Lights, Camerupt, Action! – Pokémon Season 7, Episode 46

Filler / stand-alone episodeTravelling cinemaManga cameo

Lights, Camerupt, Action! is the 46th episode of Pokémon: Advanced Challenge, the seventh season of the Pokémon anime, and the 359th episode of the English dub overall (Japanese episode 362, Bulbapedia code AG086). It first aired in Japan on 22 July 2004 and in the United States on 16 July 2005. It falls within the season’s To Lilycove: Aerial Ace & the Lilycove Ribbon stretch (EP86–EP92).

The last new episode before the summer break: no new episodes aired from 23 July to 13 August 2005.

Synopsis · Major Events · Trivia · Dub Changes · All episodes

Synopsis

Fresh from winning the Feather Badge, Ash is ready for his seventh Gym battle, and Brock’s guidebook reveals that the next Gym is in Mossdeep City, reached by ferry from Lilycove City. On the road the group help a man named Elijah free his Camerupt, which is stuck at a river crossing. Elijah explains that Camerupt carries the equipment for his travelling cinema, which brings films to towns that have none, and since they are heading the same way, the group travel with him. Team Rocket, trailing Ash as usual, spot the projector from above, and Meowth decides that Camerupt and the movie gear would make a fine gift for Giovanni. At the next river they spring a pit trap and grab Camerupt, but Corphish frees it and blasts the thieves away with Bubble Beam.

A boulder blocks a narrow mountain path, so the group camp for the night. Over dinner Elijah admits that his work is dangerous and unpaid, but he feels a duty to his audiences, and he shows them a letter from Mariah, a girl in a town with no cinema, that keeps him going. The friends swap memories of films they saw before their journeys: Ash remembers a trip to the cinema with Gary, his mother and Professor Oak; Brock recalls a Western he watched with his siblings; May describes a romance between a Natu and a Xatu aboard a doomed luxury spaceship; and Max recalls a giant Meowth battling Pichu fighter pilots and a giant Marshtomp. Elijah offers to narrate the new Plusle and Minun film, which is silent, and the next morning the group reach Mariah’s town to a warm welcome.

That night the screening begins, with Elijah narrating a slapstick tale in which Plusle and Minun rescue a Kirlia princess kidnapped by an Exploud. Then Team Rocket burst out from behind the screen. Jessie’s Seviper fills the square with Haze, and the trio make off with the projector. While Brock and Lombre keep the crowd entertained with Brock’s one song, sung over and over, Ash, May, Max and Elijah follow a trail of dropped film to the thieves, and Grovyle blasts them away. With the projector recovered, the show resumes to the relief of the audience and an exhausted Brock, and even Team Rocket sneak back to watch from the bushes. One of the films recalled in the episode stars a boy called Red and his greedy Clefairy, the only time characters from the Pokémon Pocket Monsters manga appear in the anime.

Major Events

• The group learn that the seventh Gym is in Mossdeep City, reached by ferry from Lilycove City
• Elijah’s Camerupt-drawn travelling cinema
• Red and Clefairy from the Pokémon Pocket Monsters manga appear in a film-within-the-film
• First Japanese episode after Destiny Deoxys
• Armaldo’s TV debut

Pokémon making their anime debut

• Armaldo#0348 · AG086

Trivia

• The English title plays on "lights, camera, action!".
• The screenplay is by Yukiyoshi Ōhashi.
• This is a stand-alone episode: it can be skipped without losing the thread of the Hoenn story.

Changes in the English Dub

• The Poké Ball emblem on Ash’s Badge case redrawn
• The manga’s Clefairy given a female voice
• Pokémon Trainer’s Choice (dub only, in place of Who’s That Pokémon?): which Pokémon evolves into Sandslash? Answer: Sandshrew
• A cue from Celebi: Voice of the Forest used in Japan

Part of our Pokémon: Advanced Challenge guide. Browse every season of the Pokémon anime.