Sonic Boom TV Show Megathread

Well I just watched the first 6, and I actually rather enjoyed them. The Sonic/Tails/Eggman dynamic reminded me of Adventure Time. It's just a shame that they fucked with the designs. (Somehow Eggman still looks good, but hey I quite liked his '06 redesign).

 

'Okay, let's pretend I'm not a scientist for a minute...'

Love the snarky banter between Sonic and Tails. Almost like if games' Sonic met Satam's Sally.

Not a brilliant episode, but a few decent gags put in there. An Eggman breakdance GIF has to be made.

It's hard to complain about Eggman really. This is still the most authentic looking design we've ever seen in a Western cartoon.

 

I'm starting to dislike Sonic Boom's Eggman more and more. He feels like so much more of a blatant asshole. Plus, when the hell has Eggman ever been up for COMPLETELY DESTROYING THE WORLD?

 

Sonic Adventure 2, SatAM... sorta, Sonic the Comic towards the end, and maybe Sonic 2 and 3K. We never learn what the Death Egg does but with a name like Death Egg probably something involving, well death. Robotnik's desires are often all over the place. He goes from power maniacal mad man who is hell bent on basically making the world look like a technological sewer to wanting to control people's minds to... wanting to build a theme park. Plus in both Sonic the Comic and Archie Sonic, Robotnik is just plain insane.

Plus it's not like Boom Eggman wanted to use the doomsday device. He mostly used it because he wanted to one up Dave, otherwise he seemed fine with never touching the thing. Seemed more like a last ditch effort to him IMO.

 

In almost all instances I'm aware of of him threatening the world, he was much more of a straight-forward "evil" villain, and the threat was more a threat than an actual intention of complete annihilation. I can't remember seeing any Sonic story where Eggman didn't switch to Sonic's side the moment his evil schemes put the world in actual danger.

I really do want to enjoy Sonic Boom more, but Eggman is usually one of the most fun Sonic characters to watch, and here they're trying to give him a sort of comedic "frenemy" angle while simultaneously having him be a completely irredeemable asshole, which I can't stand. There's absolutely no logical justification for Sonic and company putting up with his shit when he acts the way he does as consistently as he does, and having him be willing to set off a world-destroying device to settle an argument with an annoying-voiced intern he met less than a day ago is complete and utter bullshit. It's like they saw his betrayal at the end of Sonic Lost World and decided "Hey, let's base the majority of our Eggman writing on that!"

 

...to be fair, he just split the planet up without so much as breaking apart any existing landmasses. He didn't even enslave anybody to build his empire.

Kinda makes me wonder what he'd do if somebody just gave him a big enough piece of land to put Eggmanland on. :v:

EDIT: Also that game still managed to make him reasonably threatening while still being comedic and likable.

 

I haven't watched a single episode of this show yet, but I intend to sometime in the near future, so take that in mind when reading this post.

I feel that Eggman's character is largely based around being completely self-centered, wanting to be liked (and even worshiped) by society. Irredeemable asshole, yes, but the kind that when you boil it all down he doesn't actually want to hurt anyone. His equations only take himself into account. The only time others come in to the equation, it's more "how do I bend them to my will to serve me?" than anything like "I don't want you to exist anymore".

So then why would he have any interest in destroying the world he simply intends to manipulate, not eliminate? He might threaten people with utter planetary annihilation, but he's not actually serious about that because he knows it would lead to having nothing to rule over. He tries to manipulate others to bend to his will, but in his self-centeredness forgets that society has recognized a pattern in his behavior. Ultimately, he is naive and not truly evil. He presents serious threat with his technological power, but he is so psychologically naive that once opposed by competent heroes his plans never succeed.

Tails is almost kind of opposite to that, in a way. He too possesses technological prowess, but is more interested in benefiting society with that skill than himself as an individual.

 

I would point out here that Eggman in Sonic Adventure 2 was perfectly willing to gather Chaos Emeralds for a cannon that could conceivably destroy the world (even with 1 or 2 emeralds, the cannon could blast off half the moon), but then I realized that Shadow might've been playing Eggman in order to fulfill Gerald's plot to destroy the world for GUN raiding his lab and killing his granddaughter (At least, I think she was his granddaughter), though I do have to wonder exactly what would've happened had Gerald's plan not interfered, Eggman had all the Chaos Emeralds primed and ready to fire on Earth, and the President hadn't surrendered. Would he really have fired it on the Earth and risked destroying it, or would he not have thought of it at all if he never met Shadow?

Anyways, back on-topic, I have yet to see Double Doomsday, mainly because my Internet at the time was being a double douchebag, downloading the episode slowly until it eventually just gave up and gave me a half-downloaded video file.

 

Still, if his intention was to simply build one for the sake of building one, then why would he have no way to disable either of them? This is one case where the evil contraption off-switch/self-destruct trope would have actually made sense. Hell, he had a (somewhat convoluted) way to shut off his Obliterator Bot, which posed much less of a threat, but in Double Doomsday his reaction to the two devices creating a BLACK HOLE is "That's more like it!" You can't have Eggman be innocent enough to ask (and receive) multiple truces and CRASH WITH SONIC but be perfectly willing to let all of existence be erased over a petty argument.

...Anyway, I'll try to stop beating that dead horse for the time being. Did anybody else think that the reverse polarizer was going to be used to make the machines cancel each other out, rather than getting pulled out as a Deus Ex Machina afterward?

 

Checked out the first two issues of the comic (fittingly a Knuckles story, given we haven't got a spotlight episode for him yet), pretty fun. Flynn's definitely got the show's style down pat (though that does mean Knuckles is dumb, sorry).

 

Speaking of which, apparently Flynn will be less involved with the Sonic Boom comic, with the writers of the TV show contributing more to it.

 

Source?

 

http://arcadesushi.com/upcoming-sonic-boom-comics-to-be-co-written-by-tv-creative-team/

So for example: issue #5 will be written by Bill Freiberger, who is one of the showrunners of the cartoon.

 

I believe the Sonic Boom franchise will have the most potential when the games are forgotten and the tv show abandoned, letting the comic become it's own thing (provided it can last after the main two iterations disappear).

 

Really? Because it seems like people are generally enjoying the TV show. If anything, it's gotten Sonic some positive attention among all of the shit the games brought.

 

Well they will be guest writers for a few issues every now and then but otherwise Flynn is mainly writing, which is good because it takes alittle pressure off of him and it keeps the Boom TV series relevant with whats going on in the comic.

 

I'm honestly kind of surprised how non-awful this series has turned out, given how the games went. It may well be the best Sonic cartoon of all of them, although it'd be a tough choice between Boom and AoStH.