HAS THE WORLD GONE MONSTER CRAZY?

I know there’s no such things as real monsters, but if they existed kids would be scared of them. Digimon aren’t that scary.

—Scott

When I first heard about Pokémon being “pocket monsters,” I thought that was really weird. Nobody ever heard of small monsters before. But they weren’t like the monsters in horror movies. They were a lot different. The same with Digimon, which means digital monsters. Monster means something else in these games. The monsters aren’t scary. They are more like weird creatures.

—Max

As anyone with way too much time on their hands knows, there’s a whole bunch of monster TV shows, video games … and trading cards out there. The thing that makes these monsters different from other monsters is that they’re almost always cute … I said almost always.

Well, back in my day, monsters were scary. Godzilla was scary. Mothra was scary. The Creature from the Black Lagoon was scary. And Frankenstein was really, really scary. Now the monsters aren’t so very scary anymore. Kids collect and trade monsters with Pokémon.

Plus, the monsters are a lot smaller. If you’ve ever seen a Godzilla movie—either the old or the new one, then you know just how big they used to be. Today, monsters are small enough to fit in your pocket!

Pokémon—pocket monsters—were probably the first monsters that a lot of kids discovered. Pokémon is great. It’s a great game and will probably get even better once the company introduces the Gold and Silver versions to the United States. But there are even more monster games, cards and shows out now for kids. Digimon and Monster Rancher are two others. And Tamagotchi (though not officially a monster) is still another one.

I think that all of these characters are pretty cool for a lot of different reasons. And, there’s a lot of different stuff out there for all of them. Video games and trading cards, cartoons, action figures and battle figures. I’ll talk about a lot of these in the book, though I won’t be talking too much about Pokémon. I pretty much said everything I have to say about Pokémon in the last two books. This book is going to be mostly about Digimon, Monster Rancher, Dragonball and Tamagotchis. I’ll throw some other stuff in, too. So read carefully. There will be a test on it next week.

Okay, so even though the note from my publisher wanted me to write about Digimon, I thought I’d write about all the other stuff out there, too. It’s not that Digimon isn’t a great game, but the other stuff is pretty great, too. So, here goes nothing.