The Fastest Show Alive

I can trace my childhood love of Sonic the Hedgehog back to a single moment.

I was sitting on the living room floor of my family’s home near the Quebec/New York border watching Saturday morning cartoons eating a bowl of Lucky Charms. The previous show (I can’t remember what it was) had just wrapped up and I was zoning out while I waited for the next one to begin. My idle thoughts were interrupted by the sudden echo of a sonic boom. My eyes shot back to the television where a blue figure emerged from a forest and sprinted across green plains to warn an idyllic city of a massive airship moving in to attack.

While all this was happening, the catchiest theme song I’ve ever heard was blasting from our television’s speakers. “Blue streak speeds by,” it began. “SONIC THE HEDGEHOG!” The song went on, describing at length how awesome Sonic was, how much attitude he had, and proclaiming loud and proud that he was “the fastest thing alive!” Before the show started I’d been slouching back, lazily looking for more marshmallows in my nearly empty bowl of Lucky Charms. By the time the opening had ended, however, the bowl was on the floor and I was leaning in toward the TV as though it had just revealed the secrets of life. In the space of barely 60 seconds, I was hooked.

In the months following, I became a complete Sonic addict. I watched the show every week. I collected the comics. My parents bought me clothes and toys. I’m pretty sure there was even a Sonic-themed birthday party at one point. I wanted everything Sonic I could get my hands on, including, of course, the video games. I was a hardcore Nintendo fanboy up until the time I got a PlayStation 2. That said, I probably would have traded every Nintendo game I owned back then for a Sega Genesis and a copy of Sonic 2.

In other words, I responded to the show exactly as Sega had, undoubtedly, been hoping kids like myself would when they invested in it. After all, Sonic the Hedgehog was, for the most part, a twenty minute (sans commercials) advertisement for the games. Just like Transformers and countless other cartoons before it, the show existed to introduce kids to the characters and world of the game and make them look like something you’d want to play in.

What made Sonic the Hedeghog unique was how deeply it expanded on the bare bones story from the games. While the early Sonic games did have narrative, they weren’t anything all that fleshed out. Robotnik creates an army of evil robots powered by imprisoned woodland creatures that Sonic has to free, and that was pretty much it. The TV show, however, took this limited foundation and crafted something far more complex and, at times, even epic. When the show began, Robotnik wasn’t trying to take over the world, he already had. Sonic was cast as a member of an outnumbered and outmatched resistance movement fighting to remove the tyrant and halt his destruction of the world’s environment.

Most of the show, in turn, followed Sonic and his allies as they waged full out guerilla warfare against Robotnik and his mechanized forces. While there was never a wasted opportunity for Sonic to make use of his intense speed, there were also slower segments focused on things like the cost of the conflict and the scars left by Robotnik’s conquest. At the center of this was the “roboticizer.” Basically a Saturday morning cartoon version of a firing squad, the roboticizer was a machine that had the ability to turn mortal flesh into mindless metal. In the games, when you destroyed one of Robotnik’s robotic soldiers, a little animal would pop out and run away. In the TV show, the animals themselves had been transformed, their minds trapped inside metal bodies and doomed to serve Robotnik.

It wasn’t quite death, but it was treated that way by the characters. Members of the main cast frequently alluded to friends and family who had been roboticized and lost. One of the principal freedom fighters was a bunny rabbit cyborg (three words that should be strung together more often) created when the roboticization process was prematurely interrupted. While she frequently benefited from the robotic limbs, it was also made clear that she had been at least somewhat traumatized by the transformation. It was some impressively dark stuff for a show aimed at children.

Which isn’t to say that the show was all doom and gloom. Although it definitely had a harder edge, the series balanced it out with a good-natured sense of humor derived primarily from Sonic himself. Snarky, sarcastic, and self-aggrandizing; he’s, in essence, the epitome of what 1990’s cartoons thought “attitude” should look like. The thing is, and I say this coming off a recent re-watch of the series on Netflix, it kind of works. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of shows from this era where characters like this were really irritating (here’s looking at you Link). The character of Sonic was written well enough that he never really comes off as annoying. The rapport he has with the other freedom fighters (especially his friend/love interest Princess Sally) feels genuine and, while he predominantly jokes, the show still manages to sell him as being a serious and dedicated insurgent. He’s a smarmy little bastard, but he’s a smarmy little bastard with nuance.

And that is probably what makes Sonic the Hedgehog so memorable to me and so many others. The creators actually took the effort to give it layers, nuance, and subtext. The late 80s and 90s produced more than a few video game-based cartoons, with many of them being complete and absolute crap. Watching Sonic the Hedgehog, even today, it looks and feels like something that someone actually sat down with and put real effort into. And it didn’t have to be that way. At the same time as Sonic the Hedgehog was airing, Sonic and DIC Entertainment produced a sister series: The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. Annoying, poorly animated, and practically without a plot, it was the complete opposite of the Saturday morning (retrospectively dubbed Sonic SatAM by fans) show that won me over so deeply. After investing time in playing a Sonic game, I can’t say if it’s an experience that will stick with me in the years to come. Sonic the cartoon though? It’s been more than two decades and I still catch myself humming its theme in the car.

Thanks to TESP for the extra images.

Next week I head to the final frontier and review Star Trek: The 25th Anniversary. In the mean time, feel free to PM me any comments, suggestions and requests that you might have!