Prepare for trouble, and make it double! To protect the world from quiz frustration. To write newsletters with fun notations. To dispense essential facts, sort of. To communicate our Poké-love.

Private Events Specialist Greg.

Content Creator Tony.

Team Trivia blasts off at the speed of light! Read our newsletter or prepare to fight!

Now that that’s out of the way, we’re partnering up to give you what you need today, the release of the new Pokémon games: A bunch of fun Pokémon-related items that we couldn’t fit into our Pokémon Theme Nights (which you can still play all month long!).

Private Event Specialist Greg here, stepping out of our bustling inbox for just a moment to talk about Pokémon food, foods that are Pokémon, and Pokémon that might be food. For those of you who have already played our Pokémon theme night, you know there’s a round about this topic already. But we couldn’t fit it all in! Today, as I rush off to pick up my copy of “Pokémon Violet,” let’s bid farewell to the Galar Region and three food-themed Pokémon you can find there.

We covered Milcery and its evolution Alcremie, whose Pokèdex entry says that “when it trusts a Trainer, it will treat them to berries it's decorated with cream,” and “when Alcremie is content, the cream it secretes from its hands becomes sweeter and richer.” Alcremie also has a Gigantamax form, where it becomes a towering wedding cake featuring its many flavor profiles, and “launches swarms of missiles, each made of cream and loaded with 100,000 kilocalories. Get hit by one of these, and your head will swim.” So I think it’s promising to give you type-2 diabetes with a single attack? That’s cold, even for a Cool Whip Pokémon.

We didn’t have room in our game for one of the original food-adjacent creatures: Farfetch'd! Farfetch’d is an odd duck in Kanto, literally, having no pre-evolution and no evolution. It travels with a giant leek bigger than its body, seemingly packing its own aromatics for cooking. In Galar, they evolve into Sirfetch'd, who’s doubled up on armaments to keep hungry humans away, it seems. It’s a fancy duck knight with a food shield and food sword, it’s absolutely one of my favorite Pokémon. It uses tools and walks on two legs. I would not eat under any circumstances.

Filling out our Galar courses is Appletun. It evolves from Applin, a worm in an apple. Or should I say…wyrm? It’s Grass and Dragon type! The unsettling part is, once again, in the Pokédex entry: “Its body is covered in sweet nectar, and the skin on its back is especially yummy. Children used to have it as a snack.” Kids ate its BACK SKIN! As a SNACK! SNACK SKIN!

Ok, whew. Now that we’ve reached the apex of Pokèbody Horror, let me theorize: Pokémon are sentient, and I don’t think people kill and eat them anymore. Alcremie gives off its body…cream. Slowpoke willingly parts with its tail, which grows back. Appletun lets neighbor children eat its tasty tart crust when it trusts them, I guess? But these traits are often described historically. These are living things that say their own names and communicate with emotional clarity, that you can cook and share curry with, that are literally ride-or-die friends. A whole genre of them are just guys! Berries are plentiful, Pokémon are giving when it costs them nothing, it’s an idyllic universe. So just put the existential crisis of Pokémon edibility aside (as Brian David Gilbert does in that language-NSFW video essay) and dig into the games to sustain yourself. They’re games! Have fun! And if you want to have fun online with our Pokémon Theme Night, catch me hosting it on Twitch on Sunday, December 11 at 7pm CT for a family-friendly stream.

Not only can we tie in our Pokémon obsessions with Food Trivia (again, playable all month long!), we also have a tie-in to December’s Holiday Movie Trivia! Before they became the biggest franchise in the world, there was a time when Pokémon was desperate to make hay while the sun shone. And what better way than the time-honored fill-them-pockets strategy of making a Christmas album?

Thus, the “Pokémon Christmas Bash” exists! It starts out, as was standard in 2001, with a rap track starring many (but not all!) of the voice actors from the anime. And, as was standard in 2001, it’s only a half-step above “My name is Ash Ketchum and I’m here to say / I’m here to Christmas Bash in a major way!” Though the album does kick off with Dexter the Pokédex, whose robotic voice might just have been a prelude to the auto-tune boom later in the decade. It’s an influential album after all!

Following the title track is “I’m Giving Santa a Pikachu for Christmas.” Is it about giving Santa a companion that will become his lifelong partner? Nah, it’s about how great Pikachu would be as unpaid labor. As Professor Oak sings, “I’m giving Santa a Pikachu this Christmas / Cause Santa’s got a lot of work to do.”

Ash, who has a Pikachu himself, sees nothing wrong with this, zeroing in only on how great it is that Rudolph will lose his gig. “I bet he’ll scratch his beard and say: ‘Now Christmas Eve will be a breeze / As long as I have one of these / on foggy flights through winter nights / To light my way!’” Why is Santa in the market for a new light? Is he trying to bust a reindeer union? Pallet Town is apparently no friend of labor.

Meowth provides some great insight into what it’s like to be an adult on “Nobody Don’t Like Christmas,” a song about how some people hate every other holiday. In some cases, it’s warranted, like this astute takedown of New Year’s Eve: “December 31st’s the night they dread / They may be blowin’ on noisemakers / But they’re all a bunch of fakers / Cause they’d rather all be home asleep in bed.”

Points for that, but Meowth gets some minuses for some cheap shots at… Arbor Day? Yom Kippur? Not sure those were warranted!

If you want to find out more, or just hear more dunking on this album, I can recommend the Retronauts podcast’s takedown of it from 2019.

Lastly, we want to wish Danny DeVito a happy birthday yesterday! DeVito is perhaps the biggest what-if in Pokémon voice-acting history, as he was considered for the role of Detective Pikachu. A fan campaign to get him the role was unsuccessful, so Ryan Reynolds took it instead. DeVito later commented on the campaign by asking, “What the [he]ck is Pokémon?”

But search the internet and you can find fan-made videos of Detective Pikachu" with DeVito’s voice, most of which are pulled from his not-family-friendly turn as Frank Reynolds in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” But you can show your kids this quick edit by @CandyEevee, with lines pulled from “Matilda.”

Maybe this next generation of Pokémon will bring us a “Detective Pikachu” sequel. DeVito would be a natural fit as Detective Pikachu’s curmudgeonly-but-loveable father. After subjecting us to Chris Pratt Mario, Nintendo owes us this one.