In 1997 Takara Tomy released a life-size Pikachu plush toy in Japan and shipped about 450,000 of them. The anime had made Pikachu the face of Pokémon, and it has stayed the face ever since: on the side of aeroplanes, in museums, on coffee cups.
Ask Pokémon fans who their favourite is, though, and Pikachu rarely wins. The answers spread across hundreds of creatures, many of them introduced long after 1997. That gap, between the character the world recognises and the characters fans actually love, is how Pokémon’s cast works, and it goes a long way to explaining why a thirty-year-old franchise has not aged with its star.
The face
When TPC faces the general public, it puts Pikachu in front. Every programme TPC runs itself that its brand sheets list with a named creature, from the Pikachu Jet to its J.League matches, names Pikachu. The 30th Celebration card set puts one of 30 Pikachu cards in every pack.
Partners lead with it less often than its fame suggests. Of 13 partner deals we have read, 7 name a particular creature. All of those include Pikachu, but most put it beside others, from Eevee at the Van Gogh Museum to Charizard at Build-A-Bear; the rest show many creatures or none by name. LEGO’s August 2026 wave puts Pikachu in 1 of its 15 sets. When a single creature is chosen, it is often for fit. TPC’s own series of articles on its tie-ups names a creature in only two of its 14 titles, Ditto and Miraidon, and none names Pikachu. TPC’s licensing staff chose Ditto for a stretchy silicone cup, a cosmetics maker matched Vaporeon and Mew to its products, and Toyota’s engineers asked to build a rideable Miraidon. None of the licensing pages and brand sheets read from TPC and its Western arm names a lead character or one that must appear, though a rule could still sit in private contracts.
Pikachu’s job is recognition. It is the one Pokémon character the surveys show a general public knows: two-thirds of Britons can name it from a picture, a third of Baby Boomers. Whether any other creature comes close, no general-population survey has asked; Japan’s long-running character survey tests the franchise name, with Pikachu as its example, not the creatures. So it is the way in for a parent, a tourist or a public body, and the only creature the evidence lets us call that.
Japan shows the limit of that fame. In Nippon Research Center’s national survey, which shows people names rather than pictures, “Pokémon” is known by 80%, more than any other game name, but it ranks 27th of 89 among the characters asked about, well behind Doraemon and Sazae-san at 96%. It is also a generational name: almost all young men know it, fewer than half of men in their seventies.
Japan’s best-known game name, not its best-known character
Share of people aged 15–79 who know each name, October 2018.
Show the numbers
| Character | Know the name, % | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Sazae-san | ||
| Doraemon | ||
| Pokémon | ||
| Super Mario Bros. | ||
| Tamagotchi | ||
| Dragon Quest | ||
| LINE characters | ||
| Final Fantasy | ||
| Animal Crossing |
Know the name. Nippon Research Center’s national character survey: 1,200 people aged 15–79, sampled to match Japan’s population, shown names only. The 2019 and 2020 lists name the entry “Pokémon (Pikachu etc.)”, so Pikachu is the example cue. Pokémon ranked 27th of 89 characters; Sazae-san and Doraemon are anime and manga characters, the rest game names.
Everyone’s own favourite
Fans see it differently. TPC has run two big official fan votes. In Japan in 2016, Pikachu came fourth. In the global vote of 2020 it came nineteenth. Both were won by Greninja, a creature from 2013, with 6.4% of the vote and then just 2.1%. In 2020 the whole top ten took only about 12%.
No favourite dominates
Shares of the 2020 global fan vote.
- Top ten
- Pikachu
The winner took barely two votes in a hundred. The rest spread across hundreds of creatures.
Built from .Show the numbers
| Rank | Top ten, % of votes | Pikachu, % of votes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Greninja | – | ||
| 2. Lucario | – | ||
| 3. Mimikyu | – | ||
| 4. Charizard | – | ||
| 5. Umbreon | – | ||
| 6. Sylveon | – | ||
| 7. Garchomp | – | ||
| 8. Rayquaza | – | ||
| 9. Gardevoir | – | ||
| 10. Gengar | – | ||
| 19. Pikachu | – |
Top ten. Votes for each Pokémon divided by the 6,608,215 votes cast in the Google-run worldwide vote, 5–14 February 2020. The top ten together took 12.3%. Ranks 11 to 18 are not shown.
Pikachu. Pikachu finished 19th. The 2016 vote in Japan had a different electorate and is not comparable.
No creature commands the fan base. Each fan has their own, and every new generation adds more to choose from. A franchise with one star ages with that star. A franchise whose fans are spread across hundreds of favourites keeps renewing itself, because each new generation of players can find characters of their own.
Who is number one depends on who you ask
Pikachu’s place in three rankings, where one is best. The hollow dot is a vendor estimate.
Collectors grade more Pikachu cards than any other. Fans, asked directly, voted for Greninja.
Built from and .Where the money follows
Collectors show where attachment turns into money, and they follow both the face and the favourites. By count, Pikachu and Charizard are graded in almost equal numbers, about 2.5m and 2.3m cards over all time, on a vendor’s estimate. By price, Charizard wins. At one auction in 2026 a perfect first-edition Charizard sold for 6.9× the Blastoise from the same set.
The newer favourites have their own premiums. Umbreon, one of Eevee’s evolutions, is the modern trophy: in Prismatic Evolutions, a set built on “Eevee and its eight Evolutions”, its top card sells for about 7× the average of its peers, and the set’s Pikachu ranks below four of the Eeveelutions. TPC’s own shops follow the tail as well: at Halloween 2026 “Gengar dominates the clothing lineup”. And LEGO’s second wave pits Umbreon against Garchomp and Charizard against Jolteon.
Trainers come and go
The human characters work differently. Each generation brings a new region with new trainers, and some become stars for a while. In Japan, Nanjamo (Iono in English), Paldea’s streamer gym leader, had cards priced at 5.0–8.1× the creature cards in her set, and TPC built a launch around her. But her premium belonged to her moment. One dealer now pays 91% less for her top card than at launch.
A trainer’s moment
What one dealer pays to buy the top Nanjamo card from Clay Burst, in yen, estimate.
A star at launch, a fraction of the price today.
Built from .Show the numbers
| Date | Card Rush buying price, Clay Burst Nanjamo SAR, ¥ | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Launch, 2023 | ||
| 5 Aug 2026 | ||
| 1 Nov 2026 |
Card Rush buying price, Clay Burst Nanjamo SAR. One dealer’s buying prices only, an estimate. The launch figure is the dealer’s own “launch-day” label. No readings exist between 2023 and July 2026, so these are three separate readings, not a trend line. Down 90.9% from launch, and 37.5% since 5 August 2026.
The creatures are what Pokémon keeps. On the US trademark register, Nintendo holds many records for creature names, Pikachu alone among them many times over, and none for the thirteen trainer names checked. TPC’s brand sheet licenses creatures, not people.
Creatures are registered, trainers are not
US trademark records for each name, checked 1 November 2026.
- Creature names, records held by Nintendo
- Trainer names, records held by any Pokémon company
The names Pokémon protects are its creatures’ names.
Built from .Show the numbers
| Name | Creature names, records held by Nintendo, records | Trainer names, records held by any Pokémon company, records | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pikachu | – | ||
| Eevee | – | ||
| Charizard | – | ||
| 13 trainer names | – |
Creature names, records held by Nintendo. US Patent and Trademark Office search, 1 November 2026: 27 records for the three names in all.
Trainer names, records held by any Pokémon company. Ash Ketchum, Ketchum, Liko, Iono, Roy, Oak, Team Rocket, Lillie, Marnie, Cynthia, Nanjamo, Friede and Satoshi, each searched against Nintendo, Pokémon, Creatures and Game Freak as owner. Other owners hold records for some of the same words (Lillie 93, Cynthia 234), so the zero is for Pokémon-group owners only. US only; Japan is unresolved.
After Ash
That design was tested in 2023, when Pokémon retired the hero of its anime. Ash had led the show for twenty-six years. His last episode in Japan aired in March 2023, and a new series with two new leads, Liko and Roy, began 21 days later. Pikachu stayed, as Captain Pikachu, so that it would “remain an icon for the brand”, and the companies behind the show did not change.
The hero changed, the icon stayed
Key dates from the anime’s official pages.
Ash left in 2023. Pikachu, its voice and the companies behind the show stayed.
Built from .The logic, as we read it, is the same as the games’: a child who starts watching today gets a guide of their own era, not one their parents grew up with. TPC’s Western arm said as much: the change gives “more world and more characters to explore”, and what became of Ash is left “up to our fans’ imagination”. Pikachu bridges the two: familiar to parents, present for their children.
Whether it worked is not yet clear. The early signs are steady rather than striking. On one vendor’s count, the new series drew about 13 million Netflix views in 2024, against about 19 million for the older Pokémon series. In TV Tokyo’s ranking of its anime titles by sales, Pokémon has held fourth place in every year since the change. One survey of children points the same way. In Video Research’s Kids/ex panel of Tokyo-area children aged three to twelve, answered by their parents, Captain Pikachu, the new series’ Pikachu, was the 3rd most liked of 177 characters in 2025, liked by 57.2%.
Liking is not the same as first choice, and on that measure Pokémon’s hold on children had already weakened before Ash left. In Bandai’s yearly national survey of parents, Pokémon fell from 3rd to 8th among children’s favourite characters in 2014, the year Yo-kai Watch arrived. Boys aged six to eight, who had put Pokémon first every year from 2006 to 2013, put it second behind Yo-kai Watch. Pokémon recovered to fourth in 2017 as Yo-kai Watch faded, then fell out of the top ten in 2018, the last year Bandai asked. No comparable survey since has asked children for a single favourite, so whether the post-Ash generation attaches as earlier ones did cannot yet be seen.
Japan’s children ranked Pokémon 2nd or 3rd for most years to 2013. After Yo-kai Watch, not once up to 2018
Pokémon’s rank as children’s favourite character in Bandai’s yearly national survey of parents, 2003 to 2018, where one is the favourite. Bandai published no survey after 2018.
Pokémon sat just behind the leaders for a decade. From 2014, the year Yo-kai Watch arrived, it never placed higher than fourth.
Built from , and .What it adds up to
Pokémon’s cast is built so that no single character carries it. Pikachu is the face TPC shows the wider public, and the only creature a general public has been shown to recognise, though partners more often cast several creatures, or the one that fits the product. Once inside, fans attach to favourites of their own, spread so widely that the top ten together draw only an eighth of the vote, and every generation adds more. Trainers come and go with their regions; the creatures stay, and they are what the company protects and licenses. The retirement of Ash was the boldest test of that design: replacing the show’s hero to give a new generation guides of their own, while keeping Pikachu as the bridge.