Unboxing a "We're A Miracle" Mastering CD

Christina Aguilera's "We're A Miracle" wasn't written or recorded for Pokemon: The First Movie, but it did take some work to make it ready for the film. Here, we go over a mastering CD that I picked up off of eBay that fills in some details about how that song ended up where it did:

This was an interesting opportunity for me, as I'm always looking for ways to find out more about the production process behind Pokemon music. It's difficult to say if or when I'll have another chance like this, but I'll certainly keep looking.

Unboxing the "Mailing out My Voice" single from Japan

The CD single for "Mailing out My Voice", the ending theme to the latest Pokemon movie in Japan, came in this week. Let's take a look and see what comes with it:

Unboxing Japanese Pokemon Music-Jan. 2016

What goodies lay inside the recently released "Pokemon XY&Z  Character Song Project" CD?

Transcript:

Alright. Hi folks, Steven here. We’re going to be doing an unboxing video. This should be the latest Pokémon CD from Japan in here. And you know, I ordered this before I knew what was happening with the station. I think I’m going to keep doing these even though I don’t technically need them, because I don’t really have a true station anymore. But, we’re just going to keep doing these unboxings.

So, first of all, you notice it came in relatively a small box. That means there’s probably not a poster, or at least not a rolled up one in there. So, this should be a little bit less complicated to unbox.
Alright. Now that we’ve got that little edge there cut out, we can do these two and then this should open. By the way, speaking of the station, what do you folks think of the new approach? It’s really the best I can do right now. But, I am kind of curious to get your feelings on it. In any case, let’s continue opening this.

Alright. So, you can see, usual tissue paper. Let’s see what we’ve got.

Bubble wrap.

Alright. Pocket Monsters XY & Z. Now, of course, a week or so ago, they announced that the XY & Z is coming to America. I figured the TV show would, but they are calling it XY & Z, despite no official confirmation of a third game. And it looks like we have another one of these Tretta chips in the middle there.

I believe this is, yeah, this is a CD and DVD bundle. The way these come out in Japan, there’s usually, for the major ones at least, there’s a CD bundle, and then a CD and DVD bundle that has, usually, some sort of video content, obviously, on the DVD.

So, let’s get this shrink wrap off and see what we can do.

Boy, this is stubborn. We’ve got, it looks like Ash-Greninja on there.

I’ll admit, I was a little disappointed that the 20th anniversary thing that Pokémon announced a couple of weeks ago didn’t include any music things. But hopefully that’s in the works and they just don’t have anything to announce just yet. But in any case, let’s open this up, slide this out.
And let’s start with the Tretta chip.

If you remember, Tretta is sort of the successor of Battrio, which is this arcade unit. You can sort of see it down there. And this is a special chip that you can use in there. I don’t really know how the game’s played or what the mechanics are like. But, seeing as there are no arcades here, you just be glad we’re getting Pokken Tournament.

But in any case, this is, I guess, the Ash-Greninja Tretta chip. And if you look on the back, there’s some stats: HP— Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about the game to really say too much else. Water Shuriken, I think is how that’s pronounced. Interesting that that’s in English. But yeah, that’s a little bonus you get at least for this edition of it. I don’t know if it comes with the regular edition as well, but there you go. Obviously, some more information here on the back about Tretta. It does have a website, which interestingly is .com, not .jp. But this is probably the closest I’ll ever get to it. I didn’t really see anything while I was in Japan a couple of years ago.

In any case, let’s take a look at the actual discs that are in there.

Okay. Comes with this little leaflet. But, let’s take a look at the discs here quick. They have this little line art. I’m not sure how well that’s going to show up there. But, there’s line art. Here’s the compact disc and then here’s the DVD.

Like I said, this is the new, I believe, opening theme, if memory serves me. XY & Z. I’m very tempted to try and combine that somehow with ABC, the Jackson 5 song, but oh well.

In any case, let’s see what’s underneath this. Some more art, of course. Zygarde in its 1% Forme, or something like that, obviously not its Perfect Forme. Over here, Ash and Greninja. I wonder why they chose—I guess the color schemes kind of match, if you take a look there. I guess that must be the main reason why they have this similarity there of Greninja and Ash. Wouldn’t have worked as well. That was the starter he picked up- maybe it just happened to work out, or maybe they decided to do that. In any case, track listings over here. We have the usual versions, some B-sides, and then off-vocal or karaoke version. And we have the intros on the DVD.

In any case, it comes with this little leaflet as well. Take a quick look at that.

Here, obviously, are lyrics. Of course, they’re in Japanese.

I like that shot right there of them standing side by side. That’s a nice combination there.

I’m guessing this is about—I believe in the Japanese, she’s called Eureka. But we know her as Bonnie. There we go. Took me a second to remember the English name, for some reason. We’ve got Dedenne and again Zygarde. So, we’ve got some Team Rocket stuff. I remember seeing a thread or something about Team Rocket stuff. I don’t know if that’s what this song is about or what. I’ll have to take a listen to the CD. And on the back, we have the track listing.

So, that’s all there is in that one. And it’s not a bad package. I think I will keep buying these and bringing them in, even though I don’t have a proper station that they can go on.

Alright folks, that pretty much does it for this video. I’d like to, as I said earlier, get an impression of what you think of the new “station” format, where I put a blog article out each week with a playlist. How’s that working for you? I have my own thoughts, but I’d like to hear yours. So, give us a comment or drop me an email. Alright, folks. Thanks.

Transcript by GetTranscribed.com

Unboxing Pokemon Music from Australia, Brazil, and Japan

After returning from a recent business trip, I found that I had gotten a trio of packages containing Pokemon music from various countries. First up, we have some CDs from Australia and Brazil:

Though the discs in the video above may not seem Pokemon-related at first, rest assured they are.

If that wasn't enough, the third package had some music from Japan, both from the TV show and adapted from the games:

Transcript:

Part 1:

Alright. Hi, folks. Steven here with another unboxing video. I was out for a little bit on a business trip. And, when I came back, I actually have a few things to open. They should all be Pokémon music-related, even though some of them may not seem so at first. And, we’ll take a look through each of them.

First of all, let’s take a look here. This one, you can see, is from Australia-AU Post. Like I said, came to me while I was out. Looks like a CD case, and I’m pretty sure it is. So, let’s see. Open this up.

Alright. So, you may be wondering, what does this have to do with Pokémon? Well, this is a single from, I guess, Australia for “Aaron’s Party (Come Get It)” by Aaron Carter. And, as you might have guessed, it has the song from the Pokémon: The First Movie soundtrack, “(Have Some) Fun with the Funk”. This was found on most of the foreign editions of his album, and also this single. The one project I have going on is that I’m trying to find how many of the songs from Pokémon: The First Movie I can get outside of that album. That’s sort of the little contest I have with myself. And, you may be seeing more of that. We’ll see what happens here.

But, in any case, not a lot else to see. This is just a slimline single, nothing too special here. The only thing I kind of wanted to note with this one is that one of the guys who did the PokéRAP does beatboxing on that song as well. Which, may explain why it’s on the soundtrack.

In any case, let’s move on to the next package. This one, if you take a look here, is from Brazil. This one is a little bit different. But, let’s go ahead and open it.

It’s got some stuff around it. Alright, give me a second here. This is a WEA promo disc. You’ll notice there’s a lot of names on here. There’s two you should notice near the center that seem kind of familiar. WEA is Warner’s music arm, at least it was back when this was published. And, back in the day, they would send CDs out to radio stations and stuff like that to promote their music as one big CD. That was how they got stuff out back in the day, sort of. But, in any case, these two names sure look familiar, don’t they? Well, as it turns out…another slimline case. This is not opening very cooperatively. Alright, taking a quick look through here.

So, on the back here you have-let’s see, where is-there’s M2M “Don’t Say You Love Me”. That, you can find in a lot of places. Warner sent out a ton of samplers. The rare one here is Billy Crawford “Pokémon Theme”. And, you notice under each of these it says, let’s see, something in Portuguese, I assume, since this came from Brazil. It’s either that or Spanish. It mentions Pokémon O Filme, the first Pokémon movie. So, it mentions that on there. As far as I know, this is the only other place besides the soundtrack that the Billy Crawford version of the Pokémon theme has been published. So, that makes this kind of interesting. I just spotted this on eBay and was like, “Oh, what the hey.”

Part 2:

One more. This one is from Japan. However, it is not from the place that I buy my CDs from when I get the stuff from Japan normally, the new releases, from there. This is another eBay seller. It just happened to go through the Japan post. So, let’s see here. Let’s open it up here.

I believe there’s two things in here-I think I bought two things from the same person.

Oh, and one of them is quite large. See, we’ve got some bubble wrap here.

That probably looks a little bit familiar. Then, I’ll get the other thing out. We’ll go over each of these. I’m debating with myself whether these are— it seems like the original packaging. Which, is pretty crazy. I know that Japan tends to keep stuff pretty good condition. So, when they send it-But, in any case.

So, let’s start off with this one since it’s smaller. Some of you will recognize the guy on there despite the doodle type drawing there. That’s Imakuni?, who you will recognize from a large number of early TCG and song stuff, and the TCG game for Game Boy. He’s in all of that. And, this is-let’s see. I need to open one more flap here. There we go.

This is “Can You Name All the Pokémon neo?” So, this is the second generation Pokémon-basically the Japanese equivalent to PokéRAP. So, I guess that would make it the equivalent of PokéRAP GS. But, this is the one that comes there. So, let’s see, what do we got here? Alright.

Got a little poster here with the lyrics and on the back side we have a bunch of different Pokemon. And, probably most if not all the Unown. So, we’ve got that. And, it came with this card, which was drawn, at least this picture-by Imakuni? himself. And, you know, I just noticed he’s leaping out of the picture. This could actually be the first example of a Pokémon card where the subject of the card picture actually leapt outside the boundaries. Not 100% sure on that, but maybe this could be it. In any case, this is obviously some sort of joke card with 2000 HP and stuff like that. Which, I guess, Imakuni? decided to put a little note on the card with there. But, it has the old school Pokémon Japanese card back, which looks different than the newer one. And then, you have this little itty bitty 3 inch CD. These never really took off. In Japan, they were popular for a while. But, anyway, that’s what you have in there.

Alright. Well, let’s move on to the other thing there. Looks like this has seen some use, but someone had resealed it. Bottom here. More tape. This is, I think, the translation is something like, “Can You Play Pokémon on Musical Instruments?” So, here’s the little thing that goes on top. Like I said, they never throw anything away in Japan. But, it comes with, let’s see, nothing inside of this. There’s a track list on the back that you can see there. It’s a spiral bound book, kind of like some notebooks you might have seen. Unfortunately, I cannot read Japanese worth much of anything. Nibi Gym over there, which of course is Pewter.

So, we’ve got actual sheet music. I guess it’s from the games. I assume as much. I’ll have to show my mom this some time. You may remember, you may have heard from mom in the Pokémon Symphonic Evolutions review. She’s an orchestra teacher. This would be kind of a neat thing to show her. I don’t remember if it comes with anything else. Oh, it does come with a CD. That’s what I thought. In the back here. And, it comes with this little card, which has some stickers that you can put down there. I don’t know if you’re supposed to practice everything and once you master it, you put everything in there.

And the Old Amber, a couple different Badges, Master Ball, some items. That looks like false teeth. I’m guessing that’s probably not what that is? Oh, I know what that is now. That’s the false teeth for the guy in the Safari Zone that you have to give to him to get the HM. That’s what that is! Okay. So, that makes sense. They have a sticker for the false teeth.

This is really neat. It’s kind of equivalent to the 2 B.A. Master sheet music book I have. I also have sheet music for “Don’t Say You Love Me” and there might be a few others you can find sheet music for. But, this is pretty neat. I wish they could make a digital version of this for sort of the modern era. I know it’s nice to have the actual thing here, but of course, getting it digital would get it in the hands of more people. Some of the pages actually fold out like this. This is pretty neat. Alright.

I think there’s got more of the gym leaders in here. Like I said, wish I could read more Japanese. But, that is a really neat bound book they have here for the sheet music. But, that’s what I’ve got there. I do, actually, have one other thing, which I kind of wanted to unbox. I just picked this up today. But, it looks like we’re running pretty long on the video anyway. I bought the Wii U version of Guitar Hero Live. But, I’m sure you can find another unboxing video of that somewhere.

Alright, folks. Thanks!

Transcript by GetTranscribed.com

Unboxing the Pokemon Movie 18 Score

The score to the latest Pokemon movie may not come with a poster or a Tretta chip, but there are still some neat things to look at.

Unboxing Roaring All-Stars + Tweedia CDs

Earlier this week, I had a chance to unbox "Roaring All-Stars" and "Tweedia",the two latest Pokemon CD singles from Japan. In addition to the CDs themselves, there are also a number of extras included with the music: