giana" one, as French Guiana. Mew originally comes from French Guiana, not Guyana, according to Japanese source. And it makes more sense for French Guiana to be where on earth it was found. Mew is said to be the origin of all life on earth (in the lore). It is a wink to a popular belief that life comes from outer space. Thus, its apparence in Space in the anime and Pokémon Snap. You know where the European Union have their Spaceport? In French Guiana. It also explain Team Rocket's quest for Mew or Mewtwo. You may wonder why Team Rocket and their admin has rocketry name? Because, well because of the space theme, which is further link to French Guiana and its spaceport.

I think faraway island IS the Guyana region Pokémon has a habit of using real world things as placeholders until they add an in lore equivalent For example: Before Gen 8: FireRed Its electric charges can reach even 100,000 volts. Careless contact can cause even an Indian elephant to faint. After Gen 8: Legends: Arceus It can discharge bursts of electricity exceeding 100,000 volts— a single strike with that amount of power would incapacitate one of the Copperajah of my homeland.

Has Pokemon ever officially used the naming convention of "Kantonian Rattata" or something similar? I haven't seen them do anything like that - they've always just said "Rattata" unless they're specifically referring to "Alolan Rattata." As far as I can see, they're open to Rattata and other pokemon being native to multiple regions - it's just the regional variants themselves that are from one region in particular.

Weird thing on Clefairy and a neat bit of folklore studies that a lot of people don't know about, it's actually believed by some folklorist believe that alien encounters and sightings may be a modern version of fairy and elf sightings of the olden days. So Clefairy being a fairy from space may be a reference to that.

Technically we do go to space in oras when we go fight deoxys. We wear a space suit and everything Lol

We can mathematically estimate how buoyant exeggcute is. The dex entry puts the pokemon at 5.5 pounds and just over a foot tall. The eggs are roughly spherical so each would displace about a half cubic foot or 3.89 gallons. Water weighs about 8 pounds. Not only does exeggcute float, they float extremely high in water.

I still think the "where do they geographically come from" question is worth answering, and kind of the first thing one things with titles like this.

Regarding Mew, even in the original Japanese Red and Green, it does first say Mew is from Guyana. The retcon later on was not necessarily to change where it was from so much as it was to remove the references to the real world. There are other examples of this happening over time as well, the most easily notable being Raichu. An early Pokedex entry says it can knock out an Indian Elephant, but a later entry changes it to a Copperajah, removing the reference to the real world and replacing it with a Pokemon equivalent. This would suggest that for Mew, the change to being found in a jungle is just to remove the reference to Guyana. If there was already a Guyana-inspired region, that's likely what they would have put instead. But rather than mislead fans by naming a region that doesn't exist, locking them into that name while fans repeatedly cry out for that region to finally appear and get angry over a tease like that, they decided to be vague. Basically, yes, it comes from an unknown Guyana-inspired region, which Faraway Island is a part of. If and when we will ever go there beyond just Faraway Island is... Unlikely. It's unlikely they'd want to give unlimited access to Mew, so they'd have to find a way to prevent access to Faraway Island without refraining from mentioning it entirely. Or they would have to find a way to explain why Mew is suddenly no longer available there (it is implied that Faraway Island specifically is uninhabited and remote, so maybe they could just have that change in the time since Mew was discovered, with people of the region starting to inhabit the island and thus unintentionally scaring off any remaining Mew, but that feels unlikely to happen). I think the most we can expect would be more events taking us there instead of a full region, as much as I personally would love to eventually have regions based on every part of the world.

Sorry to correct your corrections, but exeggcute’s bulbapedia page says it’s more closely related to seeds than to eggs. Granted, some seeds still don’t float. Also, don’t all the Kanto games canonically take place in separate timelines? Isn’t that why there’s mega evolution in the Let’s Go games but not the Gen 1 or 3 games? Great video btw! 🙌 Love these

The Sevii Islands are based off of the Okinawa Islands, which are part of the real world Kanto prefecture, so I assume they’d be part of Kanto as well.

5:30 THERE I AM GARY! Great job again, good on you for clearing things up and stating mistakes where they were. Happy to see more of what you make going forward.

I love this community style of videos that you've created. It's nice to have a "healthy" dialog going. I don't think gamefreak really had origins in mind when developing most pokemon. But it is fun to wonder.

I subbed because of this video, very few poke channels listen to criticism and actually use the comments to improve theory’s/lists. Great work

i think the question of "what region were they first infinitely catchable?" is getting a bit muddled with stuff like discussions of exeggutor and clefairy. even if they did originally evolve (like irl evolution not pokemon evolution) in another region (or planet) and then migrate to kanto or johto later, that shouldn't matter based on your criteria. i think the question of where these pokemon geographically originated is interesting, but it seems like a different question from the one posed by these videos. like, just because a mon is infinitely catchable in a region doesn't mean they didn't first evolve in the region right-next-door which we might hypothetically explore next generation. for example, if gen 10 has a new infinitely catchable wild pokemon who's described as "originating from the mountains in the east" and then gen 11 take place in a region to the east of gen 10's region and this hypothetical pokemon is found in the mountains there, and stated by local NPCs as having originated there, then you have a bit of a dilemma. two questions with two answers.

Fun Fact: the reason Lapras is limited repeated in gen 2 is because it was an endangered species at first in the series but later on it's species made a recovery due to conservation efforts. From gen 1 - gen 6 Lapras was an endangered species. From pokemon Moon's entry: "These Pokémon were once near extinction due to poaching. Following protective regulations, there is now an overabundance of them." So it's safe to say Lapras can be native to both Sinnoh and Johto as places they are breeding grounds, outside of that they are more of an ocean species.

I think an overlooked idea would be invasive species. Just because it's able to be caught in abundance, doesn't necessarily mean it's native to an area.

The section of Sinnoh's Victory Road that Lapras is found in is post-game exclusive.

I love the "Controversy about dinosaurs," isn't even about a Dinosaur

It would be fun to see the ranges of Pokemon within the first four/five gens (since their ranges kinda jump the shark from gen six onwards). Zubat for example just lives across all of Poke-Japan.

YouTube just recommended this to me and I binged this whole series. I do have one thing that I want to point out. So... there's some book or magazine or strategy guide or something (it's not the game's manual, I can confirm that cause I double-checked) that I remember from my childhood that had Professor Oak in the corner at one point with a speech bubble where he actually explained that he found the starters in the tall grass that surrounds Pallet Town in the original Gen 1 games. I am racking my brain to try and remember where I read this, but I swear there is some official merchandise that covers it... Of course, in the actual games themselves, that grass is inaccessible, and even if you do get there via cheating/hacking/glitching, there are no wild encounters that spawn there.