One aspect of early pokemon in the USA that doesn't get remembered much is that Mew existing at all was debated, even with Mew being mentioned in the cinnabar mansion and Mewtwo existing at all, there were plenty of Mew deniers that claimed there were only 150 pokemon. Yeah Mew kind of appeared in the intro to the anime but it was surrounded in a shimmering light that made it difficult to actually see, some assumed it was just Mewtwo glowing with power or something.
Mew didn't appear in any episodes, and was not included in the pokerap, we didn't see any merchandise of it for a while, even things that included every pokemon excluded Mew, hell, pretty sure the official pokemon guidebook's second edition is only justified because they updated it with Mew and the few Gen 2 pokemon that appeared in the pokemon movie. Literally Mew was basically treated like a pokemon cryptid like Pikablue and Doomsay until promotions for Pokemon the First Movie started appearing.
And that's why Mew is the only pokemon that ever really felt truly mythical to me, it didn't have a cool story event to retrieve it like some of the later pokemon got ( not that it matters since most of those events were never widely available to most players ) but it's mythology is the only one that kind of spilled over into the real world, and you can never really re-capture that in the modern world where internet spoils all the mystery and mythic pokemon are unceremoniously dumped in your lap over wi-fi.
