Sonic Mega Mix DVD Provides an Uneven Animation Sampling

While SEGA Memories hasn't written about a Sonic cartoon DVD in quite a while, mainly because everything has already been released to DVD, an interesting single disc release of Sonic cartoons caught my attention. Single disc releases of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) and Sonic Underground are nothing new. The studio which owns the English language Sonic cartoons have been making an number of these budget releases, either giving a random selection of SatAM episodes or collecting story arcs into a single disc set, such as AoStH's time travel story arc (well worth the $6 in my opinion) and Sonic Underground Secrets of the Chaos Emerald (collecting all the Knuckles episodes).

AoStH 3 - Cover Art and Release Date!

Exciting news for Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog fans in the United States, the Volume 3 DVD has been given a release date as well as cover art. TVshowsonDVD.com broke the details:

This past December we broke the news that Shout! Factory's new "direct to consumer" online sales program would exclusively be offering The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog - Volume 3 on DVD. This 4-disc set finishes off the run of the popular animated series, which was spun off from Sega's classic videogame character.

AoStH Volume 3 DVD Spindashes into Early 2010

TVShowsonDVD.com has recently reported that the long awaited third and final volume of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog will be released sometime in early 2010. Unlike the previous volumes, volume 3 will be exclusive to the Shout Factory online store. The reason for this exclusivity is that previous volumes did not sell well in retail, so to save some pennies the set will only be available in one place.

DVD producer Brian Ward assures fans that this will still be a factory produced DVD and not a DVD-R like the on-demand shows coming from Amazon.com. As for the packaging and extras, nothing has been revealed just yet. There is a chance that in cutting costs, the set might be reduced to being in a simpler DVD case, but the menus and video quality will remain the same. I've e-mailed Milton Knight to see if another drawing lesson or the recently released pilot footage will appear. If he writes back, I'll post it here.

Edit: Milton wrote back! There is a possibility that volume 3 will contain an additional bonus feature! I won't spoil it here as I don't want to overstep anything between Shout Factory and Milton. ;)

Volume 3 will be the final batch of 90's era non-Japanese Sonic cartoons on DVD

European AoStH fans who have the region free complete series are probably wondering why us Yanks won't just import that. Well, the Americans who already own two-thirds of the series probably would prefer to just get those final 21 episodes online within the country rather than rely on international ebay auctions.

The Adventures of Sonic Cartoon Pilot in full!

Speaking of Milton Knight, who I obtained that brilliant painting of Robotnik from recently, just this week he has provided a youtuber with the pilot episode, which we previously saw chunks of, and of which some scenes were inserted into an episode of the actual series. Being a pilot that was made to sell the cartoon idea to the execs, there is no music and a lot of dialog missing, but what you will see is some truly stunning animation unlike the final product, due to this being produced in-house in America rather than outsourced to Asia. That and the animators are none other than Milton Knight and Ed Love, who's animation carer goes all the way back to the 1930's at Disney. A (almost) complete credits list is featured in the video's description.

Other things you may notice are that one scene was used as the credits sequence in the series, Robotnik is voiced by Jim Cummings instead of Long John Baldry, and there are a lot more nods to the games, such as a scene set in Green/Emerald Hill zone complete with the iconic loop and Robotnik's ball and chain weapon. Oh, and the shot at 0:27 was recreated on the continue screen of Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. There's even a Sonic Says scene at the end, which shows that that idea was there from the beginning. It's a real joy to watch, and it's just a shame the whole series couldn't look this good.

Robotnik Painting by Milton Knight

(Copy and paste from my personal blog, because it's relevant here too)

Well lookie here what showed up in the post today! A painting of Dr.Robotnik by Milton Knight that I purchased from him just last week! I bought a frame for it and it's currently sitting proud above my computer. He had three different pieces of art for sale on his website although I'm not sure if the other two are still available. Either way it's my first piece of original artwork by a professional animator (one who I've talked about on here many times before, mainly for his work on the 90's Sonic cartoon) so I'm happy. Oh yeah, and i contributed a little bit to his Robotnik Toy Chest page. :)

Here's a clip of the man sketching out a quick Robotnik for an extra on the American Sonic DVD. Look how expressive his drawing is in such a quick sketch!

The Nostalgia Critic digs his teeth into the Sonic Cartoons

Oh boy, after the Nostalgia Critic did a video about the mario cartoon, I was hoping he may do one for the Sonic cartoons (The original two, Sonic X and Underground are null and void) and here it is! He rips the shit out of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, particularly about how it doesn't make any sense, but loves SATAM to pieces. As much as I disagree on his AOSTH opinion (it was awesome because of how screwball it was!), it's a bloody entertaining video (as his vids always are, give his website a good hard look if you haven't already) so give it a watch already!

S.T.C Scans: Videos, Yoyo's and Milky Way Bars

I've made a start at scanning anything that people may find interesting (or not) from my collection of Sonic the Comics, starting with the many Sega and Sonic tie ins advertised. These first 4 are all the adverts I could find for the VHS releases of the cartoon Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. Much better box art than the lazy work on the recent DVDs.

More after the jump.

The Sonic cartoon that never was.

...and ain't you glad it wasn't? Just look at those awful supporting characters! 'Princess Acorn', presumbibly a early design for who later became Princess sally in the 'SATAM' cartoon, looks far too much like a slutty Princess Toadstool from the Mario Bros cartoons (also developed by DIC), Poker Lewis has been turned into some kind of punk, and Johnny Lightfoot also has shades, for some reason, and I don't even know what they were thinking with the others. A walrus called Joe Sushi? Tex the Penguin? A Flicky in some kind of white suit? Even Sonic himself doesn't look quite right, and where's Tails? More after the jump..

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog on DVD

The time around 1993 to 1995 was huge for Sonic fans, including myself as a wee lad. Not only did they release a truck load of games for the many Sega systems out at the time, but you could buy Sonic as almost anything, even spaghetti! One of the biggest things to push Sonic into stardom in these early years was the release of not one, but two completely different TV cartoons, which appeared on the scene no more than a week between each other. Named 'Sonic the Hedgehog' and 'The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog', the two cartoons have are affectionately known as 'SATAM' (Saturday morning) and 'AOSTH' so as not to confuse their similar titles.

This was an in-genius idea on Sega's half; instead of going for one particular style of cartoon, risking the chance of losing half an audience, they had two series' produced that would appeal to different audiences, so Sonic could potentially appeal to any kid. SATAM went for a deep continuing story with a dark edge to it much like other favorites of the time like Gargoyles and Batman, whereas AOSTH was a more slapstick Looney Tunes like cartoon with lots of daft animation and gags.Both were developed by the same studio - DIC, known best for Inspector Gadget, and they made yet another Sonic cartoon in 1999 (just before the Dreamcast released in the west) called Sonic Underground, although to be honest I didn't like that much.

While I have a soft spot for SATAM, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog is the cartoon I remember best from my childhood. This is mainly because in the UK most of the episodes were released on video, and I owned the lot of them. They also showed the two cartoons regulary on a channel called TCC (The Childrens Channel) where they would often get the intros and credits of teh cartoons muddled up sometimes, so you'd think they were about to air an episode of SATAM, but after the intro a AOSTH episode would pop up. Weird. This is the one Sonic cartoon that seems to keep springing up on TV as well. It was most recently screened on ITV2 and a kids channel called POP.

I have wrote about this cartoon a few times before at my personal blog, mainly because a guy who worked on the series, and designed this cartoon's cone headed version of Dr.Robotnik, Milton Knight, has posted some wonderful concept art he did for it as well as some early footage on YouTube. Please make sure you check out all these blog posts HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE. Being a big fan of both Sonic and good animation in general gives the series a double interest to me even now, not just when I was a tyke.

Just this year both of these cartoons have been released on DVD, and this week I got my hands on the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog box set, which contains every single episode on 8 discs, a run time of 24 hours! The box set takes up the same space on a shelf of just one of the ten or more videos I had as a kid! Ain't technology wonderful?

The discs are packed in 4 extra thing DVD cases, 2 in each. One thing I can't congratulate them on is the lazy presentation. The box and discs use the same artwork of Sonic over and over again, and they haven't even drawn him well! For starters, his arms are blue rather than the skin tone they should be, and his shoes are all wonky looking at the bottom. Even the logo is squashed to buggery, and the back of the cases has artwork of the WRONG Robotink, it's the more menacing Robotink from SATAM rather than Milton Knight's crazy lard-arse. Compared to the wonderful presentation of the original videos this is just plain amateurish. There is a set of stickers in the box as well, again using artwork from the wrong cartoon. Doh!

The interactive menus on the discs themselves also leave a lot to be desired, with no extras and dull layouts. They also haven't really gone into any effort to re-master any of these cartoons, but these be honest it's hardly considered to be an important cartoon so it was obvious they were not going to bother. The company that has put this out have done the bare minimum but it's the content that counts in the end and there's a LOT of it. Some episodes are clearly better than others, but the cartoon is just as daft as I remember it, with it's surreal backdrops, occasionally great animation (again mainly thanks to Milton Knight's input) and plenty of laugh out load moments, wrapped up with a forced moral at the end of the episode. I'm sure you've all heard of the 'Sonic Sez' clip in which Sonic teaches kids about sexual harassment. In case you've never seen it, here is is!



The RRP of the set is about £35, and Play.com sells it for £28, but HMV.co.uk has this week been flogging the set off for just £13, so I naturally jumped at that bargain! It's still that price right now, so if you're interested now would be the time to go get it! They also do a DVD set in America that is only 4 discs of the 22 episodes, but has a few short extras that you can find on Youtube anyway. Oh, and it has nicer box art but that's about it.