Hands Up, Drop the Pokemon

“Ya got trouble, my friend,” warned Professor Harold Hill in “The Music Man.” “Trouble right here in River City. . . . Big trouble. With a capital T! That rhymes with P! That stands for pool! “

Or in this case, Pokemon.

It is with a straight face that we report that the parents of five San Diego children filed a class-action lawsuit last week alleging that the makers of the wildly popular trading cards are setting their kids on the road to rack and ruin by encouraging them to, well, gamble.

For those past kindergarten, Pokemon, which means pocket monster in Japanese, is a card game cum video game cum television show cum phenomenon that has schoolchildren shelling out their hard-earned allowances for ever more cards and trading with their buddies. The Pokemon card game involves a host of imaginary creatures with names like Squirtle and Geodude, each with its own set of powers.

In essence, the complaint alleges that collecting trading cards is a form of illegal gambling because the odds of finding any one of the 150 different cards in any given package vary greatly. Therefore, the San Diego parents insist, Nintendo of America Inc. and two other defendants have violated no less than the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, designed to nab mobsters.

We’re pretty sure these parents were once kids themselves. They might have even once coveted baseball cards with the same singular fierceness. Or POGs, the once-popular bottle cap game pieces. Those with longer memories might even recall what one would do for, say, a cat’s-eye marble.

As Harold Hill might have observed, we’re talking frivolous lawsuit with a capital F.