Jay aka Disco Ponies is celebrating a milestone here in 2011. Five years ago, The Sonic Show began. Today, its iTunes success and place here at TSS illustrates how far this little podcast has come.
Originally, the show was a way for fans to get media on Sonic the Hedgehog for the XBOX 360. To think that a show promoting one of the shittiest games ever made is still around is beyond me, but that’s what it started out doing. In its first year, the show was in a seasonal, episodic format. The shows were an hour long and were hit-or-miss in terms of watchability, but viewership rose. For the second episode of Season 1, the still-dead Sonic Cage Dome swooped in and picked up the show for the remainder of the season.
Internal difficulties at SCD left Jay looking for a new home for The Sonic Show. With its popularity rising, Dreadknux opted to pick up Season 2 and debuted in 2007 on TSS. Leading up to Season 2, Jay went out to grab original material for the show. He enlisted Double A for the popular Red Hedgehog flash shorts, Cold Dog for “Sonic Blobs” and, uh… me for “Slingerland’s Corner.” With exclusive content packed in its hour-long episodes, downloads and viewership continued to rise.
The seasonal format, however, began to wear on myself and the other content producers. Thus, the current format of individual, short videos was born, allowing people Jay has enlisted to produce and post whenever. This format has proven to be the most popular, with last year’s “Top 5 Assholes” video being the #1 download, garnering over 100,000 downloads. The show in total has been downloaded over one million times.
2011 will be a retrospective year, but there will also be a slew of new segments and the return of segments that have been on hiatus. It started off with a bang with the premiere of the hyper-awful “Return to Little Planet 2″ and Mario & Sonic’s training regimen for the next Olympics game. You should watch the latter because when it tries to be funny, it’s actually funny.
On a personal note, I’d like to express my thanks to Jay for letting me be on The Sonic Show. I was just a moderator at Sonic Fan Games HQ at the time and he just plucked me from there to read letters from dumbasses. The segment that I got to do eventually turned into writing for TSS, then writing for Retro, along with maintenance positions. It also allowed me to make a whole bunch of new e-buds that turned into real-life buds whom I never would have met without this show. All the people I work with in this community are basically the only people I can tolerate, so thanks, Jay.
What kind of segments would you like to see on The Sonic Show for the next year?
