When it comes to collecting Pokémon plush toys, a young Williams Lake woman hopes to catch ‘em all.
Carmen Williams, 24, has been collecting Pokémon toys and cards for 20 years. She hopes to continue finding more plush toys because while she has a few hundred, she knows there are more than 700 different ones out there.
“I like that they have powers, and that you can catch them and train them,” Carmen said.
Pikachu was the first plush toy Carmen owned.
“I believe I saw it at Zellers and asked mom if I could have it,” she said, noting since then she’s collected several Pikachus as well as the other characters, but Pikachu is still her favourite.
Whenever she saw a Value Village, she would make her mom take her there to see if they had any in stock.
“I also used to draw them and sometimes print characters off from the computer to colour them,” Carmen said, noting she has the Pokémon Moon video game, too, that she enjoys playing.
When the mobile phone game Pokémon Go launched in Canada last summer, Carmen was among dozens of local people trying to catch some of the characters in Williams Lake.
She said she focused most of her efforts on the ones located at the library.
Carmen has four other plush animals she always includes with her collection even though they are not Pokémon, she said.
They are her bunny rabbit Pink, dalmatian Pongo, grey cat Catsa and Tiger, who is just that, a tiger.
Carmen also works at Walmart part-time and when she’s not working she’s going on the Internet to resume her search.
“I just think they are adorable,” she said.