The Cartoon That Sent 700 Children to Hospital

2026-07-11 · Strange Mass Events · 9 min read

At half past six in the evening on December 16, 1997, across Japan, roughly four million households did the most ordinary thing imaginable. They turned on the television to watch Pokemon. The show was a phenomenon, the games were a phenomenon, and this was episode thirty-eight, a story called Dennou Senshi Porygon, which translates roughly as Computer Warrior Porygon. In it, Ash, Misty and Brock shrink down and travel inside a computer network to stop Team Rocket. It was, for about twenty minutes, exactly the bright, frantic, harmless entertainment that millions of children had settled in front of after school and dinner.

Then, roughly twenty minutes in, at around 6:51 in the evening, Pikachu used its Thunderbolt attack to destroy a wave of what were, in the story, virtual vaccine missiles. The animators depicted the explosion using a technique the industry calls paka-paka, alternating full-frame flashes of red and blue, cutting from one color to the other on every frame at a rate of about twelve flashes per second. For roughly four seconds, tens of millions of young retinas were hit with intense, saturated, strobing red and blue light filling the entire screen. And then, in living rooms all over the country, children began to collapse.

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