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

I've never heard anything about Sonic Xtreme being tied to Sally or SATAM or anything like that. I've always heard that the girl lead for Sonic Xtreme would have been Tiara Boobowski.

 

Sonic Xtreme had the Freedom Fighters in it IIRC around the "Sonic Mars" days. I remember reading early scripts and game design documents about that. They later simplified it to just feature Tiara and her father.. actually wait, I'm not sure if the FFs and Tiara were ever in the same story. Hmm. I'll have to look back at it and see.

 

Fandom Wiki claims Christmas Blast was advertised in Issue #41 of the Archie series as "An X-Tremely Sonic Christmas", however I can't spot said advertisement skimming through the scans (might just be missing it). Sonic does say "Have an an extremely Merry Christmas" and the end, though, that much is confirm-able.

My point about X-treme was more related to how that game being canned and Sally being shunted out of any prominence happened at roughly the same time, whether or not by coincidence.

 

Channel 4 definitely did show the second season. I think it was around 1995.

EDIT: Beginning with 7 April 1996 Channel Four aired "Sonic the Hedgehog" in the Sunday 8:05am (or 08:10am or 08:00am) slot: https://tvrdb.com/listings/1996-04-07#channel4

It ran until Sunday 30th June 1996, a 13 episode run.

The site also lists a run on Saturday mornings around 7am in 1997, the listings keep changing from "Sonic the Hedgehog" to "Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog", it's unclear how accurate those titles are.

The cover date was always a month ahead, so the April 1992 issues were actually published in March 1992.

 

Here it is.

 

Ah, I was expecting a visual advertisement, I overlooked the fan letters. It's just above "Notes from the Net" for anyone else looking.

 

a few years back I was trying out the mobile Sonic port decomps and the one thing that has really stuck with me was how much it bothered me that the fades in and out are wrong - they're just straight to black or white instead of using the blueshift/orangeshift respectively that all the classic games (and phantasy star 2) had.

 

This is the thing, 1996 is quite late - if this is the first run of SatAM on British television, not only is it a couple of years after the important Sonic games, we're into Saturn and PlayStation territory.


I guess we'll have to find old TV guides and see if the synopsis matches SatAM or AoStH... if they bothered to write one.

 

1996 wasn’t the first run. Like mentioned earlier in the thread, in 1993-94 they aired AOSTH for a few months, then switched over to STH, then back to AOSTH.

Sonic the Poster Mag #1 had a feature about how both shows would be airing on Channel 4, with AOSTH described as Series 1 and STH described as Series 2.

 

Hey turns out we live in a world where the scans of Sonic the Poster Mag don't have scans of the posters.


It's very low resolution, so maybe I missed it, but it reads more like "there are two Sonic cartoons" as opposed to being two series of the same show. It suggests Channel 4 has "plans" to show SatAM - it doesn't say when, and as I posted the TV schedules we have suggest AoStH aired all year. Or someone's made a mistake.

That being said, Sonic the Poster Mag #1 supposedly came out in November/December-ish 1993, so it would presumably pre-date the changeover, if it happened.

 

Without wishing to change the subject, because we're talking about these cartoons on British TV... in Portugal AoStH was on Sunday mornings on RTP1 which was followed by SatAM also on Sundays (see https://segaretro.org/File:ClubeSega_PT_Ecofilmes_Console_Catalogue.pdf page twelve)... and as for the topic in question, my first contact with Sonic was his debut on the Mega Drive and then the cartoons that I liked because I was a kid and kids like cartoons... I don't remember any comics, but that may have been my distraction...

Edit: both original versions with Portuguese subtitles as was the custom at the time... Portuguese dubbing was rare in any foreign TV programme... and only became mainstream in cartoons a few years ago...

 

The headings on that page describe them as "Series 1" and "Series 2". We know that's not really what they are, but it's how Poster Mag billed them. The synopses also present a bit of continuity, AOSTH's leading with how Robotnik is trying to take over Mobius, and STH's leading with how Robotnik has taken over Mobius.

We know from AOSTH's bible that it was originally intended to be a loose prequel to STH (before backstory in that show's second season made such a connection impossible). Maybe that's how DIC or Sega presented the two shows to Channel 4 and/or Fleetway?

STH was definitely in that first run. I was there for it. It may be that it was listed in TV guides as Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog even when the shows switched over.



This guy remembers the switchover happening in 1994, with the first STH episode aired being Sonic Boom (which also aligns with my admittedly vague memory of the debut).

I'm also certain that Channel 4 originally aired AOSTH's episodes in production order, at least for the first 5, since I had them recorded on VHS.

There was also a period where AOSTH episodes were chopped into pieces and aired during The Big Breakfast over multiple days. The Thursday 29 September 1994 broadcast had minutes 11-15 of Tails Prevails (production episode 39):

 

Early on they did overlap, yeah. Seems the idea might've been to play it as a bit of a love triangle; IIRC there's even concept art of Sonic getting to choose between Tiara and Sally.

 

Yes, they were described as two different shows. They were also described as "Series 1" and "Series 2", and it was stated that both would be broadcast on Channel 4. So the context is that Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog would be broadcast first ("Series 1") then Sonic the Hedgehog would be broadcast next ("Series 2").

The question that prompted this was whether Channel 4 held off on airing the second show until 1996. Fans who were there say it was broadcast during the original 1993-1994 run. Sonic the Poster Mag #1 is contemporary evidence that those memories are correct.

 

I have no idea if I knew Sonic was a game or cartoon character, but I did get into SatAM first and the games after. Sonic as a character was a real media sensation at the time.

 

Somehow my first exposure to Sonic was Sonic R and I never watched any of the shows until Sonic X came out, and then I started developing interest in the history of things I enjoyed so I grabbed some dvds of the OVA, AoStH and Sonic Underground. I did get really into Undeground for a while as a kid. I just watched the first ep of SatAM for the first time the other day and it definitely shows its age lol, but I was born in 93 so any experience I have would be with the early 2000s fandom which if I recall was basically largely surrounding Adventure/Adventure 2 at that point due to Shadow's popularity. So I guess I'm in a similar boat to you but as far as what I did personally as a fan in the 90s it was mostly just playing Sonic R on my parents' PC occasionally.

 

Hate to break it to you, Hive, but Pengi posted this very video earlier in the thread.