The younger fandom, and how they learned from exactly none of our mistakes.

It just got that kind of attention back in the day because it was the classic Sonic no one had ever played.

Chaotix sort of picked up that reputation once Sonic CD was made more widely available (both with Gems Collection and the 2011 remaster), even though it sucks. Sonic CD may be divisive but it seems like few actually hate it, whereas Chaotix is just undercooked.

 

If I had to guess: SatAM would have been more popular amongst older Sonic fans (and by older I mean like tweens, not adults) who would have been more likely to be online and thus shape the Sonic fandom of those years, while the kids who watched AoSTH would have been less likely to be online and didn't shape the fandom as much. But that's just conjecture on my part.

But it's mirrored by other times in the fandom, such as the prevailing opinion on 3D Sonic in the overall fandom being...divisive at best until people my age started growing up and going on the internet more. Now we got 18-year-olds spreading unironic Heroes apologia! Unfortunately.

 

To my knowledge SatAM has always been seen as the better show by the general fanbase. It is a better show, after all. I know that when I saw SatAM for the first time after watching AoSTH for a long time, I was surprised that a show could run at the same time but present a decently written story that takes itself seriously. I think I was 9 at the time. I still like AoSTH a lot, and SatAM has problems in season 2, but there's no denying that one of them was higher quality material. You wouldn't say Gilligan's Island is a better show than Star Trek, and the idea of that being what most people think is laughable.

 

Man, back in the day, about 10-15 years ago online, I remember that the older fans would not shut up about SatAM and how it was 'superior' to all the other shows, despite it having virtually nothing to do with the games. I also remember there was one obsessed SatAM fanboy who was always pestering SEGA about getting a Sonic SatAM movie made, and he'd get rejected every time, lol. It honestly baffles me that some folks think that SatAM is still somehow relevant to the franchise when it hasn't been on the air since the early 90s, and it's the shortest of the Sonic TV shows; only getting a measly 26 episodes. Maybe it was because Archie Sonic was a thing, but even then, that was really only mainly known in North America back then.

Speaking of which, as edgy as the 'dark ages' games were, I still think pre-reboot Archie Sonic was the edgiest thing to come out of the franchise. I don't know what the heck Ken Penders and Ian Flynn were smoking in the 90s/2000s, but man they both came up with some crazy shit in their respective runs before the lawsuits and the whole 'Super Genesis Wave' thing happened. People often complain about Shadow having guns, but do you guys remember when Shadow became an authoritarian dictator and forced people to worship Maria as a goddess, and how he would torture people? At least Shadow's game was campy and could be seen as dumb fun.

 

I remember getting SatAM series on DVD around 2007 or 2008 (my mom bought me that and I did not ask for it either, she simply surprised me with it) and I never felt so much cringe watching it. I'm like "how is this show related to the games?" LOL

 

Say what you will, but if someone had shown me the OVA, THAT would have really blown me away. I didn’t hated the 90s cartoons but they weren’t exactly what I expected either (both plot-wise and animation-wise). When Uncle Chuck got robotocized, it kinda threw me off and the way they drew Eggman scared me. When they finally announced Sonic X it felt like such a relief.

 

To me personally, I don't care too much about the older fans or the younger fans overall preferences that much. Gen Z will eventually have to deal with the generation after that anyway and it's only imaginable they'll complain about it. I had to endure the complaining of Baby Boomers and Generation X for a while as a Millennial and now Gen Z wants in on it. This has been a fun thread to watch for sure, I'll admit that. Honestly I preferred the Adventure games (story-wise) with the classics being a close-second. I wished they at least kept it consistent after setting the cannon they wanted to finally go with.

 

In the early days of the Sonic fandom, preferring AOSTH over SatAM was absolutely the contrarian take.

That being said, I barely knew anyone who'd even heard of SatAM, and the ones who did I probably told them about it. Adventures on the other hand was a mainstay of syndication for years (in the Twin Cities metro area, on the UPN!), and to most people it was the Sonic cartoon. Whereas for years the only way you could watch SatAM were the handful of episodes they bothered putting out on video. I distinctly recall renting this one as often as I could from Hollywood Video:



(they also had several AOSTH tapes which we'd rent regularly because you know, I was obsessed)

Once Adventure came out and the series was back in full swing the vocal SatAM community kind of fizzled out, which makes sense as the series was a dead end whereas the Adventure and Advance games were generating millions more fans in their own right. Was definitely a bit of whiplash when people started talking about SatAM like "remember that REALLY BAD cartoon where Jaleel White played Sonic???" (and then, you know, you have to ask which one, God help them if they saw Underground)

 

I guess you could say I'm part of the younger generation of fans being at the cut off for being a Gen Z kid so I can say that, in my memory, SATAM was really hyped up online as a hidden gem by the older fans because it was so hard to find online and the nostalgia filter must have been off the roof until we finally got to see the show ourselves when the DVD came out and it gave a lot of people a resounding feeling of "meh, not really Sonic but it's cool I guess."

Everyone I know remembers watching AOTSH on Toon Disney back in the day because it was easily accessible to watch and rerun frequently. I only remember glimpses because I was too young for it to fully register as a memory but I also remember watching it fairly often back then.

So yeah, with the online community SATAM was the more popular show but amongst non fans and normies AOTSH is the show that people hold more memories of.

 

I also noticed that some SatAM/Archie fans online have an irrational, seething hatred towards Sonic X in particular, and the Japanese canon of the games by extension. Like, when Sonic X was announced to come to Netflix, some SatAM fanboys on Twitter were LIVID that X was chosen over their precious 'masterpiece' SatAM.

X was by far the most successful Sonic TV adaptation (at least I'm pretty sure it was), and ran reruns for roughly a decade, before being pulled off the air in the US around 2014 because Sega wanted to push Sonic Boom (which was basically sent to an early grave thanks to CN's terrible scheduling of the show, and then moving it to the Boomerang channel for S2; after all, what's more important than constant marathons of Teen Titans Go? ).

X's 4Kids English dub also recently got a complete series DVD/Blu-ray release, and now the whole series is re-airing in Japan, with TMS now uploading the Japanese version with new subs on top of that. It's getting a pretty big push, is what I'm getting at, and SatAM/Archie fans seem pretty irritated by that for some reason.

 

Well, to be honest, Sonic X is pretty mediocre itself like the other two but the Archie comics at least had SOME highs such as the Endgame arc and the Pre Genesis Wave Ian Flynn run, and even some of the arcs he did after that.

It also sucks that the Archie comics ended so unceremoniously not even letting Ian Flynn get a few issues to write a finale for these characters some people had been reading for 24 years. Meanwhile Sonic X which is super kiddy and is definitely NOT getting a revival or anything of the sorts is getting pushed a lot when it doesn't even fit the modern tone of the series anymore and in many ways is completely irreverent in a way that the Archie comics were FORCED to become.

Them being irritated is completely fair.

 

I can't really relate to people who say that SatAM was seen as inferior, in my own childhood I remember that show being rerun a hell of a lot more than Adventures, and going online you would just have the impression cemented in your mind that it was the "better" show.

Otoh it's been over 20 years, what could you possibly expect will happen to it? Sega is never gonna touch such a highly Americanised version of Sonic when Sonic X is right there.

 

I haven't read Archie since some time before the soft reboot, but I have yet to see a single Archie Sonic story that wasn't mediocre to trash. I even found the Flynn stories extremely unengaging, not to mention he completely derailed some of the characters. I wouldn't call Sonic X amazing, but it had plenty of highlights, like the SA1 and SA2 adaptations.

Sonic X completely irreverent? That's a funny thing to say when it's literally the most faithful cartoon adaptation so far, and was closely supervised by Sonic Team.

 

I remember when they did the soft reboot of the Archieverse (to eliminate all the Penders and other non-Sega-owned characters) I was still frequenting some SatAM fan communities who were all like "oh LET ME GUESS they're going to come back and it'll only be Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy, because Ian Flynn hates the SatAM characters, and Sega will finally get their way and be able to pretend SatAM never existed once and for all, etc." and I sort of just took it at face value that Flynn was trying to move things away from the SatAM/Archie canon. Having been keeping up with the thankskenpenders blog - doesn't really seem like that was ever the case!

Haven't dipped my toes into that community in years, but it just always seemed like there was a kneejerk resistance to any change within the Archie comics run, which SatAM fans seemed to treat first and foremost as the continuation of the SatAM story, and anything else (like incorporating game elements and characters) was a shocking betrayal of that idea. Even though Sega, you know, has games to sell.

I get the frustration though, I really like most of the characters SatAM introduced and wouldn't mind seeing them re-incorporated into at least the IDW canon, but like... it's a multimedia franchise that's been going strong for almost thirty years now. I'm not going to begrudge any series - Sonic X, Sonic Boom, the games, the IDW stuff - for putting a different spin on it. It's a 27-year-old cartoon. It's okay.

 

Your opinion on it's quality (and I was clear most of it was meh in my post) doesn't change the fact that those people do have a right to be upset that a comic they read for decades was abruptly cancelled and kicked to the curb. I understand their plight completely especially with the way the mandates and the Penders fiasco really warped the comics in the last bit of it's run.

I mean irrelevant I guess my autocorrect messed that up. And Sonic 06 and Forces were directly made by Sonic Team so that's them being involved isn't something that I believe is worth saying as a bode of confidence towards any Sonic material. Especially now with things like Classic and Modern taking place in separate canons and the two worlds split.

Sonic X is not getting a revival or any new material but it's still being pushed really often, which is weird to me but whatever.

 

I'm honestly surprised by the amount of hate towards SatAM on here. Elitist SatAM fanboys should get a life, but I must've missed the part where not being a 1:1 adaptation of the game makes it a bad show. I think people get way too picky about liberties being taken in adaptations. When SatAM was developed there were only two Sonic games out (not counting 8-bit), and it honestly does a good job of capturing many things from the games and placing them into an original story. I don't like the weird fantasy elements they emphasized at times, but on the whole, the show presents Sonic and friends fighting against the evil Dr. Robotnik, who enslaves animals in metal shells, in a story that speaks an environmental message. So, pretty much what the games were. They added an extended cast of characters, because making a show with only three characters probably wasn't easy to give a real story. The show even used elements from the games, like rings.

I also think it's worth mentioning that none of the American cartoons were actually "good" adaptations of the games. In comparison, AoSTH is even less like the games than SatAM was. I grew up watching AoSTH all the time, so I personally connect it with the classic games, and I always took notice of things from the games showing up (like badnik designs), but I can still plainly see that it's not connected to the games at all. The only thing about AoSTH that actually does better than SatAM is the relationship between Sonic and Tails, and Tails being a character with more presence obviously. But I don't fault the portrayal of Tails in SatAM, because it makes sense to make him a younger, inexperienced character. I appreciate how they treated him in both shows.

All that said, I think the SatAM pilot is better than most of the rest of the series, and I wish they had stayed closer to that. But nothing holds a candle to the Doomsday Machine finale. I don't know why people talk about Archie Sonic as if it's the same thing as SatAM. The Archie comics were initially based on the same basic characters and designs, but they have nothing to do with each other. I've only ever read some Sonic Archives volumes, so I don't have a strong attachment to Archie Sonic.

Out of all the western Sonic media, the Fleetway comics were probably the most faithful to the source material, and even that series had some major deviations. I've always wanted a true adaptation of the classic games, but I don't consider what we've got to be bad just because they aren't that true adaptation.

 

Interesting. What did you think of Sonic OVA at the time of it's release in the west? If you don't mind me asking.

 

Speaking as one of the millions who started with Adventure 2 Battle and wasted many months on deviantart making bad OC's and Sonic fanfic I can say in those circles (we're talking a little before 06 came and pretty ruined Sonic's reputation forever) that SatAM wasn't really a thing anyone hated so much as...didn't care about. The Adventure duology and its accompanying mobile games were all anyone cared about there. SatAM and AoSTH were The Ancient Times, a mythical thing we were aware about (I certainly remember coming across Sally and the other SatAM/comic characters not infrequently), but didn't really pay any heed. AoSTH had it worse--NO ONE cared about it, and I for one was unaware it even existed until the memes about it propagated in early youtube poops, and Underground was completely foreign to pretty much all of us besides the vague notion that some weird ass cartoon where Sonic had two siblings once existed. It was all Adventure, all the time, baby. Even back then classic Sonic was considered its own canon with nothing to do with the then-modern Sonic, and classic fans were viewed as basically an entirely separate fandom with effectively zero overlap.

I can't remember too much of X's reputation, but I do remember people liking it except for Chris being completely pointless and the 4kids dub having a lot of detractors thanks to the shitty censoring and inexplicable edits.