Pokémon anime coming to Netflix this weekend

While Twitch continues to play Pokémon, you can go back and watch Ash try to catch ’em all in the TV show.

Netflix and The Pokémon Company, a subsidiary of Nintendo, announced this morning that the animated adaptation of the pocket-monster franchise will hit the video company’s streaming service Saturday. That means Netflix digital subscribers in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Latin America, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries can watch select episodes from the long-running anime. This is the latest addition to Netflix’s growing library of content for children. The digital distributor is putting a greater emphasis on reaching kids.

Nintendo isn’t adding the full run of Pokémon to the Netflix’s library. Instead, viewers in all of the aforementioned territories will get the recent Pokémon: Black & White season as well as the films Pokémon the Movie: Black — Victini and Reshiram and Pokémon the Movie: White — Victini and Zekrom. Netflix members in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Ireland will also get the classic first season of the show known as Pokémon: Indigo League.

We’ve reached out to both companies to ask if they plan to add more films or seasons in the future. We’ll update with any new information.

The original Pokémon games, known by their subtitles Red and Blue, debuted in Japan in 1996. Nintendo followed up with an anime in partnership with production studio OLM, Inc., that it aired in Japan starting in April 1997. It debuted in the U.S. alongside the English release of the Red and Blue in 1998. The game, the show, and the collectible-card game all found a massive audience around the world.

Like the Nintendo RPGs, the anime is still in production, with a run of more than 800 episodes. The Cartoon Network currently airs new episodes in the U.S.

Pokémon most recently made headlines for the Twitch Plays Pokémon experiment. This is a livestreaming show on the broadcasting site Twitch that has thousands of gamers inputing text commands to control a single instance of the original Pokémon Red. The game is still running after more than two weeks, and “the collective” (as they call themselves) has beaten most of the game. They’ve also generated an interesting oral history and their own religions based on the RPG.