Were the cartoons and comics as big or bigger than the games among early Sonic fans?

I want to say my first time seeing anything was Sonic 2 at my cousins house. We still only had an NES then my parents got me a Genesis with Sonic 1 packed in...got 2 later. So that was 1992. I was 8. I was hooked immediately once I had mine. Wasn’t aware of the Master System until later on. Had a Game Gear with Sonic 2, Triple Trouble and Chaos.

I was into everything Archie comics and cartoons. I didn’t even question why the cartoons were so different. To me they were all the same universe. I just thought they were side stories with other friends Sonic had that didn’t appear in the games. It wasn’t even confusing to me.

I didn’t know about Underground until reruns. Guess we didn’t have the channel it was on. Wiki says Sci-Fi had it 1999-2000. I don’t remember that.

I must have seen the OVA over the Internet. I don’t have it and only saw it once. Unpopular Opinion...I remember not liking it that much. I think I found Sonic obnoxious. I don’t know I’ll have to rewatch it.

 

Not at all for me. I ignored basically all of it while i was a diehard fan of the games. I got every sonic game as they released, even the game gear ones and knuckles chaotix, but only picked up one issue of the comic: the sonic cd adaptation. I actually hated the freedom fighters stuff, it was so different in tone and look of the games. Couldnt stand them, except for aosth which was tolerated like looney tunes, not really as "sonic content"

One thing to understand is that there was a period where sonic, the games, were the top of the entire industry. They were the prestige games, the one the entite industry started copying. The games were a cultural phenomenon, where even online on compuserve the comics and shows were hardly talked about. The cartoons didnt come out til after sonic 2, when sonic as a brand was just about at its peak size. The games were popular first, and that's why the show existed. Not the other way around.

This entire mentality is part of why i hated sonic spinball so much. It was an satam game, not a "real" sonic game to me.

 

I discovered Sonic because of Sonic Underground and Sonic X, which would air one after the other in an obscure TV channel in my country that I had to mess around with the TV antenna to even watch at all. Good times.

 

I was too young to have experienced the early 90s as anything other than an infant/toddler, so this is more about the late 90s/early 00s. The neighbor kid had a Genesis, and I can't remember if he was playing Sonic 1 or Sonic 2, but I remember when I tried it I kept running into the fish badnik and dying. Nevertheless, I was really interested. My family had a PC, so I ended up getting Sonic CD and later Sonic and Knuckles Collection. I soon after got a Dreamcast and SA1, the game felt so much bigger back then to 6 year old me, now it feels limited and short.

My dad saw the Sonic OVA listed in the TV guide and prerecorded a tape of it for me, I thought it was so cool that there was a "movie" about Sonic. My mom would take me with her to the local "Giant Video" that was later bought out by Blockbuster. I found VHS tapes of SatAM and AoStH, and once the new management took over, the employees said they were getting rid of them soon and so they just gave them to me because I was the only one that ever rented them. I was fascinated by just how different it was to the games and the OVA.

I also picked up an issue of Archie when I saw it on a shelf and thought "oh cool, there's a comic too." The issue is whichever one that had green Knuckles. I frankly didn't like it and found it very confusing. It was a soap opera with all of these weird original characters that didn't even seem to fit with what I'd seen in SatAM, it just rubbed me the wrong way. I think I picked up a couple more issues after that but gave up, I had no context for anything that was happening and didn't even like it. Knowing what I now know about Archie, I don't think I missed out on much aside from cringe. I didn't even know about Underground's existence until years later. Glad I missed that one, too.

Even though I was stuck with dialup internet, I still liked googling stuff about whatever I was interested in, and that led me to this very forum. I lurked for a while and then joined in late 2004 and promptly made an ass of myself falling for a fake Sonic 1 proto even though it had already been debunked.

I think my overall experience and exposure to these spinoffs is an outlier. My perception is that most people didn't know much of anything about Sonic outside of the games, and most of the discussion taking place about it was online. My peers had no idea about anything else, I was the sole Sonic nerd in my class.

 

I forgot to mention I never had the Sega CD, 32X or Saturn. I had the Sega Channel. So as a kid Sonic CD, R and Chaotix had kind of a mythical allure of being other games you needed special hardware to play. I was really happy about Gems Collection and finally getting 2 of them. As well as Fighters.

Speaking of falling for fakes, after Sonic Adventure I couldn’t wait for another big game. I came across a website that was selling a used copy of Sonic X-Treme (no I didn’t buy it) and briefly fell for it until I looked it up. I thought I somehow missed it because I didn’t have a Saturn and was preoccupied with other interests. The other thing was the internet was still pretty new, to our household anyway. We had 1 computer so even though I spent a lot of time browsing a lot of old information was still new to me.

Hope nobody got scammed and paid for that.

 

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog was a fixture of my childhood and I was pretty obsessed with Sonic X while it was airing but that's about it; I've always mostly just been a fan of the games.

 

My experience is probably too new for the subject, but i got to the series from my sister reciting things from the OVA to me and hyping it up, she bought the ova, and to go with it, my father bought S3K's pc port. i found adventure 2 in my own time at a Video City, and went from there. I do remember being horredusly confused at the online scene being so heavily Satam centric when the closest thing i had to it was the mega collection comics gallery

 

If we're talking about the fandom divides originating from the vast differences between the Sega games and all of the DiC/Archie stuff, we must not forget about the subsect of 90s Sonic fans who were referred to as "SegaSonic fans".

It wasn't just a case of "General audiences who only know the games vs. Sonic fans who mainly care about the cartoons and comics", there were Sonic fans whose primary interests were the games and Japanese supplementary material, and specifically Japanese material alone. This crowd never liked the Freedom Fighters or the name "Robotnik", and made it very clear to everyone who was listening. Pretty much all Usenet discourse around Sonic CD's launch was dominated by these people, for they were really upset over Sega of America "ruining" the soundtrack. And once they got their hands on imported OVA tapes, they let everyone know that it was infinitely better than any of the DiC productions, even if they had no idea what any of the characters were saying.

Now, you'd think that this crowd would've been happy once SA1 came along and unified all incarnations of this franchise under a Japan-led vision, but nope, a lot of them really didn't like what the Dreamcast era did to this franchise. Hell, Sonic getting a redesign with very pronounced eyebrows and a shit-eating grin was specifically seen as catering to filthy, inferior Americans and their awful tastes.

 

As a little kid in the early 90s I was introduced to Sonic through AOSTH and SatAM. I didn't know about the games as I only had a NES and there wasn't any talk about Sonic (be it the games or the cartoons) in kindergarten. I preferred AOSTH for being lighter, though neither was particularly remarkable.

4-5 years later as a preteen I saw Sonic 3 at a friend's place and it was a culture shock, it was so advanced compared to what I was used to on the NES. A bit later I saw Sonic 1 at a retail, particularly Spring Yard, and was mindblown by how good it looked. The graphics looked so 3d-ish and vibrant! I knew I had to get an MD.

Eventually I did, and started collecting Sonic games one at a time. I became a Sonic fan proper. The DiC cartoons were no longer airing, and all Sonic talk among my classmates was about the games. Despite that I was fascinated by the cartoons, especially SatAM. Partially out of nostalgia (it had been 4-5 years since I last watched it, which feels like a lifetime for a kid), partially because by that point I was the age in which one prefers darker and more serious cartoons, but mainly because I was finally knee-deep in the Sonic mania, and wanted to see if the cartoons featured all the cool things from the games like Knuckles, the Chaos Emeralds, Super Sonic, Metal Sonic...

Made worse by a friend trolling me into thinking they appeared in later episodes.

When I finally got to rewatch it again after tracking down VHS tapes, I was really confused as to why it was so different from the games. Like... why is Sonic hanging out with a bunch of guys that are nowhere to be seen in the games? Why is Tails considered too young and wimpy to even be Sonic's sidekick? Why does Sonic have a mohawk and a backpack? Why did the show tell me that rings were an invention by Sonic's uncle, could only be used by him and could only be obtained from a lake; when in the games they were scattered all over the place and could be used by Tails and Knuckles too? The next time I played Sonic I looked at rings and went "Were all those created by Uncle Chuck? ...No, something isn't right here"

Despite that I kept watching hoping that the aforementioned game elements would eventually show up, and was HUGELY disappointed when they didn't. Like... WHY? Why would the cartoon ignore the coolest parts about the games?? Somehow the concept that the people that made an official cartoon based on a game didn't even bother playing or researching it was completely alien to me.

It was around that time that the internet was becoming mainstream, so I delved into it to try to decipher all those questions. It only made things even more confusing, after learning about Archie, the OVA, that upcoming cartoon Sonic Underground, all of which were completely different from each other. I swear, SoA is the undisputed king of brand confusion.

 

hah, memes are a valid way to get into something.

 

I remember getting a few issues of Fleetway's Sonic the Comic back in the day from my local newsagent. This was at a point where my obsession with Sonic had already been cemented. I remember one of the stories being tied into the Sonic 3 & Knuckles plot.

 

When it came to "Sonic Cartoons," I got a Sega CD roughly around the same time AostH and SatAM started airing. I was never a kid to get up in the mornings on saturdays -- lmao I did that during the weekdays for school so weekends were staying up late and sleeping in. So I never really saw these shows first run, I saw them in syndication in 1994 when they hit local TV stations for after-school cartoons. By that point, I already had Sonic CD, and had beaten it. Sonic CD's intro and ending were the absolute first "animated" Sonic I ever saw, period. Even before the cartoons. I guess, technically, there was an animated Sonic on the Andy Dick Sonic 1 commercial that I remembered, but in terms of "cartoon" it was Sonic CD that was my first exposure. So I already had an example from the games themselves about how Sonic should work as a cartoon. The Sonic CD anime scenes capture the feel of Sonic CD very well. So when I finally caught the shows after school, I was severely disappointed. It reminded me of 80's cartoons which would have this awesome anime intro and then the actual cartoon would suck. I saw the Anime Sonic CD cutscenes, and then the american Sonic cartoons followed. I saw the comics as basically a continuation of the cartoons, so I never bothered with those. Again, the only issue of the comic I got was the Sonic CD issue (which admittedly was a pretty decent adaptation).

I got the Sonic OVA around the same time I picked up Sonic Adventure and my Dreamcast and I loved it. It was exactly what I wanted the cartoon series to be. But from the get go, I disliked what American Sonic was like, I much preferred the Japanese shonen depiction even before I knew what shonen was.

 

That was kiiiinda where I was at. I didn't see Sonic CD first, but as a child I preferred AoStH over the other adaptations because it was (relatively) closer to both the games and all the Sonic the Screensaver art. When I saw the OVA and the CD FMVs for the first time (around 2001ish), it made me realize we could be so much closer.

I still watched what I could of SatAM and collected Archie issues (for the next decade!), but I was always unsure what to make of it, especially the further we got into the Adventure era. The chips were cracking in what I thought about "American Sonic" before I was even 10 years old. Just strange to think back to.

 

One thing that stood out very clearly to me back then was how they drew Sonic outside of profile. It was rare to see Sonic outside of a profile shot, but they'd occasionally show him. The Japanese products all had the head shape we know, with the quills coming out to the sides downwards. American Sonic portrayed him as having a mowhawk, with a single line of spikes going down his back.



They would always emphasize this by drawing the back of Sonic's head in front of the quills so you could see the circle shape of his head. In Japanese stuff, the boundary between Sonic's head and his quills is invisible. If I ever saw something where Sonic had a mowhawk, it was something I knew to avoid. Again, I was still just a kid, I didn't know American vs Japanese, I just knew that one of the Sonic merch stuff looked like bootleg knock offs and came from companies like DiC, and the other was the stuff I was playing on my Sega machines coming from Sega themselves. Just like I knew with my Sega CD which games to get, and not get the FMV crap, if you were there and paying attention you could figure out what was the good stuff very easily.

 

I can relate. As a kid I was really confused as to why there was such a glaring disconnect between the games and the American stuff. And not just with Sonic; things like the Sega RPGs (Phantasy Star, Shining Force...) using an anime style in-game yet having bootleg-like covers with a realistic style that made the characters unrecognizable absolutely baffled me.

It all started making sense when I learned years later about localizations, and how SoA thought they could just lie to kids and they would be too dumb to notice the inconsistencies.

 

Box arts in general confused me since I came from the SMS days. At first they were terrible small scribbles on white graph paper box art, but around 1988 or so SMS box arts started using a heavy airbrushed art style, the same kind that a lot of Genesis box arts looked like. Those SMS games with the air brushed art style tended to be great, stuff like Wonder Boy III or Alex Kidd in Shinobi World and such, so I kind of associated that art style with good games. Sonic had that art style, and so did stuff like Decap Attack and Toejam & Earl and such. And it would confuse me because sometimes art in sega games looked very close to the airbrushed art style, like Toejam & Earl (which makes sense, since it was a western game). I didn't so much think in terms of Japan vs USA till I was older in my teens. Back then all I knew was they drew Sonic in 2 different art styles, and outside of the game boxes, everything else that used that art style tended to be 'wrong' in my eyes.

 

This could be extrapolated based on how many Sega Genesis consoles were sold in the years 1990-1994. Compare that to the viewership of the cartoons in the same period.

 

You won't get a complete picture of the viewership of those times. At best you might get first run timeshare, being they were on major networks during saturday morning blocks, but you'll never get the viewership numbers for the local syndication reairings as those just don't exist, and that's where the majority of views would likely come from. Syndication was always much more lucrative than initial airings.

SostH and SatAM were also staples of movie rental stores, both mom and pop and big chains like blockbuster. Impossible to say how popular the cartoons were.