Well you didn't take it the wrong way, you just took an issue with my opinion. My unpopular opinion is that I'm apathetic towards a lot of sensibilities in the fandom. Or maybe you thought I'm trying to shut down the discussion? I'm not, or at least that's not what I'm trying to do.
"It worked" is a pretty difficult claim to make when we don't have any control to judge whether just staying true to SoJ's style. And even if it could, we're talking about the art, which...just doesn't really communicate that. I don't see how the hog looking oiled up and wrinkly really says "hardcore". The words they use are one thing, but half of all US game boxart just looks like that. It's not cohesive (not to mention consistent) enough for me to say they had a complete picture of what they wanted
Let's take a deep breath for a minute. Think about all the amazing things we've learned about Sonic's creation process. Doesn't it feel kinda cool having come in touch with these artists at such a young age? As long as you keep your eyes on the main attraction—the games—there's not much to hate here, boxart wise. OK, sure, the mohawk maybe. But I can't blame them. Sonic's in-game sprite sometimes made it look like he has one. Speaking of it: Sonic's in-game sprite was upgraded, but the artwork wasn't updated accordingly. (Except for that one time @Zigetch mentioned.) Definitely something that struck me as odd back then.
The SOJ style may well have worked in America. However, the American localisation clearly was a success in its own right seeing how Sonic was hugely popular in the 1990s in America (and Europe). While also not being very popular in Japan! I feel like the arguments being presented in this thread are a bit elitist. I'm not a fan of the SoA style either. But you are clearly going too far when you say it was middle aged men in suits who had no idea what they were doing. They in fact clearly knew what they were doing seeing as they helped create one of the most successful entertainment brands of all time. You can dislike it from a quality angle - I'm not a fan either - but to call it clueless is just delusional nonsense.
I sort of feel by mid-late '94 either SOA or Martin himself knew he was being depicted more and more with a fuller quill appearance in-game rather than what could be perceived as an actual mohawk (as you noted, indeed it appeared to look almost mohawk-like in the earliest games) and there wasn't much point in trying to depict him otherwise anymore. Shame that era of artwork closed off by '96 though, I like that fusion of the two styles quite a bit and would've liked seeing more of it. Hey, at least it's barely on the back of S&K's box.
It's hard for me to justify the US art style changes as if they only had sprites and in-development assets to go off. Some people in the pipeline may have only had that, but I heavily doubt no one knew what Sonic, Tails, Eggman etc were supposed to look like. Especially when many staff that worked on Sonic 1 came to the United States during Sonic 2 and 3's development. Not to mention that Europe got the JP Sonic 1 designs on its' cover, and I've definitely seen the JP art crop up in old US/UK magazine scans. It was all very deliberate and I think the marketing team knew what they were doing.. or at least were trying to use what they knew on the brand. But I genuinely don't think it would've been any more effective than just sticking to the JP designs. It was always the games themselves that sold the brand: the gameplay, the imaginative worlds, the catchy music, the tech demo Special Stages, all of the things the game provided. I'm sure the commercial pitting it against Super Mario World, demo kiosks, magazine reviews and playground word-of-mouth rumblings are how Sonic really got around, as that's how most of the big games got their legs in the pre-Internet days. I doubt any kid was going to turn away from Sonic if he or the other characters looked more like the games in their ads and covers. We'd be giving the games way too little credit! IMO SoA's revisions to the series always felt more like a mix of two things. On one end, arbitrary changes were a means to justify why SoA (and many other American branches of Japanese game companies) had a localization department: you hired artists and designers and a marketing team and they need jobs to get paid. Alright. But why even hire them (at least for this project)? That leads to the other end, where I always took these kind of decisions as an internal politics powerplay. When you repackage a product (and the surrounding supplementary material), it becomes reeeaally easy to take credit for the success. ESPECIALLY since its selling gangbusters in your neck of the woods while not so much in the home territory. Now with that newly attained power and credit, you have leverage to argue why you're fit to have greater control over the flagship brand, or maybe even the company's business decisions as a whole if its successful enough... which would sound conspiratorial of me, if not for that being a large part of what happened with SoA. But I digress.
I don't think it's an outlandish claim at all, really. Sonic filled a niche that it didn't in Japan, and it would've done that if they kept the unaltered branding too. It might have done it better, since it would've stood out more from all the other game ads trying a similar style, but I also think it's kind of reductive to the quality of the games themselves to attribute so much to the ways in which the marketing differed from Japan. And frankly, the fact that it also sucked shouldn't be discounted! I didn't bring up the Dragon Ball Z comparison lightly, because that series has it's own sect of people saying "like it or not, Bruce Falconer's droning synth music was what made DBZ successful in the US!", with no evidence of that whatsoever. I don't see how we're differentiating that tone-deaf localization with this one. Unless you actually agree with the thing about the terrible dub score I guess, but I hope you don't.
Nah, you are indeed going too far with your hatred of western Sonic. AoSTH was a huge success, despite being created by "middle aged men in suits". Meanwhile, SoJ's first attempt at making a Sonic anime series crashed and burned and its remains were cobbled together as the Sonic OVA. Perhaps SoJ should have listened to those middle aged Americans. Looking back, the early 90s were a different world, and AoSTH is a perfect fit for that zeitgeist.
That's not really what I'm talking about, I don't have a "hatred of western Sonic". I was talking about the overall brand direction, the localization of the games and the 2kool4skool attitude of the marketing. That has nothing to do with whether individual entries under that branding could be good or bad.
It's sort of puzzling, the idea that Hayao Nakayama and the boys were any less middle-aged and wore less suits when they approached SEGA of America and said, "hello dipshits, we have this new mascot we made, and it's going to be our silver bullet in your market. Also it's entirely your responsibility if it all goes wrong". So imagine hearing all this from voices atop the high horse of a 15% market share at home -- and never hearing back from them even as you actively call them. All very reassuring signs that a) they'll be cooperative b) they know your market better than you. So you gotta be different, somehow, and they made a whole brand out of it -- uglier Robotnik, mohawk and all. The idea that Sonic would have been better positioned as something different from all the grime and punk attitude that was around gets it backwards too. The account by Nick Alexander at SEGA Europe shows that the whole idea that SEGA was the stylish, punkish, the maverick and thus more prone to depict gross or generally unpleasant, boyish imagery was also a very conscious effort. No, games didn't sell themselves-- there was a whole strategy behind it. Sonic wasn't born in that environment to distinguish itself from it: Sonic made it what it was, at least in part, alongside the rest of SEGA. Whether it's ugly or not is orthogonal to it. So anyway, the approach by SoA, and also by SoE, isn't the only one that could've worked. There might be a world where using Japanese designs and ads could've gotten ther same results they got. But I'm skeptical, and every argument for it has been backward, taking for granted what that very approach established and managed, through success, to make saturated.
It kinda feels like you're putting words in my mouth here, or possibly Azoo's mouth. For my part I don't think the series' general lackluster performance in its home territory is evident of any one factor regarding its marketing, be it responsible for its failure there or for the changes innately creating its success here. The Mega Drive itself was the worst-performing of its generation in Japan, and we're certainly not laying all that at the foot of Sonic, are we? The point is, all I really meant is that the overall attempt at creating their version of the series here doesn't feel cohesive, and gives off an air of desperation that the products they actually sold managed to avoid while still looking effortlessly cool. Just because it being successful coincided with them doing that doesn't mean they had to do it.
My points were not to try to undermine the efforts of Milton Knight, Ben Hurst etc when making the Sonic cartoons, nor was it to worship any men in suits from Japan. Rather I'm looking at the people who made the games (the artists, designers etc) and their choices. I'm looking out for the creative integrity. And I don't think trusting them would've led to any less success in the west, especially since any changes SoA wanted on Sonic weren't really reflected in any main title's contents (except CD's OST change, which was controversial even for the time). It just doesn't sit right with me because I remember the 90s and enjoy a lot of things from that era, including all the "ugly" and edgy things. I also loved AoSTH, I even liked SatAM and the Archie comics to an extent. I just also remember around that age seeing Sonic the Screensaver's art and finding other JP art online. I even remember thinking as a kid that it looked and felt more like the games, which I was a fan of. It wouldn't be right or fair to my kid self to act like I couldn't tell the difference, or that I liked the JP stuff any less. And I can't imagine my opinion was an outlier.
There's an easy argument to be made against American depiction of Sonic and it's its lasting impact. What aspect of Sonic recognizably comes from American depiction of him other than chili dogs? Maybe some of the design elements after Sonic adventure redesign, and maybe some of the influences of SatAM and Archie Comics on the current staff, but that's just it. American Sonic just didn't have the staying power to stay relevant, not even in America.
I think it is fine to prefer the SoJ style. I think it is far superior. I mean it isn't without its problems and shouldn't be idealised. I think many of the prototype features of Sonic 1 such as the rock band look dreadful. But I agree the finished art produced by SoJ is far superior to that of SOA and as a kid I also far preferred the Sonic 1 boxart over the others - which in the UK used the Japanese Sonic design. I just also think it's important to recognise that SoA's Sonic designs clearly have their own appeal in their own right. Would SoJ Sonic have been even more popular? Who even knows. But we should keep in mind it is the equivalent of saying would Overwatch have been ever more popular in its launch year if it kept even closer to the style of the artists' original vision. We are talking about an entertainment product at the zenith of cultural relevance and popularity. What is there to do better other than eclipse everything else even more? SoA Sonic was already wildly popular and beloved.
Honestly I am more interested in why one market preferred it's version of sonic than whether one is better than another. It was the 90's, lots of companies had weird marketing tactics, its easy to write of american!sonic as "wow, that was weird. oh well". What cultural force made americans in the 90's want weird and gross grimy stuff so much, stuff like that. Honestly, when I see stuff like people posting AI generated images online that look bad and soulless, I wonder if some people just like bad art more. As in enjoying good art takes too much emotional effort so they would rather have bad art. Obviously I don't think SoA Sonic was that bad, I just wonder if art appreciation is something more cultural.
For the bolded, I don't think that's the same thing. If it were, I'd be arguing that the rock band or Madonna or the earlier art direction should've stayed, and I'm not. What I'm saying is more like if Overwatch released, and then a marketing team decided to arbitrarily make a new art style and character designs to market it with instead of the ones found in-game. If it still garnered huge success, would people think the marketing team made the right call? Would we attribute it's success to said marketing? Or to the game itself? Or would you say both did it? I think my point for all of this is that I believe American Sonic grew popular and beloved because of the games they were made to market, not the other way around. Kids hear about or see these awesome games, they play them, they grow to love the characters and they want to follow the series, so they take in the material given to them (in this case, much of SoA's creations). I know there are a good amount of people in the fandom who maybe grew more attached to American Sonic material, SatAM, Archie, or et cetera. But I can't imagine they're in the majority, nor that said fandom would've turned away if it were more game-accurate. Anyways that's all I've got to give to the convo. If people don't agree with me, then I guess it appropriately belongs in this topic. lol
If it was 'all because of the games' (I sort of agree) then reusing the SOJ artstyle wouldn't have mattered anyway. If you ask me the US cover for Sonic 3 looks much better and much better evokes what that game is. This idea that the SOJ art was always inherently better in of itself is just false, or is rather just like your opinion man.
It's also just your opinion too, man. Sonic on 3's cover looks grody as hell, that's his American design at it's worst lol.
So the SOJ art would've sold better because you in particular are bothered by the mohawk quills? I'm not convinced. Whether you think he looks grody doesn't matter either since the games were supposedly successful just on their own merits anyway. Not sure why they didn't sell well in Japan in that case but hey.
