Thoughts on the 90s Cartoon(s)

Wait, what’s wrong with the OVA’s dub? I’ve only ever watched the dub and I thought it was great.

 

For real, I love the OVA's dub.

 

I've never been able to get through an episode. Opening is a banger obviously.

The only thing people remember from the dub is the "Strange, isn't!?" line which became a meme. That's it. Literally nothing else.

 

I personally felt the voices the main trio (Sonic, Tails, Knuckles) were pretty bad, with Sonic having an inconsistent accent throughout. But hey, if people like the dub, that's cool! I can see it growing a following over time.

It did create the "Strange, isn't it?" meme, which I actually forgot about until @JaxTH said it, so I guess there's that too lol.

 

I remember seemingly every line of dialogue from the entire movie. "Tails is just like a lil' kid with his new toy." "He flew away!? METAL!!" "THERE-IS-ONLY-ONE-SON-IC."

I always thought it was so bizarre. Even the first time I was watching it, my brain "knew" the voices didn't fit at all. And yet, somehow, I felt like they fit perfectly. I still don't know how to explain it.

 

I only saw tids and bits of AoStH and SatAM as a little kid.
I'm sure I saw the vast majority of Underground at the time.
So, regarding the first two, I can't offer much insight and opinion.
Regarding Underground, my opinion is biased by age and experience, so I'd rather stay quiet.

The OVAs I only got to see them when I chanced upon the dvd version with dual audio.
But I kinda knew they existed, by the trailers present in Sonic JAM xD
By that time, I was already formatted to anime in jap with eng subs, so I ignored the dub.

Of course, to me, the OVAs are the best of the 90s Sonic shows.
It's the one closest to the spirit of the classic games at the time.

As an aside, when I heard of Sonic X, I spent months fanboying it like mad, hoping to watch it.
When I finally got the chance (airing in my country), I kinda enjoyed but also got disappointed.
And as years went by, I understood better why. It simply wasn't what I hoped it'd be.
More childish, tons of fillerish events and characters irrelevant to me on the long run.

Overall, until now, only Mania Adventures came quite close to the games in body and soul.
I'm quite sure Prime won't yet be the one to scratch that Sonic anime itch I've been having for years on end...

 

My husband got me SatAM on DVD years ago. I ran through it a couple times but I need to make my way through AoSTH on Netflix as I know I haven’t seen every episode.

P.S. I loved the Ok KO episode!

 

Buy the AoStH Blu-ray instead.

 

LoL, I don’t own anything that plays those.

 

I assume by "90s cartoon" you mean the only one that was actually called "Sonic the Hedgehog" aka SatAM.

I respect how the show, for the time, was very ambitious in a way most cartoons, let alone cartoons based on toys and video games, weren't. It was more serialized than other shows were (even stuff like DuckTales), and a lot of thought was put into the world design with a lot of creative ideas that we take for granted today. That said, it has not aged well at all. And when I say that, I mean it feels cringeworthy to watch as an adult. I didn't grow up with the show since it was before my time, but as I got into the Archie comics, I went back and attempted to watch it sometime around 2012, and I couldn't get through more than three episodes. And this is coming from someone who also watched AoStH around the same time and while I can't call that show "good" I can get into it for its shitpost quality. And I can also get into old shows like TMNT 1987 and Disney Afternoon stuff, even having never grown up with it.

For some reason, I just can't do that with SatAM. The pacing of it is awkwardly slow at times, and the writing feels juvenile in a way I can't quite explain. It's in this weird spot where it tries to appeal to young children by not being too serialized and being pretty comedic most of the time with fourth-wall breaks and one-liners, yet also having this grim world with grim scenarios that begs for something far more character-driven.

 

FYI, only twenty episodes of AoStH are on Netflix. At least, that's how many were on there last I checked (cancelled my subscription last month), so unless they've added more since then it's not complete for some reason.

Paramount Plus has all the episodes (and the Christmas Blast special!), but... that's yet another streaming service to get. >.>

 

Every Sonic cartoon before Sonic Boom is on youtube for free, mostly by the rights-holders themselves. Though weirdly the OVA will sometimes get copyright-claimed despite it being the only pirate upload out of these.

 

Adventures is great, Dr Robotnik is one of my favourite villains of all time. I feel like him and Zurg from Buzz Lightyear of Star Command would get on great and I would totally watch a show of just those two hamming it up.

 

I still fully advocate for SatAM even though its luster has definitely worn off the older I’ve gotten. Went from “the best thing ever made” as a kid/preteen to “still pretty darn good,” I’d say it’s still one of the best things I watched as a kid.

AoSTH… man I have a lot of nostalgia for it but I can’t really handle it. I feel like SatAM has enough going on with its characters and storyline that it’s still able to be appreciated as an adult, but AoSTH just feels like something I only could have enjoyed as a kid. If it was something like Looney Tunes where the slapstick or animation made it enjoyable as an art that’d be one thing, but it just doesn’t meet that level IMO. Long John Baldry’s Robotnik is wonderful, of course, probably my favorite voice for the character even though I don’t really think it’d fit any other incarnation.

Underground occupies a weird middleground where I really tried to like it as a kid because it seemed to be going for that same story-driven focus of SatAM, but quickly became even more unwatchable than AoSTH. Hooray! I don’t even think the concept was fundamentally flawed or anything, it just feels like a waste, especially knowing a revival of SatAM was (allegedly) in the cards and Underground replaced it. The one thing I’ll give it credit for is its exploration of classism actually goes pretty deep for its demographic. In fact I kind of prefer the sort of benevolent dictatorship we see with Underground’s Robotnik where high society is essentially able to buy freedom, rather than SatAM which paints a fairly black and white picture of the whole conflict. We see a resistance that’s slower to pick up steam with the public because most of them are simply ambivalent to the status quo Robotnik offers them, and the show is pretty good at exploring this from what I remember.

Sonic OVA is just great. Don’t know what else to say about it that hasn’t been, it’s just a solid piece of “SegaSonic” before the Adventure era really defined a tone for the series as a whole.

 

For anyone interested in watching repeats of SatAM, they're (as well as the old Mario Super Show) continuously streaming on the free Pluto.TV site; you often see the same ones over and over at times, mind you.

https://pluto.tv/en/live-tv/pluto-tv-gaming-heroes-gb