Remember at the end of epesode 001, Ho-Oh flew over Ash. When there was only Kanto, what did you think of that? I was pretty freaked out for a minute.

They evidently planned ahead.

I thought the idea was so that there will never find all the pokemon, so we will never be able to "catch them all"

I think I thought something like 'man, that Rainbow Bird thing is both cool and freakin' ugly'

i had no freaken idea what that was i thought it was a fearow

I think it was some sort of *almost* forward-planning. In episode 2, Ash claims that the bird he saw was an Articuno - we now know that it wasn't. I think the creators only put that in in case a second generation didnt come about, but the base ideas must have been there from the start.

I thought it was really cool at the time, and even to this day like 10 years later I think it's cool how they do that. I'm not sure they intended to make it a Pokémon at the time, but it's still cool. At first I thought it was a Fearow, until I saw the episode a few times. It was referred to as "the rainbow phoenix" at my elementary school before it had a name.

And then they did something similar with Dawn and Mesprit. Nowhere near as dramatic...

I thought that it was a Fearow too, and I was really excited the first time I found a wild one in the game...

But yeah, its interesting that had planned ahead so early.

When Ash saw the Ho-oh, it made him stay ten forever, as the pokedex says that whoever sees it will be granted eternal happiness, and for ash to be happy forever he would have to be 10

It was pretty cool.
Thinking of watching them again here http://pokeblogz.blogspot.com