How Amada’s 1997 Venomoth Sticker Blended Pokemon with Battle Stats

Amada Pokemon Sticker No.252 — Venomoth (1997)

A Sticker Designed Around Battle

This sticker comes from an officially licensed Pokemon series produced by Amada around 1997. What sets it apart from a basic character portrait is the card-game layout framing the artwork: a level designation (LV.43), two stat values (110 and 207), a weakness multiplier (×2), and a pair of small icons representing Venomoth’s types. The skull icon most likely references Poison typing; the smiley-face icon may indicate Bug — though Amada’s icon system has not been fully documented in any official source, so that reading is informed rather than definitive. The No.252 printed in the upper right is Amada’s own series number, not Venomoth’s Pokedex entry (which is 49), and it appears alongside a small Pikachu silhouette used as a franchise mark across the set. The bottom of the sticker carries Japanese text for “Pocket Monsters” and Venomoth’s Japanese name, Morufon.

Venomoth in the First Year of the Pokemon Anime

Venomoth is the 49th entry in the original Pokedex — a dual Poison- and Bug-type moth Pokemon that evolves from Venonat at level 31. It was part of the original 151 Pokemon introduced in the Game Boy RPG “Pocket Monsters Red and Green,” which launched in Japan on February 27, 1996. When the anime series, produced by OLM Animation and broadcast as “Pocket Monsters,” began airing on April 1, 1997, it created an enormous secondary market for licensed merchandise almost immediately.

This sticker was made during that first broadcast year. The 1997 date and the anime-era logo printed at the bottom confirm it. Venomoth appeared in the first season and was used in Pokemon League battle sequences, giving it solid recognition among fans from that original generation. The sticker’s battle-stat format reflects the energy of that moment: a period when Game Boy cartridges, anime episodes, and the Pokemon Trading Card Game — launched in Japan in October 1996 — were all feeding the same excitement at once.

Amada and the Roots of Japan’s Sticker Culture

Amada — formally Amada Insatsu Seiban Co., Ltd. — was one of Japan’s most active character sticker manufacturers throughout the 1990s. The company held official licenses for properties including Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk, and Digimon, distributing through convenience stores, candy shops, and stationery retailers. For a generation of Japanese children, collecting Amada stickers was a fixture of daily life: pick up a pack, compare with friends, trade duplicates.

That tradition traces back to the Bikkuriman sticker craze of the 1980s, when small collectible character stickers became a phenomenon in their own right — items meant to be held, shown, and discussed rather than simply pasted down. For collectors outside Japan, stickers like this one carry a specific appeal: they were produced exclusively for the Japanese domestic market, carry Japanese text, and predate Pokemon’s arrival in North America in 1998. That makes them tangibly different from any licensed merchandise that appeared in the West during the same period, and recognizable in collector communities as genuine products of the franchise’s earliest years.