TV shows and comics do play a part in getting something better placed on the map. That doesn't mean the shows themselves necessarily matter to the public or to the image of the series, though. There are going to be people who grew up watching the Mario Super Show or Street Fighter: The Animated Series. Maybe they watched it every day. Should people care that the games or main franchise don’t care about whatever they did? Should that be seen as a bad thing?
I said it was controversial, I didn't say it was bad. I don't even care about SATAM all that much; I was barely a year old when it was airing. But I've also been in this fanbase for years, and I've talked with many fans who did in fact grow up with it and felt disillusioned when the series choose to leave it behind. If you guys hate SATAM for whatever reason, it's not YOUR Sonic or whatever, fine. I don't care. But maybe the fact that people still talk about it almost thirty years after the fact, even if it's mostly just a minority of fans, kind of represents that it did, in fact, have some level of impact? To say that it was just a footnote and nothing more is just ignoring reality. It clearly isn't a footnote if people are still talking about it And once again, I say this as someone who barely even cares about the series and didn't even grow up with it.
There are going to be fans of even the most minute of footnotes. I’ll always cherish The Electric Tale Of Pikachu and am sad Pokémon won’t be more like it, but you know what? Oh well, man! I wish the Sonic games took more from the OVA too, but I’m willing to accept it’s not part of the big picture of what Sonic’s supposed to be. Oh well, you know. I don’t even hate SatAM, man. It’s a pretty decent show. And I LOVE AoSTH. But it’s hilarious to imagine they should matter or not to the grand narrative of Sonic or whatever.
You claimed it put the games on the map though, which I've never seen evidence of. I dug the shows as a kid, especially Satam, but it wasn't even airing until I had played Sonic 1 and 2. Maybe kids are getting introduced to the games now from their parents' old VHS' or something, but anyone who watched them on any consistent basis back when they were airing were already familiar with the games.
There's nothing about this series that "needs" to be left behind or not left behind. Everything can be recontextualized, everything is disposable. Personally, I think it's valid to claim that not having stuff from the shows is a point of contention with quite a number of fans. It's also valid to say the shows should have done more to resemble the games, and Sonic's identity shouldn't have been split between regions in the first place. It's also fair to say the games matter most. What you can't claim is that it's a betrayal of fans to continue making Sonic to its current vision. Not that I love it myself or anything, but nothing about what any one fan wants to see from the universe is necessarily more valid than what the creative team wants. Also, was Electric Tale of Pikachu the one made by the hentai artist?
This. Sega of America’s “we need to make changes for American sensibilities” philosophy did them way more harm then good. You can see it in almost everything they touch, and it’s the one behavior from that era that bothers me the most.
I know I've said this before, but the Sonic fandom could take a page or two from comic books. Granted, being a comic book fan comes with its own level of obsessive hemming and hawing over continuity and what did or didn't happen to a character or franchise. The vast majority of people, however, have kind of accepted and even embraced the idea that there are multiple continuities of a character, there can be multiple interpretations, that some things can come and go and things that no longer fit in the narrative can be discarded at will and later brought back up if someone has a good idea to use it for. It's a level of fluidity that has become part and parcel with comics. I've seen so many threads and posts that try to dive so hard into the nitty gritty of Sonic, how can we fit all the time lines together, is classic Sonic from the past or another dimension? What is the 'true' characterization of Sonic? Is SatAM the best thing ever or a pile of shit? And honestly, it's kind of like... who cares? Pick the shit you like, disregard the stuff you don't. He's a blue cartoon hedgehog, I think there's some room for fuckery. Or I guess you can be an insane person like Grant Morrison and weave together a complicated web of how everything that's ever happened to Sonic is canon in one way or another, but that's a project I just do not care enough to undertake.
There is an element of americanisation in Sonic Adventure, but it's absolutely not the one being talked here- it's not an SoA decision, but an internal Sonic Team one by virtue of having multiple members who just thought specific elements of US culture of the time were cool. Hence the sketches trying to incorporate the SatAM Robotnik design, hence Greg Martin's Assface Sonic becoming the face of Modern Sonic, etc. Even then, again, I very much doubt it was an organised effort- it absolutely was just people going "oh this thing the Americans did is cool, let's use that".
Wrt the cartoon vs video game popularity argument, in the west/Japan the video games are def more iconic but in countries that didn't have a big video game boom, the cartoons are definitely more iconic. In a lot of the middle east Sonic is seen as more a cartoon character than a video game character
The Sonic series is a lot easier to digest when you look at it through these lenses. But *shrug* people want what they want. I'll never understand the people who attempt at making something cohesive out of this series when the creators stopped caring about that ages ago. but its kind of the inherent nature of fanbases to be insane like that, it's what fuels the series...for better or worse.
I don’t think it’s “insane” to desire some consistency, it’s just human nature. Besides, I don’t think in-canon grievances like the classic/modern split or the two worlds nonsense is equatable to the other canons. Those are things being actively imposed within the continuity, while the latter was never a part of it to begin with. It’s fair to consider Sonics other canons in a lump sum as like comic books, but the games are a different beast. They didn’t really ask for all that, and have stayed relatively consistent to themselves, for better or worse.
When you attempt to take even the most minute of details and try to make something cohesive about it, when even the creators haven't given it that much thought, then yea I do think that's kind of insane.
I don’t see how that has anything to do with my argument, other than writing off the people you disagree with in here as crazy.
Wanting consistency is fine and understandable, but most people that talk about it like it's some unforgivable sin that the series hasn't accounted for literally every contingency that might have been an issue. When they brought back Classic Sonic in Generations, I'm pretty sure their thought process wasn't "How are we going to make this fit into the timeline" and more "This sounds like a neat concept and way of paying homage to our series". Similarly, I'm almost certain nobody ever thought about the implications of Sonic's world until a fan brought it up to them, and they had to scramble up some half-ass answer to not make them look stupid, only to make things worse. I understand fans want consistency, but I also understand that some fans don't always know what they're talking about.
People ask for consistency because the series actually was consistent for a bit. No one expect the same out of, say, Mario, because Nintendo actively refuses to make any kind of consistent timeline or canon for Mario, to the point where Miyamoto said he treated the characters as actors in a theater troupe. Sonic didn't do that, in fact it was perhaps a bit too obsessed with having an actual world and canon compared to most platformers. Even the genesis games have consistent places with names and small bits of lore, already more than most platformers of the time. South Island and Angel Island are actual places with names. Green Hill is clearly supposed to be, like, an actual place that exists outside of the levels with its name, whereas all the levels in Mario are entirely surreal obstacle courses with no logic or reason. Sonic Team let that genie out of the bottle. Can't get it back by now.
I went hunting for stuff that might even slightly imply officially that the western cartoons had a measure on getting people in the games, and didn't really find anything. Wikipedia doesn't list any kind of numbers period for AoSTH and while SATAM was popular, there are no metrics on that this meant for the game series itself aside from that Spinball was the only released game with elements from it and that of the protos with elements from it, one of them was straight up cancelled by Naka himself because he hated it. This implies that honestly, the cartoons were on the extreme periphery of the game "scene" with regards to influence, be it art direction, or getting people into it. Sega was super into trying to sell Sonic any way they could, so you'd think that if they found players asking "where's sally" or whatever, they'd try to cram it in as hard as they could. But...this didn't happen in any meaningful way, and it wasn't even mentioned in the slightest in any documentation about concepts for Adventure post NiGHTS - Sonic Team never even thought of the western properties when handling (let's be honest) their series. I wouldn't say that the cartoons have any real importance to the direction of Sonic as a whole.
Then they're gonna have to reboot; either soft or hard. It's rather clear they didn't plan for this long term, and seemingly have plan to reconcile 30 years of continuity.
Again though, there's actual concept art of Eggman with the robot arm from SatAM for Adventure, footage showing they had faxed copies of the first Archie issues around at ST's office, and Okano mentioning how he liked the Greg Martin covers and was using them in specific as influence. On the overall yes, you're right, the cartoons were a sidenote in the creation of the games; but it's pretty wrong to actually say "they never even thought of the western properties". They thought of them and mostly dismissed the ideas they tried to use from them, perhaps more accurately.
Don’t remember where I read this or even if it’s true , but on the topic of Sonic CDs US soundtrack replacement, I hear tell that was due to Sega wanting to push the Q-Sound technology as a showpiece for the hardware. That and the eurobeat influenced music used in jp version didn’t really catch on in the states at that time.
No they don’t. You said it yourself before, they can just include or disclude anything to make a more concise or streamlined take. All this talk feels like huge exaggeration to me. Both how important “western Sonic” was as well as how ‘irreparable’ the damage done is from the divide. Neither is a really big deal imo.
