Hot fuzz: why has the world gone mad over Pokémon Detective Pikachu?

The live-action film trailer has become an overnight sensation - thanks to a mix of unsettlement, nostalgia and Ryan Reynolds

This week, Warner Bros released the first trailer for Poki(C)mon: Detective Pikachu, a live-action Poki(C)mon film due for release in May. At the time of writing, the trailer has been viewed 10m times on the official YouTube channel alone, and tens of millions more via Facebook and Twitter. Vice declared the trailer "extremely cursed". It's been a top trend on all night, with hundreds of tweets a minute. So what is it about this trailer that has provoked such an intense reaction?

Poki(C)mon is a pretty sacred source of childhood nostalgia for most millennials - a lot of us think about it the same way that 45-year-old men think about Star Wars. Anything that taps into (or messes with) childhood memories has a tendency to reduce grown adults to filling comment boxes with emotionally charged reactions to the size of a fictional creature's paws.