Chinpokomon first appeared in South Park in 1999, when the show satirised the Pokemon craze with its own line of fictional pocket monsters and a toy-driven fad sweeping the town. The joke worked because it mirrored the real collecting frenzy of the late 1990s, and the name stuck with fans long after the episode aired. Short clips from the parody now circulate as meme audio, giving editors a compact way to reference creature-collecting games, childhood nostalgia and South Park itself in a single beat.