Sonic the Hedgehog & Dragon Ball – Influences and Inspiration

I brought up this similarity in the article. I asked Yamaguchi, who I must reiterate was the creator of Tails, as he has been the most open about the Dragon Ball influences to Sonic and he said that Goku’s tail flight was not factored into the creation of Tails.

He says that for Tails design they were thinking of a way to have a character match Sonic’s speed without looking unnatural. They then came up with the idea to have two tails like propellers in order to keep up with Sonic. In turn they could then make Tails fly in the air like a helicopter.

違います。
もともとソニックと同じくらいのスピードを出しても違和感のない表現方法を模索していたところ、2本の尻尾をプロペラのようにすれば足の速いソニックに追いつけそうだという理由で考えました。
ヘリコプターの様に空を飛べる事にしたのはそれの応用の発想です。
Translation via Google Translate:
No.
We were originally looking for a way to express a character moving at the same speed as Sonic without it looking unnatural, and we came up with the idea that if we made the two tails like propellers, they would be able to keep up with the fast Sonic.
The idea behind making it possible to fly in the air like a helicopter was to apply this idea.
https://xcancel.com/judy_totoya/status/1838792196042141923

https://archive.ph/1ShOE
This same kind of thought process went into the creation of Metal Sonic. In the Sonic CD dev diary video Kazuyuki Hoshino said that Metal Sonic's torso was designed to be a jet engine in order to match Sonic's speed.

This sounds interesting. Do you have any links and sources for this? I would like to know more about this please.

I know Ohshima has already stated that he was not thinking of Goku when he was designing Sonic as people compared Sonic’s quills to Goku’s unique hairstyle but I think the information I have found about Goku’s hair is worth sharing.

I was watching a video by the channel “Casual Anime Guy Explains” which was about Goku’s creation and there is a part where he mentions the design of his hair bringing up a sourced quote from Toriyama

(@15:26)

I wasn’t conscious of this when I made it, but thinking about it now, I suppose it might have been the influence of Astro Boy. The angle of the “horns” and the flat part in the middle look similar, don’t you think? I often receive items that are being released, like figures; I really admire how the sculptors are able to bring out that hairstyle in three dimensions.
-Dragon Ball Full Color Comics: Freeza Arc Vol. 5
https://web.archive.org/web/2024030...color-comics-freeza-arc-vol-5-akira-toriyama/

I recommend watching the entire video. It was done very well.

I am also aware that Yamaguchi dispelled the connection of the Chaos Emeralds and Dragon Balls but I would also like to share something I have read. There was a theory that loosely connected both of them in order to make the comparison and that is that the reason they are called Chaos Emeralds is because apparently dragons have been historically symbolized as chaos.

Here are some articles about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(cosmogony)

https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/56042

https://www.theosophytrust.org/705-dragon

From the research I found that Tiamat seems to be the most associated with chaos:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tiamat

https://www.worldhistory.org/Tiamat/

https://arsgoetiademons.com/blogs/s...-the-primordial-goddess-of-chaos-and-creation

I’d like to point out that Sonic 3 planned to include a dragon. There are 3 instances were the dragon was shown:

1) In a concept art for Mushroom Hill Zone at the bottom of the page you can see a layout where there’s a mural with a dragon on it:
https://web.archive.org/web/2023060....net/images/a/ad/Sonic3_Level8_ConceptArt.png

2) A colored concept art of Super Sonic fighting the dragon seen in the MTV Rock the Rock special:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230508192739if_/https://i.imgur.com/c1rkwKI.png

https://web.archive.org/web/2024073...rf.net/images/4/4d/S3_Doomsday_ConceptArt.png
Also note that the color of the dragon appears to be golden like Super Sonic

3) The Japanese manual mentions the dragon. In it Knuckles thinks the crashed Death Egg is the egg of the dragon:
Knuckles walks out of the altar, stunned.
Then, as he gazed helplessly into the distance, he noticed something eerie appearing around the lake.
Knuckles felt a shiver run down his spine when he saw the huge round egg-like object.
"That big egg is the legendary dragon's..."
The egg must be the one that brings misfortune to the island, as depicted in the legend on the altar of the Chaos Emeralds.
https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_3/Manuals

It seems like the idea of the dragon eventually became Perfect Chaos in Sonic Adventure.

It turns out that Naoto Ohshima was the one who designed Perfect Chaos as he shared this concept art on his Twitter account:
https://web.archive.org/web/2023082...m/media/C8fxqANUMAESv5R?format=jpg&name=large

https://web.archive.org/web/2021100...el.com/NaotoOhshima/status/848912772741988352

More recently with Sonic Superstars the character of Trip becomes a golden dragon when all the Chaos Emeralds are collected for her.


Year of the Dragon artwork by Ohshima:
https://web.archive.org/web/2024100...m/media/GCr1Zsna0AAzeP5?format=jpg&name=large

https://xcancel.com/NaotoOhshima/status/1741474031839367642

https://archive.ph/ORlfD

Is it possible they went back to that initial golden dragon concept art from Sonic 3? They did reuse a piece of concept art for Sonic 1 depicting a golden landscape and distinctive loop for Golden Capital Zone

Also Trip is a Sungazer Lizard and according to Wikipedia they are also known as the “giant dragon lizard”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_girdled_lizard

It is an intriguing theory and connection as to why the Chaos Emeralds have chaos as its name.

 

I have finished updating a lot in this article. Particularly adding in more images but mostly adding more in the section about Shadow and especially the section where I brought up the now debunked claim of Super Sonic’s green eyes in the Sonic 3 sprites being a palette error. I demonstrate a lot of posts that brought up the claim to show how prevalent the misinformation had spread.

In that section I also brought up counter points for the people that were using the larger, more detailed sprites of Super Sonic with black eyes as supporting evidence for the debunked claim. These are the Super Sonic sprites from the data select portrait, the ending poses, and even the unused slot machine icon. In the article I attempted to bring up reasonable explanations as to why those sprites had black eyes which I will write here in this post as well as I want to share my findings.

The unused slot machine icon had black eyes because as it turns out in the prototype the slot machine bonus stage was already being worked on.


This meant in turn that the Super Sonic icon was made at time in development when the Sonic 2 sprites were still present and the icon was likely being based off of that design.

Something also about the slot machine icons is that in the prototype they look much better in comparison to the final release


Apparently according to The Cutting Room Floor this was because "colors in the object palettes had to be shuffled around to accommodate both the rings and the updated slot machine, resulting in the slots themselves losing some of their details"
https://tcrf.net/Proto:Sonic_the_Hedgehog_3/Stage_Differences/Other_Stages#Slot_Machine

I was more speculative with the data select portrait sprite but what I said is that it had to have been made some time just after the Sonic 3 prototype we have but before the final build since some of the zone portraits still reflect their prototype designs.




As the prototype, again to reiterate, still has the Sonic 2 sprites then the Super Sonic portrait was going to have the black eyes then.

I would like to point out that the Flying Battery portrait is an exact match for one part in Act 1 of the prototype. The only thing is that the tops of the capsules hadn’t been put in yet.

Without a proper timeline of development or other prototype builds we won’t know for certain when the actual data select was implemented.

The Sonic 3 ending pose sprite turns out to seemingly have been based on the data select portrait.

Here is a GIF for comparison:

It looks like the ending pose sprite was made after the data select portrait as another ear was added on the right side.

I don’t have a reasonable explanation for the Sonic & Knuckles ending pose sprite. Perhaps it had black eyes to be consistent with the Sonic 3 ending pose. Overall that’s three out of four sprites that have some sort of reason for why they have black eyes.

At the time of writing this article I had forgotten to mention one aspect of Tails that Yamaguchi brought up in his Sonic 2 30th anniversary thread. Yamaguchi said that he was inspired by the character Myau from Phantasy Star.
中さんの方から「うる星やつら」に登場した純情キツネなような可愛らしいものにしたいというオーダーが来て出来上がったのが彼。
最初尻尾一本だったけれどインパクトが弱かったのでファンタシースター1に登場したミャウをヒントに2本の尻尾にしてプロペラのように使うアイデアが出来た。
Naka-san requested that I make something cute like the innocent fox that appears in “Urusei Yatsura” and that’s how this character was created.
At first it had only one tail, but it didn’t have much impact, so I got the idea of making it into two tails and using them like propellers, inspired by Myau from Phantasy Star.
https://x.com/judy_totoya/status/1594372826269900800

Yamaguchi actually had drawn the character Myau for a Phantasy Star manga that appeared in volume 6 of the Sega Players Enjoy Club (SPEC) magazine from 1990. His design for Myau in this manga looks really similar to Tails so the idea of a two tailed animal character seemed to have already been in the back of Yamaguchi’s mind.

https://retrocdn.net/images/3/3e/SPEC_6.pdf (Page 88 in the PDF)

Speaking of Yamaguchi, I asked him about that comment he made that when they were making Super Sonic they were considering making the form glow seven colors which sounded very close to what became Hyper Sonic. He didn’t really provide anything substantial but I suppose it was worth trying to ask anyway. Here was his response if your curious
ソニック3以降の開発には関わっていない為その件に関してはわかりません。ソニック2では容量節約のため、色変えるだけでスーパーソニック状態を表現できないか試行錯誤していた時の案の一つです。
I haven’t been involved in the development of Sonic 3 or later, so I don’t know about that. In Sonic 2, to save space, we were trying to see if we could express the Super Sonic state just by changing the color, and that was one of the ideas we had.
https://x.com/judy_totoya/status/1859091817905664496

https://archive.ph/bmS8F

While Ohshima may not have worked on Sonic 3 he must have been in contact with the team developing the game as he said he heard Michael Jackson’s demo tape for the soundtrack.

I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly but I recall reading somewhere that while Sonic 2 and CD were both in development each of the teams would exchange messages to know what the other was doing. Perhaps I may be wrong about this though.

I may know what you are referring to but just to be clear do you mean this document?

Thanks for providing a link to the video. I can understand a good amount of Spanish so I watched the video. It was very interesting to see the discs he had in his possession. The room they were in looks pretty cool too.

That is more than likely crediting Uekawa for the base form design of Chaos

More recently Ohshima has actually brought up about working on the opening movie and even showing storyboards for it
https://x.com/NaotoOhshima/status/1886817324587737205

https://archive.ph/VGLTo

https://x.com/NaotoOhshima/status/1891767562884743570

https://archive.ph/T0zJ2

https://web.archive.org/web/2025030...m/media/GkDokeUaAAMUTXS?format=jpg&name=large

https://web.archive.org/web/2025030...m/media/GkDokeTboAAtdmm?format=jpg&name=large

All that aside I think that just about wraps up all the major updates for this article at the moment until any new information comes out. Time moves on so quickly since it's getting close to a year since Toriyama's death was publicly announced.