It has always been a habit for children to exhibit and swap their card/sticker/toy collections with their friends in school. The premise of Pokemon -to collect and train pokemon - was the perfect fertile growing field to exploit this fascination children had with collecting things. The first exploit was the TV show, where the characters in the videogame were rendered onto the TV screen. When that became popular enough, the creators rendered the full 150 Pokemon into thousands of different incarnations. Pokemon T-shirts, teddybears, actionfigures, trading cards, stickers, watches etc were all created under the slogan: 'you've gotta catch 'em all'... Parents had a rotten time, that's for sure. And it was this capitalistic, persistent, and continuous explotation of the pokemon name which made the name synonymous with childrens toys. The pokemon legacy was ruined by this exploitation, and the videgame was largely discredited as a childrens fad. But before the TV show, the toys, the trading cards, etc..the game stood pure and unspoilt by the impending pokemon-craze which was about to accompany it. Everybody loved the game. Pokemon was revered.