I thought I knew why the Porygon episode got banned until I watched it with the sound off and caught something at the 12 minute mark

Ben Smith · 2026-10-01T06:35:04.896634+00:00

For about 15 years I went around telling people the Pokemon episode with Porygon got pulled only because of the flashing lights that sent 685 kids to the hospital in Japan back in 1997. Then a buddy in Portland asked me to watch it without the audio so we could study the animation itself, and I noticed something I had missed the whole time. Around the 12 minute mark there are these rapid red and blue screen swaps that look fine when you watch them at normal speed, but when we slowed it down they lined up almost exactly with the seizure-triggering pattern described in the news reports from that week. I had always assumed the ban was just panic and bad press, but now I am not so sure the network overreacted the way I used to argue. The other side of it is that plenty of fans insist the show was doomed anyway because parents groups in the US were already writing letters about the series months before the incident even happened. I keep going back and forth on whether the ban was about safety or about saving face, and it bugs me that I cannot find a clean answer. Did anyone here actually watch that episode when it first aired, or am I the only one who only learned about it from YouTube clips years later?

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I thought I knew why the Porygon episode got banned until I watched it with the sound off and caught something at the 12 minute mark | Canceled Cartoons - Talk Freely