Since this project doesn't seem to have its own thread yet, now is as good a time as any. Team Sea3on, a group of fans intent on giving SatAM a continuation in both comic and animation form, has just released a new trailer for their season 3 pilot. While I think that their pipe dream of getting Sega to produce the remaining 12 episodes is still extremely unlikely, that doesn't make me any less excited for this episode; the quality here is simply astounding. And in case anyone here asks, yes, that is Johnny Gioeli singing the SatAM theme.
Does anyone have the original video these guys created to announce the crowd finding it this project? It's now private on their YouTube channel. Frankly, it was bloody awful so I'm not surprised to see them hiding it. It was just Sonic and Sally trying to sell the project to fans, but both the animation and voice acting were dreadful. Big credit to the team for sticking with it after that poor first showing though. After several years their work has come along in leaps and bounds. This latest trailer is very, very impressive.
I somewhat remember this, along with the fact that I wasn't particularly impressed with it either. One of the characters was voiced fine enough, but the other character's actor was just phoning it in to a comically obvious degree, and the whole comment section was pointing it out too. (I can't remember which one was which, but I'm guessing that Sally's VA was the one doing a decent job, as an impression of her SatAM voice would most likely require less specific direction.)
Love the animation, and the cover of the song is mostly great, until it got murdered at the very end. Do a little editing on that to soften the ending and I think it'll be perfect!
When I started reading your post for a moment I thought that you're talking about this infamous thing: Spoiler feet
It is impressive but when are they gonna release it? I thought they were making 1 episode to pitch to Sega. Someone in the comments asked and they just ignored him. Is it listed somewhere? Is it in that upcoming panel? Oops just noticed the panel already happened.
Honestly, this makes me grateful to be a Sonic fan. Every other gaming franchise I can think of either doesn’t have a dedicated enough fanbase to attempt something as ambitious as this, or will sue you into oblivion if you try. Can’t wait for the full episode!
Given that there's absolutely no chance in hell that Sega is going to pick this up, I hope they decided to go down the route of resolving the Season 2 cliffhanger at least.
I like to think that maybe Sega would give this the OK so it could be truly official. Promotion on a big streaming service, bring back the original voice cast (the ones that are still with us, anyway), the works. But one can dream... I like what I'm seeing so far! Will be interesting to see how much they cover. So far it matches up with the first story of the web comic, but there's a lot they will likely not be able to cover in 13 episodes.
SEGA is not touching this shit lol. I know we like seeing them do stuff with fan creators but that's a total fantasy. They want nothing to do with SatAM, let alone just handing the OK to a bunch of unaffiliated fans trying to fulfill their own vision. That's not to shit all over the clearly polished work here and the talent and effort that went into it, of course. Though that being said, I do think that the way certain shots are framed and some of the ("floaty"?) movement gives away that it's an amateur production. I dunno. I'm excited to see more from the team regardless but getting even one episode done is a huge task, thirteen is a damn pipe dream.
So the 1 episode is still in production? I thought there was an estimated release since they made a trailer. I have no doubt Sega will eventually bring back the Freedom Fighters but they might have their own vision for how to do it. A standalone animated movie that just clears up the cliffhanger might be more realistic. The way 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo had. Either way I don't think it's as far fetched as some think it is with TV revivals being a thing.
Never say never. Sega of Europe officially approved issue 261 of "Sonic the Comic Online" and even paid for printing that issue for Summer of Sonic 2013, in exchange for an ad for "Sonic Lost World" in the magazine.
Didn't know about that one! Still, that's one already-finished issue of an ongoing webcomic that had already been releasing issues for a decade and had former creative staff from the comic working on it. The odds were a lot better-stacked in their favor. Also, I went to check which issue that was, and the StCO website is completely fucked. Nothing works except the most recent issue and a bunch of the socials got deleted. What's going on there?
I think that's a poor comparison. That was just a physical release of a niche webcomic for a Sonic fan event. Nowhere near the same as financing a whole new animated series based on an abandoned 31-year old continuity, in an age in which Sega is aiming for greater brand consistency.
It's still a fancomic, written by one of the original writers, given away during a big Sonic event, financed by Sega of Europe, in exchange for an ad for the new game. How many fancomic got that ? That was not even a comparison, that was to show there is a possibility.
That "Sega of Europe" bolding is important here, though not in the way you'd want. It's underlining this was an exceptional occasion that happened because of a local branch that nowadays barely exists.
So what I'm getting from this is someone needs to find a way to work the plot of Shadow Generations into a season of SatAM Look. We've got the void. They've got the white space zone. We've got an incredibly threatening wizard figure who never to reveal the full extent of his powers. They've got a beast that has become unmoored from all of space and time. Surely we can do something here.
As much as I love SatAM, let's be real, SEGA doesn't want anything to do with it. Primarily because it's such a far cry from the games-centric branding that SEGA has been cultivating for the past 15 years or so, but also because I think they'd rather avoid anything that is even adjacent to Ken Penders. Sure, Penders had nothing to do with SatAM itself, but due to his work at Archie and that whole fiasco, he is adjacent to it whether we like that or not. SatAM itself was a very unrefined attempt at crafting a larger brand image. But SoA had their own stuff in mind and even that was ill-defined. The games themselves didn't have a lot to work with, and once you filter it all through a game of telephone (or fax, rather :P), you get something essentially equivalent to the Pacman or Donkey Kong animated series of the 80s. Sonic Adventure 1 probably marks the first time that SEGA started caring more about consistency with the JP canon. Sonic Team was just doing their own thing (Sonic's creators' conception of Sonic), but because that game had more plot, cutscenes, actual dialogue etc, it's not so easy to just make up some new story to stick in a manual.
