How I Caught Your Mother

How I Caught Your Mother
Creators	Mugiwara Yoshi ThornBrain
Starring	Mugiwara Yoshi ThornBrain LillyLivers BigTUnit1 Shadow JigglyJacob
Written By	ThornBrain Mugiwara Yoshi BigTUnit1 (Script can be read here)
Link	YouTube

How I Caught Your Mother is an abridged one-shot of Pokemon Origins episode 2, created by ThornBrain and Mugiwara Yoshi and developed by TheMidnightFrogs. It was created for Team Four Star's June 2016 #TIBA contest and to celebrate TheMidnightFrogs' channel reaching 10,000 subscribers. While it was originally intended to be the first episode in a four-part miniseries, the idea fell through when TheMidnightFrogs went into indefinite hiatus.

The episode ultimately reached the top 10 at #7 in the contest.

Summary

The video follows young Pokemon trainer Red as he recalls the beginning of his journey to become a Pokemon master. As an orphan bumming around Lavender Town, Red gets adopted by a family of incredibly broken people. He gets tasked with bringing his new mother's father home from the graveyard tower, which has been overtaken by Team Rocket and a vengeful ghost. The credits song is "Come and Catch Your Love".

Crew

• ThornBrain - Co-creator, Writer, Editor, Voice director
• Mugiwara Yoshi - Co-creator, Writer
• BigTUnit1 - Writer

Cast (In Order of Appearance)

• Red: Mugiwara Yoshi
• Mom: Shadow
• Grandpa: ThornBrain
• Blue Rocket Grunt: BigTUnit1
• Green Rocket Grunt: BigTUnit1
• Purple Rocket Sam: JigglyJacob
• Spurdu the Cubone: LillyLivers
• Marowak: BigTUnit1
• Widow: Thorn
• Green: Thorn
• Tower woman: Lilly

Other voices

• Robbed old man: Jacob
• Nurse "Joy": Lilly
• Unknown Growlithe Hater: Thorn
• Jim: Yoshi
• Brother: Thorn
• Sister 1: Lilly
• Sister 2: Lilly
• Dan: BigTUnit1
• Rattata: Yoshi

Music Used

Pokemon

• "Ecruteak City" - TV Anime OST Best 1997-2010 - Intro
• "Best Wishes TV BGM M04" - "Best Wishes!" and "Fanfare of the Heart" - Red comes across Mom's house
• "Avant 2010" - Zoroark: Master of Illusions - Red counts himself in
• "Eye Contact! Rocket Gang" - TV Anime OST Best 1997-2010 - Team Rocket chases Cubone
• "Tears of Life" - Pokemon: The First Movie - Cubone grieves
• "Fight! Trainer (Johto) - TV Anime OST Best 1997-2010 - Bandits disturbing the grave site
• "Team Rocket's Secret" - Pokemon Anime Sound Collection - Red, Green and Team Rocket in the tower
• "Gym Leader Battle" - Pokemon X & Y (Game) - Marowak's ghost appears
• "Hesitating to Go on an Adventure with Youth" - Pokemon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea - Cubone and Marowak reunited
• "To Be Continued" - Pokemon Anime Sound Collection - Resolution back at the house
• "Avant 2008" - Giratina and the Sky's Bouquet - Red rides his bike out of Lavender Town

Other

• "Tar" - Scott Walker - Bisch Bosch - Mom turns
• "Come and Catch Your Love" (Redbone parody) - TheMidnightFrogs - Credits

Development Notes

Yoshi and Thorn planned to abridge Pokemon Origins as early as its release in October 2013. Despite saying that they would at multiple points on TheMidnightFrogs Podcast starting with Podcast 33, "Sonic!", Yoshi and Travis's heavy work and school schedules prevented anything from forming for years. In June 2016, abridging group Team Four Star, best known for Dragonball Z Abridged and for being a collective of the most well-known abridgers, announced an abridging contest, the Tenkaichi Ironman Budokai Abridgathon, that would last until the end of the month. Thorn was interested in making a video for TIBA, and he thought it was a good excuse to finally abridge Origins; Yoshi was on board as long as they went with Origins, and Travis had previously mentioned a desire to abridge a Pokemon video (he wasn't available to work on PMDA: Fire Red Version). Thorn also wanted to take the opportunity to make the video as a 10,000 YouTube subscriber special.

Origins' abridging was originally planned as a one-shot of all the episodes combined until the contest announcement, wherein the rules stated that the video had to be under 10 minutes, and Origins is an hour-and-a-half in total length. Thorn, Yoshi and Travis's brainstorming for the special was so fruitful that Thorn decided to abridge each individual episode on its own, and they would submit the first episode to the contest and abridge the rest later. This plan fell through as the team went into hiatus by 2017, but the first intended episode was completed.

Yoshi, Thorn and Travis watched the full Origins special and brainstormed on June 7. Thorn settled on Episode 2 of Origins as the episode focus, due to the full-length special's hour-and-a-half length, the Lavender Town episode having the best jokes they thought of during brainstorming, and Thorn's idea of Red not initially starting out as a Pokemon trainer but being inspired to become one by the events in Lavender Town.

Yoshi and Thorn wrote the majority of the script on the 13th, and Thorn and Travis finished the script on the 15th. Thorn wrote a short section with JigglyJacob on the 11th, but nothing from this session made it to the final script.

Recording began on the 18th and concluded on the 25th. Editing lasted from the 24th to the 28th, with last minute changes added on the 29th. The video was then submitted to Team Four Star later that day before finally being uploaded to YouTube on the 30th.

Post-Credits

More of Cubone and Marowak's rant is heard.

Joke References and Explanations

SPOILER WARNING
The following has numerous spoilers for the episode. It is recommended that you watch the episode before reading any further.

• The opening narration is Red giving a sob story to the nurse so that she will give him Pokemon. This, combined with Red's visible lack of grief over losing his father when he steals the bike and the unlikelyhood of him surviving getting hit by a train, suggests that none of it really happened.
• Red has inexplicable powers:
  • If the intro narration is true, he survived getting hit by a train with no injuries.
  • He produces a slice of pizza from the back of his throat.
  • He blasts the Rocket Grunts with energy from his hand a'la Dragonball Z.
• Mom says that Dan's Rattata ate his kids. At the end of the episode, Dan can be heard strangling Rattata and demanding it give them back.
• Cubone's name, Spurdu, was Thorn misremembering what bit of gibberish he had named one of his sheep in Story of Seasons, (Splapu).
• The Team Rocket Grunts are repeatedly shown to be ineffectual at being evil:
  • Green Grunt has such low energy that Cubone running slowly is still too fast for him.
  • They never kill Marowak, instead all getting caught in an explosion from a nearby Voltorb.
  • Although they push the widower down the steps of the tower, he repeatedly runs back up unharmed.
  • They end up sitting around during the entire tower scene. Blue Grunt has to remind Green Grunt that they have work to do long after Green has stolen their goggles.
• When Green is introduced, he repeatedly misremembers his name as Blue, a joke at the dubbed version of Origins changing his name from Green to Blue.
• The woman in the graveyard tower sings to Red. Later Rocket Grunt Sam gets angry at Blue Grunt for singing because Sam's parents died at an opera, and Green Grunt says they might be able to use their goggles to see his parents' ghosts, all hinting that the woman is Sam's mother.
  • The lyrics to the song the woman sings is parodied from "V is for Vampire" by Powerman 5000. The melody was ad-libbed by Lilly.
• Blue Grunt sings Meowth's catchphrase, "Meowth! That's right!" from the Team Rocket Motto in the main Pokemon anime.
• Green whispers "Gotta catch 'em all", the Pokemon anime tagline, into Red's ear.
• Cubone runs out of the house singing "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister.
• Red thinks he shot a "Pikablu", which was the fan term for Marill when it was leaked prior to the release of Generation 2. Marowak screaming "It's not real!" is a joke at the people who believed that it could be glitched into the Generation 1 games.

Reception

The video passed 600 likes in its first week, reaching 609 likes and 5 dislikes by June 6. As of July 31, 2016, a month after its upload, the video had 2606 likes, and as of August 14 it has 3052 likes, far surpassing Sgt Frog Abridged - Episode 1 as their most liked video. Many viewers considered it one of their favorite #TIBA entries, and the video made it to the second spot in YouTube's search page for "TIBA" and fourth in the search for "#TIBA".

The video ultimately placed at #7 in the contest.

Additional Trivia

• The title of the video came from an off-hand comment by Yoshi during brainstorming, when Travis mistakenly thought that Red was going to try to capture Marowak. Thorn liked it as a title, though it didn't have any connection to How I Met Your Mother until Yoshi described how every episode of the sitcom starts with a narration.
• The "V is for Vampire" parody line was originally written by Jacob during the brainstorming for The Sgt Frog Abridged Movie.