I've talk about Pokemon before (in the context of biodiversity), but here's an interesting bit about how it sideline hundreds of kids, who happened to have watched an episode where the aggressive animation manage to mess with heads.
Here's how it panned out:
Anyway, the short version is that the animation in that particular episode led to somthing called "Photosensitive Epilepsy." The long version (i.e. a pdf of the first page of the scientific publication) can be found today at the SCQ.
If you're really dying to see the offending scene, you can actually check it out here.
Sorry to burst ye bubble, but some American cartoons/shows are way ahead of you on this thing about cheap-ass Japanese cartoons causing seizures. In an episode of Simpsons, at the turn of this decade, they were in a hotel room watching "Fighting Seizure robots" which caused their pupils to dilate and gave them seizures, rolling around on the floor.
Actually if you read the whole abstract only a "miniscule fraction" of the kids were diagnosed with photosensitive epilepsy.. the rest likely had our old pal, mass hysteria promoted by fit-inducing media reports.
Yes, which plays again to the "mass media" point brought up in the previous post. Crazy media...