The turn of the millennium was a heady time. There was the Y2K bug and a change in American presidents to worry about, Creed was a legitimate force in pop culture, and, most importantly, those damn kids couldn’t stop talking about their damn Pokémon. Pokémania was spreading so quickly, in fact, that even Norm MacDonald—who’s never seemed one for cartoon monsters—took part in it on an episode of his old sitcom, The Norm Show.
If this seems unbelievable, watch the above clip, taken from the third episode of the show’s second season back in 1999, to see just how fully MacDonald commits to the scene. In it, MacDonald (who plays an amateur social worker) confronts a boy about how he spends all his time watching the Pokémon cartoon and running “around the city trying to capture these so-called creatures.”
The boy, dressed up in a full-on Ash Ketchum costume, soon gets into an argument with MacDonald, flips his ball cap backwards, and summons a Pikachu—which looks to be a big child or small adult decked out in an oversized plush suit. Though it seems too good to be true, MacDonald responds in kind.
“Surprise! For I, too, am a Pokey-mon trainer!” he says.