Lickitung and the GB Mini Cards From Japan’s Pokemon Boom

Lickitung Pocket Monster GB Mini Card No. 108

A Character Card From the First Pokemon Generation

This is not part of the Pokemon Trading Card Game. The Pocket Monsters GB Mini Card is a small, roughly square collector’s card produced for display and collection rather than gameplay — no HP values, no attack statistics. The “GB” in the name almost certainly refers to the original Game Boy, connecting this item to the software that launched the Pokemon franchise in Japan in February 1996. The number 108, printed in a red-bordered white box in the card’s upper right corner, corresponds directly to Lickitung’s National Pokedex number, confirming that the series was organized to mirror the original 151 Pokemon in sequence — a structure built to encourage collectors to find every entry from No. 001 onward.

The copyright line on the card reads “© Nintendo·CR·GF·TX·SP·JK.” Those initials represent Nintendo, Creatures (CR), Game Freak (GF), and TV Tokyo (TX), the broadcaster that began airing the Pokemon anime in April 1997. Because TX appears in the credit, this card was manufactured after the anime launched, placing it within the first major wave of Pokemon merchandise that reached Japanese stores from roughly 1997 onward. SP and JK in the credit most likely refer to additional licensing partners such as ShoPro, though the exact identities of those abbreviations remain a matter of some debate among collectors.

Lickitung — No. 108 of the Original 151

Lickitung is a Normal-type Pokemon from the first generation, present in the original Red and Green from the start. The design is built around one exaggerated feature: a pink, round body paired with a tongue far longer than the creature itself. The Japanese name, Beroringa, is derived directly from that tongue, and the English name Lickitung continues the theme.

In the games, Lickitung was a catchable but non-central Pokemon. The anime shifted that somewhat: Jessie of Team Rocket owned a Lickitung for a stretch of the early series before accidentally trading it away for a Wobbuffet in one of the show’s better-remembered comedic episodes. That storyline gave Lickitung a lasting presence in early Pokemon fandom. Its evolution, Lickilicky, was not introduced until Generation II with Gold and Silver; at the time this card was produced, Lickitung stood on its own with no evolved form.

Small Cards, Big Collections, and Japan’s Late-1990s Pokemon Market

In late-1990s Japan, numbered small-format character cards like this one were woven into the everyday retail landscape. They appeared as vending-machine cards — most famously through Bandai’s Carddas dispensers — in candy and gum packs, and as standalone collector items in toy shops and dagashiya, the small-item variety stores that were a fixture of Japanese childhood. The numbered structure was deliberate: aligning each card with a Pokedex entry created a built-in collecting goal that the format continues to satisfy decades later.

The precise manufacturer behind the GB Mini Card line has not been confirmed — multiple companies held simultaneous Pokemon licenses during this period, including Bandai, Tomy, and others. What the copyright notice does confirm is that this is an officially licensed Nintendo product, made in Japan during the original anime era. For collectors focused on first-generation material, the early copyright format — with its distinctive broadcaster and licensing credits — serves as a reliable marker of a product from that initial boom period, distinguishing it from later reissues and retrospective releases.