In the first segment (1:15-24:18), Anne from Pikapi Podcast joins me to discuss the music of My Pokemon Ranch for the Wii. While it might be light in...a lot of areas, this title still had enough material for us to make some observations. As usual, there's a game discussion after the outro.
Our second segment (25:22-49:32) is a round of Pokemon music trivia. Anne tests her knowledge against a quiz covering the games, anime, and more! If you'd like to give it a try, there’s a link in the episode description:
The first Pokémon movie had a bit of an odd production history, and you may have noticed some shots are sharper than others. There are some technical reasons for that, which I explain. I also provide some other options, courtesy of AI image enhancement.
Technical Details:
The movie was originally produced on 16 mm film, as opposed to the 35 mm film normally used for theatrical movies. Around the time the movie was being brought to the west, some shots were re-done in 35 mm, hence the difference in visuals.
I wanted to see if it was possible to make the 16 mm footage look sharper. In earlier times, this could be done by using a sharpening filter on the image, but this would cause haloing artifacts that would make the sharpness look fake. With the advent of image processing AI, I decided to use a deblurring model I had created using the ESRGAN framework. I experimented with blending the model with a base untrained model to get the results you see here. Overall, I'm fairly pleased with results in the 40-50% strength range. Values above that tend to bring out too much of the film grain, making it look as if the film had a higher ISO, and creating a haloing effect.
Looking beyond what I've done here, it should be possible to create a more accurate model by creating high/low-resolution pairs of footage on 35 and 16 mm film (likely a 16 mm print created from a 35 mm master, or perhaps specially created footage for such a model). This would likely avoid the grain issue mentioned above.
Anne from Pikapi Podcast drops by to discuss the music of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time, Darkness, and Sky. This second set of games from the beloved side series features another boatload of tunes, which we try our best to cover, even if we couldn't possibly get to every song we wanted. That said, we do make sure to talk about the game's characters and story, which you’ll hear about in the game discussion after the outro:
Having previously used Stable Diffusion to create pictures of artists, I decided to take some lyrics from English Pokémon songs to see what kind of images they would generate. I asked Anne from Pikapi Podcast to see if she could guess the song and lyrics based on the pictures:
In memory of the recently departed singer, I decided to collect segments from a few recent interviews and discussions regarding "(Have Some) Fun With The Funk", his song that was featured on the Pokémon: The First Movie soundtrack. You'll hear from producer Paul Umbach, co-performer James "D-Train" Williams, and Anne of Pikapi Podcast:
For a song that wasn't officially tied to Secrets of the Jungle, "Wonderful" sure has a lot of parallels to the plot and characters of the movie. Watch as I do a quick rundown:
In this episode, Anne from Pikapi Podcast joins me to discuss the music of Pokémon Battle Revolution for the Wii. This follow-up to Genius Sonority’s GameCube titles has a number of venues with a diverse set of tunes, plus an announcer to boot. It may also have some shortcomings due to being released early in the system’s life. As usual, if you want to know what we thought of the game itself, there’s a bonus segment after the outro:
