So Gaku Hoshikawa Plays Pog?

I remembered seeing Fiveman episode 33 dubbed in Tagalog back in the 90s. It was also back in that day when I played Pog and a lot of my Pog sets got confiscated by the teachers. A lot of Pogs were confiscated because they were study hazards. Sure, nothing wrong with owning Pogs but a school is a school, right? I think Gaku Hoshikawa would still confiscate them if he were my teacher. Anyway, let's move on to the episode shall we? 

This episode was full of laughs. Aside from Garoa's really huge colossal failure of incompletely combining both Galactic Beasts back to back it also featured the brains vs. brawn episode. The monster has tremendous strength and it could have ripped the whole world apart in that episode. Gaku finds his Menko cards as a child and decides to use them against this bizarre creature. The monster gets too obsessed with Menko since it's obsessed with flipping things. So how could the monster not budge a Menko card is beyond me but it was funny how it got too obsessed with playing Menko.

Let's take a bit of historical references that may prove POG actually came from Japan.  Here's what I found concerning the game card called Menko from the Robert Jazz Mystery Box:

This piece was originally published April 20th, 2009 Menko is two things: first, a card game that has been played by kids in Japan since Japan’s Edo period (1603 to 1868 a.k.a. the pre modern isolationist Shogunate era of Japan, usually the period where most bad ass Samurai films take place) and is surprisingly still around today, and second, the name for the actual cards themselves. Menko as a game is similar to marbles and with much respect to this actual game, which is ingrained in a multitude of Japanese childhood memories to this day, you probably won’t be playing Menko anytime soon, nor will I, but oh boy, a piece of cardboard with a colorful printed image on one side has rarely been as visually appealing and fun as the glorious Menko. The Menko card reflects Japan’s cultural history, pop history and team sports history. Being a close relative to the trading card, or even a Pokemon card, kids have collected them, traded them and probably sneaked a few into their pockets at the corner store…uhh, forgetting to pay at the register.

The Menko game involves slamming your cards down, so a card is usually made from a thick piece of paper or more commonly, cardboard. Prior to the 1930’s use of mass produced printing processes such as offset, Menkos might had been made using clay, woodblock and other hand printing on paper methods.

The plan was working like a charm. The monster could no longer fully use their destructive capability because both sides of the same beast got too obsessed with Menko. I really laughed at how it failed to do the task because both sides of the same monster got too obsessed with the game. Added bonus is Garoa's lack of proper planning led to his eventual dismissal. 

What are your thoughts on this episode?