Michael Jackson 1958-2009 - His Contribution to Sega

Michael Jackson has just been confirmed to have passed away tonight in a hospital in L.A. at the young age of 50. No matter what you think of him as a person, he was an incredible talent and for those who were kids during the 80's and 90's: his music was a huge chunk of our childhood.

And as any Sega fan would know, Michael Jackson and Sega got along rather well, collaborating on many projects such as The Moonwalker arcade, Mega Drive and Master System games..

..not to mention his supposed involvement on the Sonic 3 soundtrack.. (click image for the video)

More after the jump..

More Sega Pirate TV ads!

The British Sega TV ad campain from the early 90's is under rated on this here internet of ours. Fussy old clips of the American Sega commercials from the same time are everywhere for all to see, but the UK ones are harder to track down. Thanks to the odd Youtuber such as SegaMarkUK and Chrisofthetube though, they are slowly all being dug up again so they can give a new generation of viewers a good headache or a healthy old seizure. To say many of these make little sense and are batshit insane is probably a bit of an under statement.



First off, some huge budget epic, probably shown at half time of footie matches, that has Pirate TV regular Steve O'Donnell AKA Spudgun from Bottom fighting mutant pigs using a mega Drive II and games like Street Fighter II and Shinobi III amongst others, with the mega CD 2 thrown in for good (or bad, which ever way you look at it) measure. "This is the end!...and this is the other end!" Yes, I have no idea what they were thinking with this commercial either.



As if that commercial wasn't baffling enough, here's one for Sonic Spinball that blows your brains out with subliminal nonsense before finally showing off the game itself, all flashing by with rock music in 20 seconds flat.



The Mega Drive Aladdin game next, and much like the last one it whizzes by so quickly you barely get a chance to take anything in. It kind of looks like an episode of the Games master on fast forward. In this case the American ad was actually better because you know, it made sense.



This rather earlier one, when the campaign was a little less noisy, has that bloke on the rotating chair telly thing again talking us through the first Sonic game, which then goes into some odd ninja action scene and some guy that sounds a bit like Benny Hill talking over the top with Monty Python style animation.



Finally, an extended and very high quality transfer of that Mega CD commercial I linked to before, with a whole lot more brilliant animation of the skull character and more shit interactive games being shown off. £270? No wonder no one bought the bloody thing. One again, I have no idea what's going on by the time it goes into some war movie parody, but then again, either do the guys singing in it by the sounds of it. I think this could be the explanation as to way Sega eventually went close to bankruptcy, this commercial must of cost a bomb.

Random odd fact: While Sega had Steve O'Donnell as a regular for their 90's ads. Nintendo in the UK went with another star of Bottom: Rik Mayall. Oo-er.

A Goldmine of Sega Marketing waffle!

UK: Resistance, the original Sega nutters website and one of the main inspirations behind this blog, have stumbled across a video that pretty much sums up everything that made Sega so huge in the UK back in the 16-bit era, particularly in 1994. This two video spilt into two parts for Youtube and submitted there by Shenmueaddit, gives us a glimpse into all the marketing pies Sega had their fingers in at the time, from TV commercials (Remember the Pirate TV campaign I told you about? You'll see more of it here), radio competitions (Sonic CD music on the radio, folks!), merchandise, that awful Right Said Fred song, the Sega tour buses, the food promotions (Sonic tomato ketchup!), even the sponsorship with Damon Hill!

This, my friends, is why Sega ruled the world (or at least the UK), during my childhood. These videos pretty much sum up what this blog is all about, and the exact kind of content I've been looking for. If anyone can recall and bring up details on any of the stuff seen here (like photos, videos, magazine scans etc), please send it my way and I'll be more than happy to share it here. =)

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.

The Sega Logo Project

This video has been posted all over the place now, but I just can't not post this here. The Sega logo at the start of every Mega Drive game was possibly one of the main reasons the Sega brand became so well known. You ask any casual gamer who was raised in the 16-bit era, and they'll likely tell you they used to have "a Sega" rather than "a Mega Drive". Well this video has 143 different game intros of the Sega logo, even some from the Mega CD, 32X and Game Gear.

Almost all of them do something unique with it, ranging from tech demo like special effects to the game's main star interacting with it (with the best example being Vectorman, which actually let you control the character, jumping and shooting at it for as long as you please) and even some unique screams of the brand name (such as the Jurassic Park one with a T-Rex growling 'SEGUUUAHH!"). Some games even had more than one that would play at random each time you switch on the system (For example: Eternal Champions and Bonkers). These didn't just come from Sega's own games either, as all the third parties joined in on the trend too, giving the Mega Drive versions of multi format games something unique over the Super Nintendo or Amiga versions. This was in the days before consoles would have their own specific logo which would play every time you turn on the system. It's a real shame this individuality was lost to slapping a flat logo that sits on the screen for a few seconds with all the copyright details. Enjoy this wonderful display of what made Sega special in the early 90's.



Oh, and just in case there's a game within the video that you can't quite name, InfiniteContinues, the creator of the video has posted a entire list of the games featured.

P.S: There is also a website called Whip Ass Gaming who did a whole collection of animated GIFs of the Sega logos(many with the sounds too) which can be viewed HERE. Funnily enough both are called "The Sega Logo Project". How great (Sega Fanboy) minds think alike =)

Pirate TV: Best Sega Europe Ad-campaign ever.

A La Kat Food? Ecco Washing Powder? The Cyber Razor Cut? What the bloody hell am I talking about?

(Click for a news snippet out of...where else? Sonic the Comic. Issue 2, to be precise.)

More after the jump..

Educational Outrun and False Advertising

Those Sega Tour Buses

Now this is one of those 'When-Sega-were-big' things I never really got to experience, mainly due to the fact that the ruddy things never came down to Essex, but here's a little look at the rather funky tour buses that drove about the UK throughout 1994 and 1995. All these scans came from issues of S.T.C. Click to enlarge them.

More after the jump.