Pokemon is a massive global franchise with a huge fan base. You can be sure that a lot of people are going to be quite excited to see the first live-action adaptation of the franchise Detective Pikachu, when it arrives in theaters on Friday.
People are so excited that they might be tempted to view a pirated version of the film that seemed to hit YouTube recently. Luckily, Ryan Reynolds himself tracked down the illegal file and made the powers that be aware of it. Of course, in doing so he also drew attention to it. I wonder if that was on purpose?
The file is titled Pokemon Detective Pikachu full picture and if you look at it, as I did only for research purposes, you see that it's an hour and 42 minutes long, which makes it long enough to be a feature film.
As you begin to view it you get the opening logos of Warner Bros. and the other companies involved in producing the film as well as a scene that includes Justice Smith which certainly looks to be from the finished film. Everything looks legit, (well, not legit) and in remarkably good quality.
The most interesting thing might be the R. Reynolds watermark in the corner, which would seem to be indicating that this was the actor's copy of the movie that somehow got out.
Of course, we know, there's a punchline coming and if you watch past about the one minute and nine second mark, you see what it is. Pikachu jazzercising, for an hour and 40 minutes. Check it out.
For the record, as somebody who has already seen Detective Pikachu, legally, the brief bit of the actual movie you get isn't even the actual opening scene, but it is from the movie.
My favorite bit has to be the distortion that's been added to the video to make it look like Pikachu dancing is actually from an old VHS tape from the 1980s.
This is pretty much prime Ryan Reynolds. Whether he's promoting a Deadpool movie or a Pikachu movie, he's clearly having a lot of fun with it/ Of course, since Pikachu's voice never appears, it doesn't seem Reynolds had all that much to do with actually creating this video, so praise also goes to the digital artists who created it.
While the dance moves get repeated, there's no obvious looping of the video, which just makes everything here that much more impressive. Some significant work went into a video of making Pikachu dance for over an hour and a half. I have no idea why this exists, but I sort of love that it does.
It's more than a little mesmerizing and the digital music is also hypnotic. Is anybody else watching more of this video than is probably healthy?
While movie piracy is certainly an issue, and Detective Pikachu will probably be no different, most serious fans are probably going to want to check this one out on the big screen anyway.
Detective Pikachu hits theaters Friday.
