I had been anticipating the release of the movie Detective Pikachu ever since it was revealed. In the past, I never was able to watch any of the Pokemon movies in the theater due to the fact that I was too young when they originally came out to theaters, and the rest of the movies up until "I Choose You!" were only released on DVD. Yes I know, that one movie with Victini and Zekrom technically was released in theaters, but that movie was only in theaters for an extremely short period of time and only came to theaters in the States. But the reason I am writing this is because I just have to tell someone about it. It was the freakiest thing I have ever witnessed happen in a movie theater to date.

The kids laughed at the trailer for The Secret Life of Pets 2. Me and many other people who were around my age laughed out loud when the trailer for the Sonic The Hedgehog movie played because Sonic looked so bad. Also due to the fact that it was playing before a movie starring Pikachu which made me think of Sonichu. I loved the song that played during the trailer for the live action Aladdin remake.

After the Cineplex Feature Presentation played, something that we definitely weren't expecting to see in a movie like this popped up on the screen. It was white text on a black background that said the following: "The following program includes content which some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised." This stayed on the screen for around 7 seconds. My (and probably everybody else's) first thought was they were mistakenly playing another movie instead of Detective Pikachu. It had happened once before when I went to go see Monster's University and they mistakenly played World War Z instead. Although I've never seen a movie that had a content warning like that show up. I thought it was something that only showed up on TV. I also thought that the same thing that happened to me when watching Monster's University was occuring and that it would be quickly fixed like back then. Boy was I wrong there...

It just went to a shot of Mario walking around on the same cliff that appears in the original World of Light story mode intro in Super Smash Bros Ultimate. A bunch of children in the audience behind me happily exclaimed "Mario!" The mood quickly changed however, as a couple seconds later there was a flash of light and a loud “boom.” Next, there was a scene of all the characters turning into skeletons as we hear their screams. It reminded me a lot of the attack scene in “The Day After.” In fact, now that I think about it more, the whole scene seemed to be a parody (if you can even call it that) of that scene from The Day After. There was one scene where we see a character (I think it was Villager) running around on fire but this only showed for about a second before the camera was engolved in flames. Nothing graphic or anything was seen but it was still very upsetting to see. It then started showing a compilation of real-life nuclear bombs going off. It started panning across what was normally seen. All you could hear was the wind, fires burning and occasionally a scream or moan. When it went past some ruined buildings you could see skeletons and shadows on the some of the rocks. It faded to black for about 5 seconds.

It then cut to a cartoon. It was that 1950s “Duck and Cover” one, but the voice actor for Detective Pikachu (you know, Ryan Ryenolds.) starts talking over the cartoon in place of the usual deep voiced Narrator. Next it went to a dark room. Outside a broken window you could see the fires burning. Then the sound of sobbing came. The camera moved and Mario was in Luigi’s arms, obviously dead. Luigi sobbed maybe a minute and then started hysterically bawling. Mercifully, it didn’t last long. During this scene all of the parents rushed their understandably distraught kids out of the theater, which left only about 15-27 people (including me) in the auditorium. All adults.

Next was another cartoon – this time a crudely drawn unidentified city. An animated missile flew over and detonated. There were scenes of the city destroyed – including cars turning over, overpasses being crushed, etc –  like the attack scene in the British 1980s nuclear war cartoon “When the Wind Blows.” This faded out and it returned to an unknown building underneath the cliff – the fires had mostly burned out, but now fallout was falling from the sky. The camera panned down through a basement and a room below. Apparently the building had a fallout shelter. In the room were some shelves, a table with a battery operated lantern giving off light with several chairs aound. Sitting around the table were Kirby, King Dedede, and Meta Knight. They had a combined look of shock, fear, sadness and confusion. None made a sound. Meta Knight was reading a “Protect and Survive” booklet. I swear this scene lasted more than 5 minutes with no sound. It finally faded out.

Next was back up on the cliff. Sonic was lying on the ground moaning and asking for Pikachu. This was really ironic considering the Sonic movie trailer had just played a few minutes before this nightmare was happening. This was bad. Some of his spikes were burned while others had fallen out. Pikachu never showed up and this scene was mercifully short.

The last scene was back in the bunker. Kirby went to a shelf and turned on a radio. Nothing but static. Kirby switched the radio off and let out a sad "Poyo…" King Dedede is then seen walking up to Kirby and silently comforts him as the camera slowly zooms out. As the scene fades to black, white text appears on the black screen. “There is hope in any unresolved and unpredictable situation. But is there a real hope to be found in the silence?”

The credits for the short then rolled by quickly– like when a movie is playing on TV and the credits are sped up to fit the timeslot. The music that was playing during the credits was Mr Boombastic by Shaggy, although it was the shorter version from that Barnyard movie that came out a long time ago. What I noticed was that it sounded like Parappa The Rapper was singing it. I don't know if they were trying to be funny by playing that song or what. A few people who remained in the audience laughed at this but it was more nervous laughter than anything else.

As for the actual Detective Pikachu movie itself, everything played as it should have. I tried my best to enjoy the movie and tried to forget about that horrific short that played before. After about 30 minutes into the movie, I finally was able to forget about it for a little while and enjoyed the rest of the film. Although I later learned after looking up the soundtrack that the music that played during the credits was wrong and had seemingly been replaced.  What should have been the Red & Blue theme instead was replaced by the song "Finale" by Madeon, most well known as being the main theme for the game PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale and being a track in FIFA 13. When the song ended, the credits rolled silently. The songs "Carry On" and "Electricity" were absent. I also later looked up the lyrics to Finale, and they fit the tone of the horrible short film that I saw.

Several days past after the incident at the theater. I was going to search for Smash Bros Ultimate videos on YouTube when an article popped up on my News Feed in Google Chrome. Apparently, a theater in Montreal was showing a screening of Detective Pikachu but trailers for horror movies like Joker and the new Child's Play played before the movie, which obviously terrified the kids who wanted to watch a fun Pokemon movie and not some disturbing fucked up horror film.

Reading that news article made me even more convinced that other showings of Detective Pikachu might have been tampered with as well. Whoever did this must have been involved with the theater business and decided to edit a few copies of the Detective Pikachu movie as some sick joke. That's what I think anyway...