Why did it say in a Generation 3 episode that arbok evolved into seviper?

Question

Recently, I watched a Pokémon Advanced Challenge episode, which was in Generation 3. In these episodes, before going to a commercial break, you will be asked by ash's voice to see which of 3 Pokémon evolve into another Pokémon, and in this episode, it was which of the three, one of which was Arbok, evolved into Seviper. Now, know this that it might've been that they originally meant for Arbok to evolve into Seviper, but I don't know. Anyways, so when the episode came back after the commercial break, it said, "Trainers, if you chose Arbok, you were right!". Now, maybe it's the fact that they got it mixed up, but I believe they fixed it (so that they are no longer considered to be in the same evolutionary line) when they thought it might bring distress since Jessie used to have an Arbok, before sending it away to save a group of Ekans from poachers in an episode of Pokémon Advanced a while prior. I cannot really tell the episode number due to I think I deleted the recording. (I have dish network also, and they are in a disagreement with tuner network, which, long-story-short, led to me losing Boomerang, the channel I watched this on.) Along with this, I have no idea when or where they decided to get rid of the idea Arbok evolved into Seviper, considering now those two are no longer evolutionally related.

Answer 1

This is an error. Arbok and Seviper have never been related, this was just a mistake they made with the episode. The anime makes a lot of mistakes like this. So they never decided to "get rid of" the idea that Arbok evolved into Seviper, since they didn't even mean that in the first place. There isn't any evidence that suggests that Arbok was planned to evolve into Seviper either; their designs are different and they were introduced in two different generations, so I doubt they ever planned Arbok to have an evolution.

btw the episode was Advanced Generation #77 if you're curious.

Comments

Thanks, I was always confused on that, and I thought maybe it was an abandoned idea, since the Swinub line had mamoswine, the magby line had magmortar, the elekid line had electivire, the yanma line had yanmega, and those were added in Gen 4 even though the beginning of the line was mainly in Gen 2 and/or 3.

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Originally, they intended to code it like that in the Generation 3 games. They ended up removing that evolutionary link, but they did not correct the anime to match.