So I'd finally just obtained an actual copy of Knuckles' Chaotix and actually took the time to play it and you know what, I had an awesome time with it. I went in with the mindset it's not a traditional Sonic game and am enjoying it for what it is. The levels are samey in terms of game design but I'm discovering lots of little secrets and oddities in them that keep them interesting. It is possible to tear through the levels once I know what I'm doing (and abuse Mighty's wall jump). And the graphics and music absolutely rock. Great Special Stages, too. It's got that mid-90's charm to the max. Not a bad game at all.
I don't exactly know why, but when I see crowd scenes from forces or the IDW comics, where there is just a bunch of random NPC's filling the background, I almost never like the designs for them or think the scene itself looks very good. I think it's because the story the scene takes place in requires you to think "there is a bunch of random people here", but the designs are so specific that it feels more like a handful of dudes that just happened to be standing around, which ironically makes the scene feel more empty to me. IDK. But I think human characters would work best if you need to fill a space up with random nobodies, just because it's possible to make them look generic enough that you don't focus on them to much. I really like the human NPC's in sonic adventure for this reason.
I agree. Whenever I see people praise the Greg Martin box arts, I get so confused because they just look.... gross. The harsh spotlight on Greg Martin's sonic art straight up reminds me of the weird harsh lighting on AI generated images. A lot of american art and japanese art feels different to me. I think it's because, especially in the 90's, a lot of non-disney american artists just had this obsession with grossness. Like, a lot of artists would go out of their way to make their drawings look as weird and gross as possible. I'm thinking like Ren and Stimpy, and maybe like a Rick and Morty. And so many commercials at the time were about snot or slime or distended mouths or whatever. Sonic, and a lot of other classic anime designs, which were designed to look basically like a logo more than a character with lots of simple shapes, do not translate well to this kind of style. A lot of early american sonic art ignores things like keeping consistent proportions or perspective. On a related note, I really don't like the youtuber Meat Canyon and it is because the first four videos of his I saw in a row were "what if this cartoon/video game character was really ugly and also a rapist".
Amusing timing, just wanted to share a mockup I did of Greg Martin's work resembling the Japanese style. Just in case you ever wanted to see what this cover looks like in an alternate universe... I saw in the Rare Sonic Art thread the files for Sonic Genesis's promo art and decided to try something with those high-res assets. But yeah I'm really mixed on Greg Martin's work. I actually think his style is pretty nostalgic, since it reminds me a lot of VHS boxes of the era. It's pretty ugly, but also makes me feel warm and fuzzy? If he actually drew the characters on-model then I probably wouldn't have been so bothered by his work. Still doesn't hold a candle to the JP art though; I really wish they hadn't messed with it.
This is just what gets me too. The grossness. The way that everything is so exaggerated to get visceral reactions. I've never liked it and much prefer the cleaner, smoother style of the Japanese art. The various styles we've been getting in the 2D animations since 2017 are like 99.9% perfect. I just wish that they'd stop with the sausage mouths. I could also take or leave "messy hair" spikes tbh. I think they kind of throw off the silhouette.
I think that your idea of 90's cartoons is rather limited. I can think of more than a few shows from that era that don't exactly fit your description.
I know. It definitely was a trend. It's just that I've seen so many people think all cartoons during that time were like that.
I didnt want to get into this because it sounds kind of weeb-y, but I wonder if the particular grossness of 90's american media was reflective of the cultural attitudes at the time. Like it's just a visual representation of the south park obsession with irony and thinking it's cool not to care, end of history kind of stuff. My crack pot culture theory is that they made ugly cartoons because they didn't want to seem gay.
Sonic just had an unfortunate side effect of being released in 1991, when ugly and uncouth was becoming the new "cool" in America. Both Ren & Stimpy and Rugrats hit that year, The Simpsons launched the previous year(ish), and the big cartoon wave before that was TMNT and its subsequent knockoffs. Besides that, the gnarly counterculture of grunge and etc that sprouted on MTV exploded that same year. How else to compete against Nintendo's whole Disney-esque presentation than to be the grody looking alternative? Especially since that makes Mario look like a polite, old fuddy? It's the perfect storm! ...At least I'm sure that's what the marketing executives were thinking. I imagine Sonic could've survived perfectly fine without that angle. The games were the main attraction, and they featured almost none of what SoA was putting down. Kids's minds were being blown whether or not they saw the box art or the ads.
SoA wasn't taking a very grungy approach when Sonic 1 was out. That didn't really happen until around '93, I think. I highly doubt that the changes made to Sonic were a deliberate attempt to make the IP more grotesque.
I hate the "mohawk" spikes of American boxart Sonic with a burning passion. It's so off-putting, that his head is just this smooth ball with a single line of spikes down the back center, urghhh...
On the plus side, he was very easy to draw for kids. Shark fins, balls, sausages - the secret ingredients to drawing western Sonic.
Localization mangling IPs to cater to what a bunch of middle aged men in suits thought "western sensibilities" of kids were, that was just kinda the norm for games and anime back then, regardless of whether it actually did qualify as "cool" or "mature". Look what happened to Dragon Ball. It took itself so much more seriously but became embarrassingly juvenile in the process, even without the content edits. I think it's hard to even say the executives were trying to make Sonic "edgy" so much as they didn't know what the fuck they were doing, they just knew they were supposed to change it for some reason.
Finally an unpopular opinion I can get behind. I love Chaotix despite everyone apparently loathing the game lol. Glad you enjoyed your time with it. My particular favorite things to do is either rapidly reach escape velocity while wall-jumping as mighty or slingshotting myself into the stratosphere. Welcome to the Chaotix enjoyers club.
Giving Sonic 2d spikes on his head is probably, if somewhat subconsciously, trying to make sense of what they are compared to Micky Mouse or other cartoon animals. I don't think anything before was quite as 3d as Sonic could be, even if artists after that tried to push it back to something 3d.
I think it's very shortsighted to say stuff like this. It was never IP mangling so much as it was IP creating-- SEGA knew exactly what they were doing: talking to a different market altogether, knowing they had a product they were supposed to be responsible for, but couldn't trust the original, source material to deliver anything in time. They also knew they wanted to position themselves as more "hardcore" than Nintendo, so it wasn't just Sonic -- it was all part of a bigger strategy bringing sports games, unchecked violence, home arcade experience and beat 'em ups targeting slightly older gamers in an era that saw grunge rock music as its biggest cultural flagpole. Even the chaotic Tom Kalinske emails from a later date stress what their strategy was. So they had to create a new Sonic. Grimier, gritter, etc. And it very clearly worked, no matter how much our own sensibilities changed (it's been almost 35 years!). So, unpopular opinion-- American Sonic is uglier and I personally hate the style but they absolutely knew what they were doing when they did it.
I have no strong feelings towards the western depiction of Sonic. The most damning thing you can say about it is that was arguably the result of xenophobic business practices. And even then after decades we are far removed from that context and circumstances that lead to its creation. Everything else is just arguments about biases and personal taste. I hope it's not taken the wrong way, but taking issue with recent animated shorts having sausage mouth (or bean mouth some would say) is such a moot point to make to me. And I'm not someone who's crazy about 90's Japanese Sonic either, this is such a normie thing to say but I'm really not into most Japanese pop culture sensibilities showcased in most Anime, Manga, Games and other Japanese media. Hell I'm not even a Ghibli fan. I'm not a fan of American sensibilities either. So when people pine for a past era of Sonic media as their ideal it just goes over my head. Not saying I didn't like anything, but I never really got the passion some people have for certain things. I just have a hard time finding common ground with other fans I guess.
My first ever exposure to Sonic at the miniscule age of 4 was Sonic 2's cover art, and I can confirm with it definitely worked on me in creating an image of a character who was too cool to fool. (For context this was in 1995.) Nothing that came before even came close. From even just that artwork alone Sonic was bound into my being, lol. I would even try to pose just like him and make the same face as him. To this day I still find Greg Martin's artwork genuinely endearing, it isn't cute in the slightest but it's still charming to me. I've gladly collected those games with the motivation of admiring the cover art. Also starting after Sonic 3 but before Sonic & Knuckles he began to depict Sonic more akin to his original design, and I'd say he looked just right.
I mean, it's called a nitpick? A non-issue? Just casually mentioning a minor thing. This is where issues arise when talking about things such as design preferences. One person says "I prefer X" or "I don't like Y" and then someone else decides to weigh in saying how they don't care and how pointless the argument is to them. It's both dismissive, and makes out what the person said to be a far bigger deal than it was ever supposed to be. This is the unpopular opinions thread. What is it if not the place for biases and personal taste? Prefacing what you just said with "I hope it's not taken the wrong way" doesn't cut it this time.
