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

I appreciate the historical accounts here, this is becoming an excellent resource for future research.

As far as Czechia goes, I have it on account from a friend that both SatAM and AoSTH were broadcasted on TV here (dubbed, naturally). To make things confusing, allegedly both shows aired under the same name. I didn't get to watch them myself. As somebody who grew up on the early '00s internet, the impact of the shows and comics was felt especially in the storytelling around the Sonic fandom, by which I mean in sprite comics, because I consumed those voraciously. It makes sense that fans would work with those settings because the story and characters had a lot more "meat" to them compared to the games early on. Personally, I did download and read a good number of Sonic the Comic episodes - not sure why I got the British magazine specifically, but the premise and setting may have felt more familiar as I was already more interested in the games.

I'd just like to chime in that I looked it up and the website is currently online on kilorat.com. I imagine the rat.org domain was lucrative to sell at some point, but it's nice to see it preserved. There's definitely some interesting stuff, including a takedown request from Sega of America in 1995.

 

Alright so, I'm an Iranian, I was born late 90s, lived in rural/conservative areas and I didn't have an online presence until 2011 or so. And before that, internet use was only for e-mails in small internet cafes, purely business oriented.
Im not really the subject of the question here really, but I'd like to share my perspective.
I've lived in a sanctioned, isolated and heavily censored environment, mainstream media in the outside world had to be REALLY huge to break into our cultural osmosis, like Michael Jackson big, and even then, Iran has always been selective with that too. Rock and roll, Jazz, Sitcoms never had a big presence over here. Knowledge of English language was not common.
Edit: a bit of correction, rock music, sitcoms and jazz were big here, but not in the sense you might expect. We didn't talk about the Beatles, or a show like Cheers, and there wasn't a bustling underground community sharing knowledge with each other, not outside of Tehran at least. Like I said, it was (and still is) a heavily censored and conservative environment trying its best to remove "western" influence, so the terms we used to talk about these things were very limited and basically impossible to find and engage with, unless if you were born adjacent to it.

And when it comes to videogames, while they did catch on over here, our relationship with them have always been weird.
Like you know how video games as a hobby has always been treated with mockery and "loser nerd" thing to like, and how the conservative attitude to control children's behaviors and keep them away from those damn games? That happened over here too, but in a sanctioned country that no company had a commercial presence and a market to capitalize on , especially game companies, video games never had the pop cultural influence they had in other countries over here.
We called Mario "mushroom eater".
Every game console was "sega" before the Playstation, and after that all game consoles were "Playstation".
I can go on but that's enough.
It's not an experience exclusive to Iran, but over here it was cranked up to 11. NOTHING was accessible. And you had no community to get into, especially SONIC of all things.

Now with that said, I *think* my first Sonic game was Sonic 1, but I'm not sure cause it might've been a fake rom I played, I was a kid and didn't know better. The first time I played a Nintendo title other than Mario was on game compilation of Nintendo games emulated on the Playstation. I loved Kirby BTW.

I didn't come across any other Sonic media until 2004/5(?).
There were no dubbed cartoons, absolutely no comics, no OVA, nothing.
My proper introduction to Sonic was through Sonic Heroes, when internet became a bit more accessible and folks were pirating and selling cheap copies of games in stores.

Now, being the weird kid that I was, I got too attached to these creatures, I went on to play Sonic riders, and In 2009, I got my Xbox 360 and finally owned my first sonic game.

As years went by, as my English improved, I finally started browsing the internet, and started searching Sonic stuff and slowly learning.
DeviantART, wikis, weird obscure fan sites I don't remember.

Now to really get to the relevant part, my understanding of Sonic was through weird jumbled up perspectives of Sonic fans online. I saw references to Archie Sonic and knew it was very different, and I didn't like it, I was super annoyed when some folks smugly claimed that "Eggman is a stupid name, Robotnik is the real name", and I thought that Europeans were much better to like Sonic more than Americans, and like the REAL version.

By 2014, I was fully online, I tapped into the Sonic fandom online, I never participated in any discussion, but I was always lurking and learning.

Sonic games have always been bigger, always more relevant and SatAM/Archie Sonic always felt "wrong" outside of the US.

But guess what, I really like Archie sonic and the material now lmao.
I read through the comics around the time they were getting canceled, in fact I read the Final issue around the same day it was announced that it was canceled.

This final tidbit to say that relevance is not really important to me. I can pick and choose what matters to me ultimately.
Sonic was never accessible enough for me to be invested in, but I was invested nonetheless.
Either way, Archie Sonic has always been weird and off, no matter what region you're from.
A video game icon, created right around the time video games took off as a global cultural phenomenon, will go on and be mainly known through its video games. Not comics and TV cartoons, old mediums which its main audiences wanted nothing to do with video games. Especially weird localized american versions of video games. I have to say though, we did get the american Megaman series dubbed and aired over here, even though no one really recognized him as a game icon.

 

This thread made me think about the evolution of the leading female in the Sonic franchise during this time, and SATAM and the comics did seem to have unusually long influence over this.

1991-06 - No main female character (Madonna is prototyped, but scrapped)
1992-04 - Amy Rose introduced in Sonic manga (Japan)
1993-09 - Sally Acorn introduced in SATAM (USA)
1993-09 - Amy Rose introduced in Sonic CD (Japan)
1993-11 - Sally Acorn cameo in bonus rounds of Sonic Spinball
1993-11 - Amy Rose introduced in Sonic CD (USA) - lots of confusion in press around whether the character is Sally - did the US localisation consider replacing Amy with Sally at one point? Possibly too hard given that Amy is in some of the anime cut scenes.
1994-03 - Amy Rose playable in Sonic Drift (JP)
1994-12 - Sally Acorn in SATAM - show cancelled but continues in reruns/syndication and comics (USA)
1995-05 - Amy Rose cameo in Knuckles Chaotix (USA)
1995-11 - Amy Rose playable in Sonic Drift 2 (USA)
1996-01 - Sara is the female lead in the Sonic OVA
1996-07 - Amy Rose playable in Sonic the Fighters (USA)
1997-11 - Amy Rose playable in Sonic R (USA)
1998-12 - Amy Rose is cemented as main female lead in Sonic Adventure (JP)
1999-01 - Sonia introduced on Sonic Underground (USA)

Given this rough timeline, it seems clear that Amy was on the rise as the main female lead in the Sonic universe, with Sally only ever featuring in the SATAM cartoon, the comics, and a single cameo in Sonic Spinball.

AND YET, when SegaWorld opened in Sydney in March 1997, Sally was chosen as the female character to go with Sonic, with statues and merchandise and animatronic/puppet shows featuring her instead of Amy. In retrospect, this seems a very odd choice, given that all the games since Spinball were favouring Amy - the Saturn games for sale in the SegaWorld store would have had Amy in Sonic R and Sonic Jam. As I previously stated, it did not seem like the SATAM cartoon or the comics had a huge following in Australia. I'm pretty sure Sally probably remained at SegaWorld until it closed in November 2000.

EDIT: updated with Amy's appearance in manga in 1992

 

Sega's western branches banked hard on Sally (and to an extent, all of the other DiC characters) until the Adventure games came around and cemented the Japanese canon. Reportedly, SoA vetoed Sally's death in Archie Sonic's Operation: Endgame, but I need a source for that.

 

Amy Rose was actually active in 1992 through the Sonic manga in Japan.

Both her game design and Sango Morimoto's version debuted in April 1992.

 

US Manual just renamed the female lead to Sally instead of using Amy. Why they did that, I don't know. Incompetence? Malice? Mystery. I think they just saw "female lead" and just assumed it was Sally because of SATAM.

Western press didn't really do a good job if verifying anything at the time either.

 

I went back and checked some old TV guides and it looks like the SATAM cartoon aired at 8am on Saturday is metropolitan areas in Australia during 1994, so maybe there was a larger group of kids exposed to the show that I first thought.

Since I lived in a regional area, there was only one commercial channel broadcast at the time, and this local channel would pick and choose content from the three major channels and reshuffle them into the hours of the day - this must be why I remember watching SATAM at 6am in the morning and often being disappointed when it was gazumped by other programs/live sport etc.

EDIT: On a similar train of thought, I remember how the old Sonic GameBooks would feature Sally as a character, but they would depict her more like Ricky the squirrel, which sort of bridged the gap between western and eastern art. I didn't get much exposure to the comics, and only caught about half the episodes of SATAM, but there were a whole bunch of other books and merchandise that featured expanded lore that tied into the American take on things.


https://archive.org/details/sonic-t...-gamebook-06-stormin-sonic/page/n123/mode/2up

 

The plot text in both the US and EU versions are essentially the same, with the only difference being that Amy is referred to as Sally in the US version. It seems to me that the text used in the US version is a modified version of the text used in the EU version.

 

Sally definitely was being pushed as the female lead of the series by SoA up till X-treme was canned. Her final animated appearance was Sonic Christmas Blast, 1996, which probably started production as a tie-in to that game before all the troubles there kicked in. Amy certainly had much more presence in the games themselves but, asides from CD, they were all spinoffs- released during Sonic's most obscure era no less.

Another thing is, Sally had more presence in western auxiliary media. There were children's books based around SatAM, she was the female lead in the Archie comics, she got who knows how much merchandise. Hell, she arguably got more attention than Tails in some areas. Amy, by contrast, was a very minor character in Archie up till Adventure and didn't appear in any of the cartoons.

Sally is definitely an example of the cartoons/comics having a notable impact on Sonic's brand (which is probably why she has so many fans even to this day), but she was always something at-odds with the games and SoJ themselves. I think it says a lot that she was probably the biggest thing to come strictly from the cartoons and comics and yet she's still a pretty niche character, all things considered.

 

I would argue that some of that niche aspect is because her character design is one of the most non-standard of the SATAM/Archie cast. She has this huge head with a tiny body and separated eyes, she doesn't even wear gloves (or clothes at all in some works). She's always looked soooo out of place in all of Sonic outside of some of the more outlandish obscure characters (that one that looks straight out of Dragon Tales comes to mind).

 

Sega of America divised a Sonic Bible around the first game's lauch in 1991 - all of the animal buddies had names (Johnny Lightfoot, Porker Lewis, etc.), Ricky changed genders and became "Sally Acorn". So she pre-dates Amy Rose, but not in a way that anyone cares.

As to whether your country favoured Amy or Sally... honestly it probably depends on how much influence DiC managed to cultivate during 1993.

- In the US, the comics were tied up with SatAM, and it aired in places you could see it, thus Sally Acorn was established as the female lead.

- In the UK, Sonic the Comic got out before SatAM, and was pushing the US 1991 continuity. We had our own supplementary material because Sega Europe actually cared, thus a world was invented without Princess Sally Acorn and her ugly looking chums.

- In Australia... I'm going to guess the comics were never a thing, which meant the television shows were able to drive the narrative. And so Sally Acorn turns up in Sega World Sydney.


You'd think the launch of Sonic CD would make a difference, but it was a niche product - the masses won't have been exposed to Amy in the games until something like Sonic R in 1997. But once the networks had got bored of syndicating the television shows, and the release of Sonic Adventure, Sally Acorn could be taken into the shed and shot.

 

Ironically, I think the Freedom Fighters' early designs from the pilot looked somewhat closer to Sonic designs.

Still didn't look remotely like Sonic characters, but at least they had cuter designs with bright colors. Contrast with the final designs, in which everyone was brown aside from Sonic and Rotor (with the latter being a dull grey instead, changed from his original purple).

I find it funny that SoA tried to aim for a semblance of brand consistency by calling Amy Sally in Sonic CD and adopting the AOSTH Robotnik design in western covers, when they didn't even make any efforts to stay consistent in their own material, localizations and lore. They gave Sonic like three different origins, couldn't decide if Sonic was supposed to have a mohawk or not, and allowed DiC to do whatever they wanted with Robotnik's design. Not to mention even their attempts at brand consistency were half-assed, as they didn't bother replacing Amy and Eggman's sprites with Sally and AOSTH Robotnik.

 

I took in everything I could: The games, both shows, the comics, the pasta, but Sonic was always a video game character first and foremost even in my small child mind. But the related material did definitely have an effect on me, like people said. To the point where it's still weird to me that Sally just straight up doesn't exist in the franchise anymore. She was always at least in the comics.

 

Penders has since clarified that it was editor Justin Gabrie who didn't want her dead, Sega themselves didn't care. (Though I suspect this had more to do with Sega not paying attention to the comics rather than them approving of the killing of a main character)

Either way, a lot of the sentiments I've seen on this thread genuinely depress me quite a bit. With all this talk about a consistent and easily marketable brand identity being more important than unique and varied human visions being expressed through creativity, I bet that soulless corporate executives would absolutely love the way some of you look at art.

And okay, I get it - a lot of the messy and inconsistent pre-1999 art is not very good - but neither is most of the clean, consistent and Japan-approved post-1999 art! So to me, dismissing all of the former while warmly embracing all of the latter feels less like a preference for quality and more like an extremely weird sense of doing a multi-billion dollar corporation's job of brand identity enforcement for them - combined with varying amounts of West-hating weebishness. Maybe there's some shipping agendas involved too, but that is a whole other can of worms that should remain permanently closed for the sake of all of our sanity.

 

West-hating weebishness? I don't even watch anime. I was literally introduced to Sonic through the cartoons, they were mid, then I played the games, fell in love with them and was baffled as to why the cartoons were so lame and boring by comparison. I didn't even know of the west/east divide back then!

I also don't hate all western stuff. I like Sonic the Comic - and I'm not even British nor did I grow up with it. And you know why? Because STC actually made an effort to try to be somewhat close to the games based on the info and lore the writers had access to at the time. Yes, there were deviations, like evil Super Sonic, or the original characters not resembling the game characters, but I could overlook those because the writing, storytelling and art were good.

I can't say the same of the DiC cartoons, or most of Archie. Prior to Ian, Archie had literally some of the worst, laziest, most amateurish writing I've seen anywhere. Ian was an improvement, but even his stories had flaws and a few really dumb moments. I haven't read IDW so I can't comment on his work there.

I also don't love everything from Japan. The mid 2000s home console games were terrible gameplay and story-wise. Sonic X was a mixed bag, leaning on mediocre. Mania was western-made for the most part and it's one of my favorite Sonic games, as the people that made it actually made an effort to be true to the Sonic spirit, not to mention they understood what made the Sonic formula work.

 

Wasn't trying to accuse anyone of anything - sorry if it came off that way.

It's just that whenever I see early, Western Sonic material catch a lot of (often deserved but almost always excessive) flack in Sonic communities that have a, well... less sophisticated benchmark for discussion than this forum does, it's almost always done in an effort to elevate Japanese material which is more in-line with the brand status quo but just as inadequate as far as quality goes.

I generally hold my favorite Japanese-made Sonic games in higher regard than most of my favorite Western-made supplementary material, but would never push down even the worst of the latter just because it is not a 1:1 recreation of the former. That would be an absolutely disgusting mentality for experiencing art, and I'm very much afraid that the sudden emergence of it is a contributing factor to our current hellscape where corporations want AI-generated slop to replace everything that creative and motivated human beings have willingly crafted.

 

I'm an enjoyer of SatAM and AoStH, not to a large amount but I still think theres value in 'em. The Archie comics prior to Ian? Less so, but they've still got moments and characters I like (mostly under Bollers, I'll admit). I love StC, definitely my favorite non-game thing of the Classic era outside the OVA. No love for Underground, sorry fans of that.

This strikes me as a weird comparison. I mean one, wanting an adaptation to be faithful to the source material is a far cry from wanting content slop generated in your face all day, and two; this is Sonic Retro. A decent chunk of this board feels like it hates everything not called Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2, and 3&K sometimes. If any bit of the internet is going to be resistant to anything outside the games, it's gonna be here, people be stubborn.

If there's been a pushback of the old western media outside of niche communities like here I really haven't noticed, I would imagine if there is it's mostly just the younger crowd oggling at how weird the stuff is sometimes and being dismissive of it- as they are for everything, it's basically always been like that. I guess some people could also be conflating the Penders stuff with the SatAM universe as a whole? But that's just ignorance.

But even then, I think the overall opinion of Classic-era spinoff material tends to be pretty positive? Barring Archie and Underground, maybe. People love AoStH for Robotnik and memes and such, SatAM is a fun little 90s cartoon, the OVA is a wonderful little slice of style. Honestly I think StC gets the worst treatment, it's basically only remembered as "the one where Sonic is a dickhead."

 

God do I fucking hate it whenever this stupid page gets brought up. It cannot be overstated what an utterly misleading image it paints about Fleetway Sonic as a whole.

 

That IS a very, very weird bit of the comic even in context, to be fair. Though yeah it is unfortunate that most of the things people know about StC are just panels of Sonic being a dick or that page. It's good! It's very Saturday Morning Cartoon-y, in a positive way.

 

This... sort of depends where you are and your perspective.

In the UK, the games were definately the driving factor.

AOSTH, it was shown every Sunday on Channel 4, and they promoted the hell out of it when it launched, but I don't know many people who watched it, nobody at my school spoke of it, it was one of those shows I watched but sort of knew wasn't that good.

SatAM, it did at one point get shown on Channel 4, and it was clearly the better cartoon, but I don't think many people watched it, a lot of people saw its title and assumed it was AOSTH so they didn't tune in. I don't think it got shown often after the first few episodes.

However... Fleetway Sonic the Comic was HUGE!!! I know people at my school bought it and read it, even though it was a bit of a secret to admit to.

But Fleetway was apparently at one point the the best/2nd best selling Comic in the UK behind the Beano, which if you look at the Beanos sales figures in the 90s must have meant a lot of people were buying it.

But I don't know if anyone could say for certain if the comic fed any fans to the main game series, it probably helped maintain fans for longer than they would have been fans had it just been the games. But I have no data to back that up!