Abra and his evolutionary lines really make it clear that the evolutionary line has a heavily brains-over-brawn style going on for it, and Abra's sleep-18-hours-a-day deal is definitely well done. It's always asleep, it's always floating, and it only ever knows the move Teleport naturally, which makes catching it in-game hard because you have to throw the pokeball and capture it before it teleports away, something that made me go 'HOLY SHIT THAT IS SO COOL' when I first met an Abra in 1996. The yellow-and-brown colour scheme really makes them look cool, too.Ībra is a hilariously and awesomely designed Pokemon. Some people try to compare the line to foxes or goats, but it's really a tenuous comparison in my opinion, especially since all three end up having these armour-like design on their lower legs and their weird Dragon-Ball-esque armour. And really, I love just how nondescript the three of them looks. The manga doesn't make psychic-types as creepy as the anime did (surprisingly, because the early arcs of Adventures are pretty dark at times) but still, the sheer awesomeness of these unnatural-looking spindly humanoids are well-shown off. The anime has a huge three-part episode devoted to the main characters attempting to defeat the psychotic gym leader Sabrina and her insanely powerful Kadabra, and the anime really pulled all the stops to make Kadabra creepy, even moreso than the actual Pokemon based on ghosts. They embody two of the most common tropes of supposed psychic powers in real life, telekinesis (the ability to move objects with the mind) and teleportation (the ability to move instantaneously to another location). They do embody some neat tropes for the concept of psychics far better than any other future psychic-types, in my opinion. But most of all, how unnatural they look, while still also looking animalistic enough to really conceivably be some sort of highly-evolved mammal. Everything from their hilarious names based on funny magical spell words (the rejected English names for Abra and Kadabra are 'Hocus' and 'Pocus'), and I've always thought that they are better names than the Japanese ones, who chose to name Abra, Kadabra and Alakazam after real-world mystics Edgar Cayce, Uri Geller and Harry Houdini. I've always loved Abra, Kadabra and Alakazam. I think the shape of Kadabra and Alakazam being similar to an overturned star were even cited as one of the 'evidence' that these are low-key teaching kids to worship Satan? It's also perhaps one of the biggest points that some over-excited fundamentalists use to point out that 'OH POKEMON IS THE CHILD OF THE DEVIL' just as they do for every fantasy franchise aimed at kids like D&D before Pokemon and Harry Potter after it. It's definitely the game's original 'unnatural' or 'magical' type, far more ambiguous than the likes of elemental types like rock, fire, water, grass or ice. But Psychic was always something special in the original generation, by simply how weird it is. Ah, the Psychic-types! Back in the first generation, Psychic was perhaps one of the rarest types, beaten only by Dragon and Ghost, each only having a single evolutionary line among the original 151 Pokemon.
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