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

My first exposure to the Sonic series was from a birthday, maybe around 6 or 7. Got a Sega genesis, and Sonic 1. Later on, rented Sonic 2, bought the game, did the same thing with Sonic Spinball and Sonic 3 & Knuckles. In terms of the cartoons, I was more exposed to the slapstick humorous Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog cartoon, through those VHS tapes where they had 2 episodes a tape. Those were rent-able at the local video rental store in our area at the time.

Later on, when I got my first computer (Windows '95) and we had 56K modem, there was this website that showcased episodes of the SatAM Sonic shows, and I remember watching them with a best friend of mine. One time he slept over during a weekend, we set up a tent in the basement, the hole of the tent faced the computer screen while we watched those episodes.

I guess in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, it wasn't so super popular where there was mania for the TV show, but then again there were many cartoons at the time awash on YTV.

 

I was first exposed to the series somewhere between 1993 and 1996 (with an age range of 1 to 4). From this extremely fuzzy period I have three very early Sonic memories, though I couldn't tell you which order they occurred in to save my life:
- either playing or watching someone play Sonic 1, specifically the part in Marble Zone Act 2 where the lava chases you
- hearing the SatAM theme song
- playing with the Sonic 3 tie-in Happy Meal toys (specifically the Sonic and Tails ones)

In terms of actual cognizant fandom, somewhere between 1996 and 1998 (with an age range of 4 to 6) I played Sonic 2 a lot, watched AoStH fairly often, and read at least one issue of the Archie comics (one of the Sonic Kids issues).

So, my earliest activities as a Sonic fan, as well as the "inciting incident(s)" that made me a fan in the first place, involved a mix of both games and non-games. As an actively participating Sonic Fan™, playing the games (namely Sonic 2) definitely occupied the bulk of my time in this era, followed by RPing as Sonic characters with my friends (whichever box we want to put that in; these included characters we knew from the Archie comics, like Sally, for what it's worth).

 

As a young kid, I was first introduced to Sonic though merchandise. I'm talking about Sonic & Knuckles crap in the grocery store. This got me craving the games themselves since the AoStH show and crappy LCD games did not do enough for me, and I kept waiting to see Knuckles show up somewhere. After a few more years though I got to experience the crazy combo of Sonic Adventure 1 and the Sonic & Knuckles Collection on PC in a short amount of time, which absolutely cemented my interest in the series.

edit: this post was originally meant to be more focused on AoStH as a starting point haha. Might as well say though that I had no idea about the comics at all until about a year after Sonic Adventure, courtesy of a gift from my grandma, lol

 

What did you think of Underground?

 

Had no idea it existed until a decade later.

 

I feel like the games were exponentially bigger in real life, but the cartoons/comics fandom was extremely loud on the internet for at least the first 15 years.

 

I feel like the early cartoons (mostly SatAM, really) and comics managed to cultivate a smaller, very specific audience of people who mostly only cared about that one bit of Sonic media while viewing everything else (games included) as kinda a secondary thing, not helped by said games drying up during the Saturn era. This may in fact be the genesis as to why Sonic fans infight so damn much.

Overall? Games mattered most, they are what drives merchandise and spin-off media and everything else. Plus, they came first, so it isn't like a Pokemon situation where the animated series started up before the games came out in the west.

 

From the perspective of growing up in rural Australia, the comics didn't have much of an impact here. Importing American comics wasn't exactly cheap, and during the early 90s recession were not exactly affordable. Outside of speciality stores, the comics industry in Australia was/is basically dead (outside of one stubborn locally produced series of The Phantom comics, that is still going today).

The AoSTH series and Sonic Underground were shown on kids breakfast tv shows, but I don't think they had any particularly strong fan groups. The shows are pretty fluffy and forgettable. SatAM was also shown, but you had to be a super fan to know anything about it. I remember having to sneak out into the lounge room without waking anybody at 6am on the weekend to try and catch the latest episode, and often it wasn't shown because some stupid international golfing tournament ran overtime.

So it was basically the games that people were drawn to. Since the Master System had a stronger foothold in PAL territories, I experienced Sonic's 8-bit games first, and would drool over footage of the 16-bit games in promotional segments of the kids morning programming. I would play the 16-bit games at store kiosks, renting a mega drive once on holiday to play through sonic 2, and would eventually trade in my master system for a Mega Drive bundle with Sonic 1 and 2 (and a t-shirt).

 

For me it was the games, and I did know several other kids at school (90s, in the UK) who played the games. I don't recall other kids ever talking about AoSTH or the comic.

 

This is exactly what I was thinking. In the UK, where SEGA was absolutely on top of the fucking world, I always thought that the cartoons were relatively hard to come by. I was so insanely enamoured with the games and wanted desperately to watch the cartoons, but it always felt like a tall order. Yet once I started browsing the web in the late 90s and joined forums in the early 2000s, I was inundated with Archie and SatAM stuff everywhere. It confused the hell out of me because it was nothing like the Sonic I knew.

This is also where the regional divide comes in, and the Northern American history overshadows everything else.

 

yeah for me it was exclusively the Genesis games too. even during the "drought" era of the Saturn, I still had no problems replaying the Genesis games (or, rather, their PC ports since the air force ruined our hardware physically shipping them overseas) - there was no knowledge of such a thing when I was growing up at that time. we didn't have cable or anything and didn't really watch a whole lot of TV back then, and I wasn't really interested in comics either. None of my friends were into that stuff as well.

when I came across the cartoons and comics because my parents were like "it's Sonic, they like Sonic", I have to confess I didn't like them very much. the OVA on tape however grabbed me really hard, probably because it actually made an effort to try to be like the games instead of whatever the hell the DiC shows and archie comics were doing*. It was never just "I like it because it has the blue hedgehog" for me, the whole package of the characters, gameplay, aesthetic was and is what I find appealing.


*(but additionally, at that time I already had been anime-pilled by Pokemon and Sailor Moon, so I found the anime artstyle much more appealing than the very ugly DiC style and designs)

 

Anecdotally as a millennial who started kindergarten in 1996, Sonic seemed a bit washed up as a franchise, likely due to Saturn not really having any impact in the US (and it barely having any Sonic game of its own anyway). Sonic 1 and 2 were on par with like, Super Mario Bros. or Donkey Kong Country as far as games that "everyone" had played, but even knowing who Knuckles was felt like obscure knowledge. AOSTH was still in reruns locally and I think kids were aware of it, but that was the extent of it.

Online it seemed like SatAM and the comics were the fandom, which makes a lot of sense. The comics were still ongoing, SatAM left off on a huge cliffhanger, there was just way more to talk about and theorize and whatnot, whereas the games were just sort of what they were and in limbo between Sonic & Knuckles and Sonic Adventure. Of course, this was the early days of the Internet, so the hyper-enthusiasts were significantly overrepresented - I really doubt the comics or cartoons were ever truly on par with the early Genesis games in terms of public consciousness.

Once the Adventure games were in full swing, and especially when the games started being ported to GameCube, Sonic X premiered etc. the fandom seemed to move solidly in that direction. The first online forum I was really a part of was Fans United for SatAM, and I definitely recall some animosity there towards the "Sega fans" who were supposedly getting everything they ever wanted whereas the efforts to give SatAM another shake went nowhere. I even remember some peeps turning on the comics once Flynn took over, accusing him of trying to de-SatAMify it by sidelining Sally, Rotor, Bunnie etc., which I think was extremely uncharitable, to put it mildly. By that point though I had moved on from that corner of the internet.

 

In my city, in Spain, usually most kids had the Master System II VS NES and the Mega Drive VS SNES. Both Sonic and Sonic 2 for both consoles were really popular here, plenty of kids I knew played them. The rest of the series weren't as popular, even I was one of the few that ended with S3K.

My order was S1 (SMS), S1 (MD), S2 (SMS), S2 (MD). Then I can't remember if it was either Sonic Chaos or Sonic & Knuckles. Some friend let me play Sonic Spinball, and later I ended with Sonic 3, Sonic CD (PC), Dr Robotnik Mean Bean Machine, Sonic 3D (MD) and the latest one of the classics was Sonic R (PC). I always wanted to play Knuckles Chaotix, but honestly, I didn't knew anyone with Mega CD, 32X or Saturn. All of them were too expensive and games weren't like the SMS/MD ones. Kids who keep at videogames jumped to either PlayStation, N64 or PC. To this day I haven't seen any of those 3 consoles anywhere (except maybe some store).

The first time I saw Sonic was in a TV spot when the game launched here. I fell in love with Labyrinth (not Green Hill). I already had SMS with Alex Kidd and other games, so I ended up with Sonic on SMS first. One of the best days of my life was getting the MD with Sonic 1 (MD).

Here there were tons of cartoons. All channels had cartoons at mornings and evenings, so there were many to see. Aosth, Satam and Underground were here but I didn't like much any of them. The same can be said about the rest of the people I knew, except a friend which liked Aosth. Maybe I knew around 10-15 kids with either SMS or MD gams, but only a few watched the cartoons.

So here the games were huge but the cartoons not so much. Many cartoons were showed here many times, but I think these ones were showed a few times only.

Comics didn't arrive as they weren't localized. I learnt about Archie ones around 2004-2005 and I imported them from around 130+ to the end of the run. I didn't jump to IDW ones, as honestly I haven't found Sonic comics that fun either.

I have played many Sonic games from there, specially on DC, PS2, GC, X360, Wii, PC... But from Generations I haven't found them that fun and I stopped bothering (I finished Lost World which was meh). Mania is awesome though and I have replayed it tons of times. I still replay the classic ones, Adventure ones, sometimes Advance ones and boost ones. I still think Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed is the best kart game ever (replayed it many times too).

 

I grew up in the US playing the games and had never heard of the shows or comics until maybe 2001 when I went on SonicHQ. Even then I didn't watch the DiC cartoons until maybe college.

 

I've always theorized and somewhat-assumed the online "classic vs modern Sonic" wars became so severe because of the online fanbase being so entrenched in the SatAM/Archie mythos during the series's 5 year hiatus.

A lot of my early internet days was spent seeing people bitching about where Sally and the Freedom Fighters are, why it's on Earth with humans / why it isn't Mobius, or why Robotnik's name "changed". The Adventure games just had a completely different thing going on than anything SatAM/Archie was putting down, with differences nearly impossible to reconcile. To Sonic Team and maybe their (small) Japanese audience it was an evolution of what they knew, but to a western fanbase that already had to squint putting Green Hill and Knothole in the same setting, it was a culture shock. It really didn't help that Archie artists (Ron Lim and Art Mawhinney specifically) were really bad at drawing the modern designs, and the things they were worst at drawing (the quill length and taller proportions) became a major pressure point in the fandom on why the new design was so bad. Lest I remind y'all of ye olde "hentai quills" arguments..

Tie all this in with the steep drop in quality after Sega went third-party and I think it's not too hard to see how this all snowballed into the "where it all went wrong" narrative we're so used to today. It's just funny that SatAM/Archie faded out of relevance now; it's kind of a footnote today (outside of people point and laughing at Penders, I guess). I think it deserves more than that if not for it's impact on the early fanbase / online community, but I'm also glad it doesn't have such an immense stranglehold on how people talk about the franchise anymore.

 

This franchise has been part of my life since very little.
My first exposure was 8-bit Sonic1, on a borrowed Game Gear.
After that, my parents gave me and my brother a Master System and Sonic2.
Close friends, at the time, got a Mega Drive shortly after and through them I discovered the 16-bit games of the franchise.
Then the Saturn and later the Dreamcast. Only Sonic CD and Chaotix remained a mystery until mid-teen years.
The comics went under my radar until mid-2000s, when I got good net connection in my home.
The cartoons might've fed my love of Sonic at the time, but now they remain as a tiny piece of memory.
I enjoyed Sonic X at the time, but even that one feels lacking to me nowadays.
Sonic OVA could've been a nice bet, if it hadn't panned at its early stages...

 

Kinda get the feeling this anecdote supports this theory, y'know.

I suppose this isn't wholly related to the thread topic anymore but it's always struck me as odd with how... ravenous(?) a lot of the early SatAM/Archie fans are/were, especially when so much of Archie is viewed negatively in retrospect. Like imagine if characters like Tekno the Canary or Nicky the Hedgehog had fans as loud and weird as some of the worst Sally Acorn ones.

 

As a young kid, I didn't have the spatial awareness to recognize the character in the game to his other media. Sonic 1 on Game Gear was my first exposure to the character, but I didn't establish myself as a fan until I saw a comic in the drug store that caught my attention. I didn't connect that they were the same character until several years later.

I began buying the comics regularly and found out there was a cartoon show which aired shortly after school started so I would hit record on the channel before I left for school and came home with the tape (filled to the end and rewound) would be ready to watch Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.

I eventually ended up with a JVC X'Eye the next Christmas because it was cheaper than buying a Genesis and Sega CD together, along with Sonic CD for me and Ecco for my dad. The games were both too hard for me at that age but I did enjoy the visuals and the music at the time. Over the years I did accumulate more Sonic games, but I did not play them much as I still couldn't get very far. I continued into the comics until after issue 50 and the Endgame saga. The comic had lost focus and direction on the thing I liked "Robotnik loses and Sonic wins in a new way", it was a formula I liked, but the comic was turning into a soap opera and I cared for it a lot less.

I tried picking the comic back up after Sonic Adventure previews were coming out in magazines and again I failed to have any interest in them. After Sonic Adventure came out, I became hooked soley on the games and revisited the old ones such as Sonic CD and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but now we're delving out of the 90's.

In my space of the world, the comics were bigger to me personally. Sonic himself was not popular, if not downright hated, at my schools, so I have very little to share other than my own experience. But my experience should answer your question: Even though I had access to the games, the comic and cartoons were more accessible to me as I got more enjoyment out of them than the games. My parents were always weary of me hooking up the console behind the TV so I did it very infrequently.