Nintendo is a pop-culture powerhouse. They’ve been the undisputed kings of video-gaming for almost 40 years, and their properties have been adapted into movies, TV shows, card games – you name it. One territory that the home of Mario and Zelda should never venture into again, however, is music.
For starters, Nintendo are responsible for a Legend Of Zelda rap that cursed Japanese television in the ’80s. But that’s a story for another day. In 2001, the company teamed up with a British nu metal band called 50.Grind, letting them release a song called Gotta Catch ’Em All to promote the Pokémon anime – and it’s terrible.
The music video (seen below) shows the band performing in a warehouse, with clips of the TV show randomly screened behind them. It starts off… passably, with your standard turn-of-the-millennium rock riff whirling away, but abruptly leaps off a cliff when it samples Pikachu yelling its own name. After some incredibly of-the-time turntable scratches, frontman Nick Atkinson cuts in with a rap: “Let’s snatch a batch and get down to the nitty-gritty. I’m fully armed, got my Pokéballs ready to go, and for a fact I’ve got Pika-Pika-Pikachu!”
Bloody hell.
The remaining two-and-half minutes aren’t surprising. Long story short, they mesh edgeless Limp Bizkit imitations with lame samples and lyrics so pathetic that to believe an adult wrote them is to feel your hope for our species die a bit.
“Yup, this is as bad as I remembered,” a comment underneath one of the versions uploaded to YouTube reads – and the faux-tough-guy marketing clearly didn’t stick, as Gotta Catch ’Em All only reached number 57 in the UK charts. That’s despite a children’s TV performance to promote the song, as well as a CD single being included with one day’s edition of national newspaper The Daily Express.
Two decades down the line, the stories of how this actually occurred and what happened to 50.Grind have been lost to time. The band didn’t do anything else to our knowledge, but singer Atkinson later joined a pop-rock group called Rooster, whose self-titled debut album reached number 3 in the UK. Bet he didn’t go shouting about his past CV in interviews…
