Iron Trainers?

I grew up with Pokémon. I grew up with Food Network. And I also grew up with Iron Chef, something else that is distinctively Japanese and became popular just about the same time that the first Pokémon games were released; the show only grew in greater popularity thanks to it being shown on Food Network and later on spawning its American adaptation. The premise of the show is that one challenger chef goes up against a resident master chef, dubbed appropriately the Iron Chef. It is in effect a battle, and a battle such as this speaks to my inner Pokémon fan. It makes me want to cross the concepts and have this realized somehow, as "Iron Trainers", something I hinted about in the previous post.

Now, I wanted to save this post so that I could realize that Pokémon-Iron Chef cross in writing, but that would take a long time, and that is not something I necessarily have. However, today is also the regional premiere of Iron Chef Gauntlet, so I might as well take this time to discuss this strange connection and flesh out ideas for it. This brings up an interesting point, in that the format of Iron Chef changes according to the adaptation and over time. With this in mind, so too could the format in this cross be different than what would be expected. Perhaps it could be a best-of-three to be in line with some current battles, or it could be one supreme battle to continue the original tradition. Regardless, either one would have to involve "featured" Pokémon to battle with as per the essence of Iron Chef.

As for the Iron Trainers, I know of one particularly suited for that role, and that is none other than Ash. I still think that despite what has happened, he is really, really great in his own right, and so he fully deserves it. Of course, Ash can't be the only Iron Trainer, the same way as there is no single Iron Chef; there have to be others that accompany him. To that, I say who better to accompany him than some of his companions and rivals from his journeys (that aren't already popular as Gym Leaders). They are all pretty great characters that could hold the position of Iron Trainers and serve battles with challengers.

That last bit is probably where most of the difficulty lies in realizing the cross, which is in finding and naming challengers for the Iron Trainers. Sure, it is easy to have previous acquaintances battle the Iron Trainers again, but it would also be exciting to have unique challengers as characters from different Pokémon games. It just means determining who would be challengers and what kind of battles they would have. If this were an actual Pokémon game, then the players would be the challengers, though they could also battle as the challenger characters and certainly the Iron Trainers. There are a lot of possibilities for this one.

I know, it seems like I've been watching Iron Chef a bit much that I start to fantasize about this cross. But I do like the concept of Iron Chef a lot and that I really think it could be applied to Pokémon; they both center around "battles", after all. Plus, they are both Japanese in origin and popular in their own right, almost like buddy fandoms. It's a cross that is totally natural and fascinating to make happen in one form or another. I can almost visualize the results and the battles.