Sega Magazine Highlight: Sonic Merchandise Showcase

One of the best articles (at least for this blog) that I found in my new collection of the official UK Sega magazine was this two page article about Sonic Merchandise from Issue #5 (from May 1994). It shows off tons of the Sonic toys, clothes, stationary, books and even food from the era, most of it I either had (and in many cases still own) or at least remember, with many things I forgot all about but this article sent memories flooding back! Best part is they even tell you where to buy them and how much they were!

In particular interest (for me anyway) is the food items, as for obvious reasons next to no one would have thought to keep any of the packaging for that. I was a Sonic collector even back then, but I wasn't that sad! I do remember sticking the crisp packets into scrapbooks though. Who remembers the Daily Milk Easter Egg? The Chocolate rolls? How about the MEGA MILK, which sounds a bit too close to Chemical Planet Zone's purple water of death "Mega Mack"?

One thing I defiantly don't remember is the official Birthday cake from Sainsburys. For one of my birthday's I had a basic chocolate cake that had Sonic Pogs decorated on it. My mum knew exactly what stuff from this she bought me back then, including some of those daft looking trainers! Also lol, they don't know who Sally Acorn is.

BONUS! Found a news snippet in issue 8 featuring another Sonic food stuff I forgot all about...toffee biscuits! How exciting!

S.T.C Streets of Rage Comic Online

One thing I quite enjoyed about Sonic the Comic in it's early days was how there was stories based on a whole slew of Sega's most popular games at the time (and even a few based on third-party games from EA and Konami). One of the earliest to appear in Issue 7 was Streets of Rage, which went on to receive a three stories (one for each game I presume) and even a book collection.

This website called Geekenvy has some great Sega related articles and has also uploaded scans of the first Street of Rage story in all of its glory, written by Mark Miller and Illustrated by Peter Richardson. Considering the game's simplistic story and the fact that they could only get away with so much in a children's comic, they did a quality job on this.

If you want to download any of the S.T.C comics in their entirety, there is a complete archive over at a website called Tails.Kicks.Ass.net, though you have to sign up to download anything.

Japanese Sega Art Book of Sheer Beauty Part 2: Scans!

As I promised here are some full scale scans from that wonderful Sega game illustrations book.

Here's a scanned example of one of the pages, which not only contains all that lovely felt-tip pen colored art from Sonic 1, but also talks of the characters' "charming and saucy nature". Hmm. No doubt the PAL Sonic 1 box art was nicer, though. More scans after the jump.

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.

Been there, done that, worn the t-shirts.

Why just play Sonic games, read Sonic books and comics, listen to Sonic music and use Sonic shampoo when you could also wear Sonic clothes to really show Sega owns your soul? I know I had quite a lot of Sonic clothing when I was a kid, that's for sure. I remember having a jacket covered in Sonic patches when I was about seven, and when I grew out of the jacket I had my gran stitch the patches onto a new jacket. I can't remember a time I didn't have any sonic shirts, I made sure my mum bought the ones they only did in adult sizes long before I could fit in them, presuming I'd still want them once I was in my teens. I remember having some of the T-shirts shown in this ad I found in an issue of S.T.C.

I had that one in the bottom right corner for sure. That one was great because it was all pixelated up like the first game and has the Lives/Score/Rings hud on the arm. I remember also owning a Spring Yard design of some sort that had Sonic transforming from his sprite to full artwork while bouncing off a spring. It was awesome.

More after the jump..