Butch: The Team Rocket Agent Whose Name Nobody Remembers

His most stubborn gag comes down to one botched syllable. Butch shows up in the original series, in the episode titled "The Breeding Center Secret," as a Team Rocket agent paired with Cassidy. Some ten appearances later, he has mostly been the character the writers love to misname — before they give him an exit that almost no antagonist in the series ever gets.

Contents

• The mangled name, the character's signature gag
• Butch and Cassidy, a duo built as a mirror image
• About ten returns spread across the whole series
• The seaside bakery, a very rare retirement
• Butch at a glance
• Frequently Asked Questions

The mangled name, the character's signature gag

Butch may work for an organized crime syndicate, yet he is one of the most consistently mocked characters in the series. The setup never changes: nobody ever says his name right. Biff, Buffy, Hutch — the variant changes, the mistake keeps coming back.

He takes it very badly, and that's exactly what keeps the gag alive: the correction he demands every single time has become his signature line. An antagonist whose only real victory would be getting people to say his name correctly.

The Japanese version uses the same mechanism. There the character is called Kosaburō, and the people he deals with invariably rename him Kosanji. So the gag isn't a dubbing invention but part of the original writing, carried over from one language to the other.

Butch and Cassidy, a duo built as a mirror image

The pair carries its origin in its name: Butch and Cassidy point to the outlaw Butch Cassidy. The nod sets the tone — two professional thieves, presented as more serious agents than the trio they keep running into.

The promise never holds. The character keeps his status as a villain, but every one of their operations ends exactly like those of Jessie and James: in a rout and a blast-off into the sky. The supposedly competent duo shares the fate of the comic one.

The grudges, however, aren't symmetrical. Cassidy hates Jessie, while no comparable animosity pits Butch against James — an imbalance that leaves Butch as the follower in his own pair, dragged along by his partner's feuds. The organization that employs them is covered in detail in our feature on Team Rocket.

🚀 The black uniforms have their own section: see the collection Team Rocket.

About ten returns spread across the whole series

Butch isn't a character with an arc but a face the series brings back from time to time, about ten times in all. After his debut at the breeding center, he returns in episodes such as "Pikachu Re-Volts," "The Fortune Hunters" and the three-parter "The Mystery Is History," "A Parent Trapped!" and "A Promise Is a Promise."

His returns then grow sparser over the following sagas — "The Scheme Team," "The Ole' Berate and Switch!," "Sleight of Sand!" — all the way to "The Good, The Bad, and The Lucky!" in the Journeys saga. Few secondary antagonists cross so many generations of episodes without ever stepping into the spotlight.

Above all, the duo holds a special place in the specials gathered under the title Pokémon Chronicles, appearing in seven of them, from "Showdown at the Oak Corral" to "The Search for the Legend." That's where Butch and Cassidy most often play the main antagonists, notably around the kidnapping of Professor Oak.

The seaside bakery, a very rare retirement

The Journeys saga closes the file in an unexpected way: the two agents have quit, tired of the organization's routine, then gone their separate ways. The duo built to last breaks up off screen.

Butch then settles by the ocean and opens his own bakery. The Pokémon thief becomes a craftsman, and along the way he adopts a female Meowth that is now the only Pokémon he has left, after the Primeape, Hitmontop, Mightyena, Cloyster and Shuckle, whose fate the series never reveals.

The epilogue goes through his former rivals. He welcomes Jessie, Meowth and Wobbuffet into his shop and gives them something to eat; to pay off their debt, the three start working in the bakery. Meowth grows fond of this danger-free life and falls for the bakery's own Meowth, to the point of wanting to stay — until he finds out she's already close to a Persian from the next village.

Butch at a glance

Frequently Asked Questions

• Why does nobody ever say Butch's name correctly?
  It's his running gag. People call him Biff, Buffy or something else, and he can't stand it. The Japanese version does the same, turning Kosaburō into Kosanji.
• Where do the names Butch and Cassidy come from?
  From the outlaw Butch Cassidy. The duo is named after a real-life bandit, which underlines their status as professional thieves.
• Are Butch and Cassidy Jessie and James's rivals?
  Partly. Cassidy hates Jessie, but there's no equivalent animosity between Butch and James. The two duos do, however, fail in exactly the same way.
• What happens to Butch at the end of the series?
  He leaves Team Rocket with Cassidy, tired of the organization's daily grind, then parts ways with her. He then opens a bakery by the ocean.
• Which Pokémon does Butch have?
  Only one remains: the female Meowth he took in after opening his bakery. The series gave him several others without ever saying what became of them — Primeape, Hitmontop, Mightyena, Cloyster, Shuckle.

In short

Butch is a curious case in the series' gallery of antagonists: a character entirely defined by a joke about his name, who came back about ten times without ever rising above a supporting role. Yet his exit is one of the cleanest the anime grants a Team Rocket member — a resignation, a shop by the water, and a Pokémon obtained some other way than by stealing it.