Twitch announces plans to stream a marathon of the Pokemon television show, including all nine seasons of the show and presentations of the Pokemon movies.
Pokemon already has a massive audience on Twitch. The creature collecting RPG series has previously made headlines with streams such as Twitch Plays Pokemon, which tasks Twitch viewers with controlling the inputs of a game from the series. Soon, though, Poke-fans will have even more of a reason to visit the live-streaming platform.
Today, Twitch has announced that it is planning to air a marathon of the Pokemon TV show. The marathon takes place on the TwitchPresents channel and will begin on Monday, August 27 at 10AM PDT. It will run for two months, ending on October 28. “Mondays through Thursdays will feature blocks of 10 to 16 Pokémon the Series episodes,” explains Twitch, adding that the blocks will repeat through the day. The schedule for the TV shows is as follows:
Meanwhile, on Friday and Saturdays, there will be “encore presentations of the episodes that were featured at the beginning of that week.” On Sundays, Twitch will air a “special Pokemon movie” at 10AMPT. Twitch does say that more information on the movie schedule will be available via the TwitchPresents channel but this info wasn’t available at the time of writing.
Twitch has already found some success in airing Pokemon media. A previous Pokemon movie marathon, which aired two years ago to celebrate the franchise’s 20th anniversary, received more than 70,000 viewers. So, the fact that Twitch is now hosting an encore will surely draw in massive viewership, too.
There’s also the fact that the stream comes just before the release of the Nintendo Switch Pokemon games, Let’s Go Pokemon Pikachu and Let’s Go Pokemon Eevee. While the Venn diagram of Pokemon fans and Twitch viewers is arguably just a singular circle, it could allow Nintendo and The Pokemon Company to introduce the franchise to new people. Or, it could get lapsed Pokemon fans excited about the new games.
After all, the Let’s Go Pokemon games are remakes of Pokemon Yellow, which was released in the TV show’s heyday. The new games may make some polarizing changes (including a controversial tweak to Gym battles) but the nostalgia of the Twitch streams may help the games sell a few more thousand copies.
