Ongoing Project that will always need to be reupdated because of Masters/ other things
Attempting to make a chart of the gen 1 trio designs and variants for drawing reference by using things like official artwork/merchandise, mangas, and in game sprites. Some anecdotes on this:
I never noticed that Red's Gen 1 hat design has variants of the button thing until looking at all of them on Bulbapedia and seeing ones that weren't just the leaf.
In the Pocket Monsters manga, Fire Red is considered a separate character from Red (Isamu Akai). It's a gag manga though, so it's not serious.
Ash/Satoshi and Ritchie/Hiroshi shouldn't really be on the chart since one's design changes so much and the other wasn't seen for years but they did start off as Red variants.
Gen 1 rival has had the most consistent designs not counting his hair color changing and his hair in the RGB sprites, which gets corrected in yellow.
The Unused Gen 1 girl design and Leaf have the least amount of variants currently.
I probably missed a design because I kept finding more Red hat variations the longer I looked on Bulbapedia
so I had to stop myself and post the current design chart before I ended up with a hat chart.
New edit:
trying to put this one girl in chronological order was a terrible idea because manga Blue outdates Leaf but wears her outfit but LGPE Blue outdates Masters Leaf
so I was like "dude no one is gonna care about that aside from you" but if masters makes Blue and Leaf the same then I'm going to look like a clown.
Some Image Sources (Most I pulled were from Bulbapedia, these are for extras):
This is still a pretty solid chart of the Gen 1 stuff but I’m probably still missing some though.
The red hat thing is fascinating to me because I found a piece of concept art for the anime which featured Ash wearing one of Red’s hats with the leaf badge attached.
I think they’re supposed to be representative of which game was picked, or it’s that Red just has multiple hats with the same exact decoration thing slightly altered on each one.
Source on the Ash artwork:
Pokeamice
Today in my quest to make a reference chart for all the designs of the Kanto trio: this piece of artwork from Ken Sugimori featuring Red and Blastoise. At this rate I might need to make a separate chart just for the amount of hat variants I’ve seen on Red.
Blastoise Image Source (but I have no clue where this poster found this drawing): Twitter, El_Aleph87
Mini Updates:
Added the Back of Gen 1 Red's Jacket having a Pokeball Insignia, Ash doesn't. Does FRLG Red have the insignia? Can't tell, bag's in the way, same for LGPE Red.
Winter Leaf has an extra piece of art by Sugimori.
Origins gives a very boring answer to the insignia thing of “there’s nothing behind there, actually.”
Pokespe’s design for red with his FRLG fit has the same answer presumably.
I don’t know if Masters Red could potentially have it on his back in his suit costume because I don’t have him.
Did the FRLG Red's hair design thing but the pureref quality compressed things to shit so it probably looks bad. Kinda abused the color picker to grab what I thought looked close enough.
It's kind of more gray than I thought there would be. Also, the weird FRLG one where his eyes are BLUE? They settled for like, a brownish black in the end.
The badge thing has been figured out and I feel like it's such a simple answer that I feel dumb for not thinking about this before speedreading Zensho. Once again, Pureref has compleetely jacked the quality.
It actually provides a reason for the changing badge designs and it works like a scout patch badge
like literal scouts awards like the iron on sticker patches
so. he just puts it on his hat
the answer of "why does the badge keep changing on his hat" was "he keeps changing the badge"
I may be stupid (-_-;)・・・
Here's Rival's badges. He's kind of mostly been shown with the Rainbow badge. (Also, TIL that the badge names in JPN are based on colors.)
Concept Art Capmon Style
Those characters that exist in the fringes of Gen 1 the capsule Mon concept art girl and boy.
Bonus: The Source Code Leak showed the girl character being a thing at some point in gen 1's development but it's a complete mystery as to why she was scrapped because there's never been a full explanation (probably because gen 1 as a whole runs on some kind of wizardry of duct tape to be a functional game). Credits to French Orange for the reconstructed sprites.
Also, bonus, but the guy at Sliph Co who gives the player a Lapras was originally intended to be the player character's dad. Weird, right? That explains where he was when you check that one NES game that says "dad would like this!"
Unused Girl (Capmon edition)
Player's Father
(So I found out how to remove PureRef’s border thing but only after I finished … FML.)
I can't think of anything else new to possibly add to this unless there's some gamefreak postcards I'm missing or some rare piece
of official merchandise/artwork because I don't think fanart by official artists should count.
Reds hat in this game is a magikarp coin like the rest of the elite four (as noted by their different designs from the usual player recolor for comparison).
I literally cleared magikarp jump in the span of a month from my old account (only being four gyms in) grinding daily just so I could get a screenshot of red’s hat.
I guess I should make a hat chart for Ash but not alt costumes
because I'm not doing every single episode of the pokemon anime just to see if the hat slightly changes. I think he won his first one in a contest episode and fought Primeape for it.
I know mark and mint technically aren't a Red or Gen 1 girl but they're kind of in between variants since they came in between the time frame of Gen 1 and 2 and they still match the colors so?????
Pocket monsters is probably one of the weirdest long running things within pokemon media because it got to Galar. Everyone has probably seen the freaks of nature already. It clips so far from the realms of canon and probably shouldn’t even be on this page. Anyways, here’s Blue (she’s called Blue here) with a Charmander as her pokemon and two Reds coexisting.
Smash Bros Section
Made a protagonist expansion as well:
Design Chart: Regional Expansion
They don't get as many design variants the longer generations go on, like the only one that still consistently gives out variants is
Pokemon Masters but once you get to custom protagonists it's pretty much a wrap because they can really look like anything.