The other day, my wife asked me to watch a show on Netflix called Yo-Kai Watch. This concept originated as a Nintendo game and is a cartoon series running across the world, but in the United States, it’s on Disney XD.
You can buy the Yo-Kai Watch at stores that carry children’s toys, like Wal-Mart. It’s not really a watch. It’s a plastic wrist band that’s supposed to confer a special ability to the wearer. Someone bought my son one, and he brought it home, unbeknownst to us. He learned about the Yo-Kai Watch on Disney Channel commercials and from his friends at day care.
Yes. Disney. So it must be safe, right?
Well, for those who don’t know Japanese, Yo-Kai (also spelled yokai) are a class of spirit beings from Japanese folklore, including ghosts, demons, and monsters. For our purposes, a ghost is a disembodied human, a demon is a two-legged earth-bound evil spirit, and a monster is a four-legged earth-bound evil spirit.
A Yo-Kai Watch, then, would be a device to be able to watch demons… or to see spirits.
But surely, the children’s video game, toys, and Disney Channel television show aren’t really about gaining occult power to see and control demons, are they?
My wife noticed that our 6 year old son was watching the Yo-Kai Watch show on Netflix, and immediately realized this was basically a bold and basic lesson spiritualism from a pagan perspective. She thought it would be useful if we reviewed the pilot together, and this article is a general overview of the show.
This review involves 28 pictures, so I broke it up into 8 segments.
Here is the opening title sequence (later changed to remove the farting demon, but this one is on Netflix).
“Gera gera po” is the name of the song, and it translates as “giggle giggle” or”Ha ha haaa!” The jokes on you.
I had the closed captioning on, so you can really get the picture, so to speak, of the message in the cartoon.
It starts with a disclaimer.
I suppose the idea of selling demon-attacting Ouija boards as a wrist watch to children warrants a disclaimer.
In the opening title sequence, we see the premise. Demons are everywhere, and they influence people. Here, a one-eyed demon is impacting the tired business man, whereas the skeleton demon is doing something else. They are floating around, impacting real people all the time, and they are unseen… to most people.
Some spirits follow people around in school, making them depressed. Others make people have to run to the restroom, holding their crotch, apparently.
This review continues here.
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