Megathread MT | Sonic Prime (Netflix, TV Series) - General Discussion

[Mega]

 

Quote

]I'm gonna piss every single side of this whole discussion off and say I'm not sure if the alternate takes on Sonic are different enough for an Into the Spider verse type joint to be interesting. Ova Sonic is more of a prick and Archie Sonic is more of a flirt but overall there's not enough here that has me aching to see them interact.

As the resident SatAM Sonic nerd, I actually think SatAM, at least is a good example of a very different character. SatAM Sonic, unlike his game counterpart, is not a winner who saves the world on a regular basis. All of his victories for most of the series are small ones. He might blow up a SWATbot factory, or he and his friends might protect some natural resources, but even their attempt to undo Robotnik's takeover ended in a colossal failure.

This is a Sonic who's only known uphill battles, and for as cocky and boastful as he seems, he's also a Sonic who's got pretty deep traumas that a whole episode tackled with nightmares and such, on top of being more emotionally vulnerable. The idea of taking on literal gods of destruction and such and winning- that's the kinda thing that might make him feel jealous or insecure.

Adventures Sonic lives a much more lighthearted life. Robotnik's antics are generally very comical and silly, and while there was that one four-parter with time travel, the scale of the conflicts he's faced were never quite on par with that of the games or SatAM. His Mobius is a mostly happy Mobius, so I could see SatAM Sonic envying him being this world renowned hero whom just about everyone knows, whose world was never fully taken by Robotnik.

Underground I honestly don't remember, but there's the whole royalty and siblings angle, at least.

I only used these examples because these are the IPs Wildbrain owns.

Also like... Ducktor, I'm not a mod, but it's kinda weird how you keep accusing people of being racist or prejudiced for things like being skeptical of SEGA's parent company being so restrictive with the IP and now netflix credits. Just seems unnecessarily hostile.

[Scritch the Cat]

You know, it occurs to me that a big part of why the brand unification push happened at the time it did, is because of the Internet.  Or rather, the Internet getting better.

While the Internet did, in fact, exist when Sonic was first created, it was a pain in the ass to use because it was slow, required you to co-opt a phone line to use it at a time when the phones were much more used than the Internet, and because of the inconvenience there wasn't all that much to see online yet.  Email already existed and of course, it delivered faster than conventional mail, but it wasn't an overwhelmingly popular way to communicate when again, using the Internet was still more trouble than it was worth for many people.  I think that effected how Sonic was marketed and perceived in the 1990s in two primary ways. 

First, at the production level, it just wasn't all that easy to coordinate across countries and time zones how a brand would be presented in each.  When SEGA was finalizing its concepts for Sonic 1, they usually didn't even bother with mail or phones to communicate; they just took flights between Japan and the USA.  That would obviously be too expensive if they did it to make every major decision, so they instead just delegated separate marketing divisions to each territory and hoped for the best.  I just don't think they wanted to find themselves in a situation where the best happened abroad while in their own country sales were disappointing.

Second, at the consumption level, well, what the above resulted in was what we got.  People watching a show or playing a game in one territory weren't likely to see what it was like in another territory.  They had no reason to even yearn for it.  As far as they were concerned, a show or game was what it was anywhere, it was good or it was bad, and if it sucked in their country there was no reason to suspect it didn't suck in other countries.

But as the Internet got faster, more available, and more equipped, that all started changing.  People who didn't know much about Japan still knew that the games and at least some of the shows they loved were made there, and they used the Internet get a glimpse of what was going on there.  It wasn't long before it got blown wide open that many things had been changed quite a lot in their export.  It was only natural, then, that companies were also using the Internet to coordinate better what people saw in every country.  It maybe isn't so much that native branches of corporations got more draconian towards their foreign divisions as that those foreign divisions got downsized and handed less localization tasks as they became less necessary.

But while that much is to be expected, I do think SEGA of Japan doesn't necessarily have a grasp of what makes Sonic its most successful with the greatest number of people.  As I said earlier, it's not just the USA where Sonic is more popular than it is in Japan; it's most places.  Even SEGA of Japan's retool of Sonic in the Dreamcast era probably has more fans abroad than it does in Japan.  So as much as SEGA of Japan is trying, sometimes you have to wonder why. 

There isn't really much argument to be made about artistic integrity, because Sonic was literally designed by committee, in order to make money.  No one person dreamed of making a game about a hedgehog running at mach speed; the whole company sought to make a mascot game that would make its console competitively viable, and as they bounced ideas around, a game about a hedgehog moving at mach speed just fell into place; then a similar process happened to create his world, friends and enemies.  So given that Sonic the game was so much a collaborative evolution based on circumstance, why shouldn't Sonic the franchise be?

I will concede that DIC didn't make a great case for having multiple different Sonic canons by having two different Sonic cartoons made and aired in the same time period albeit on different days.  The idea of a multiverse wasn't all that common back then so that situation presented the brand with an erratic grab bag of things from the games, one cartoon, and the other cartoon when making every new bit of Sonic merch, and DIC arguably made it even worse by making Sonic Underground with its shitloads of DeviantArt Sonic OCs at a time when both the games had developed a big cast and the Archie series had carried on with the SatAM cast.  That was a bigger mess than anyone working on Sonic needed.

And yet!  It didn't seem to hinder the brand's success.  It likely helped turn Sonic into what it still is, whatwith different fans of different segments of Sonic bickering about which versions were best and which versions sucked, but in the case of this brand, maybe it really is true that no publicity is bad publicity...to an extent at least.  Sonic was everywhere in the first half of the 1990s, and even if in most places it wasn't good, that kept everyone talking about it.  Perhaps the reason Sonic has endured so well when so many other totally radical 1990s things have died off, even after some legendarily awful games, is that we've always been laughing at many things about this brand, and that means it fits pretty well into the era of Internet trolling and memes, for better or worse.  And as much as SEGA of Japan might have wished that its revisions about this brand conquered all, its handling of it from the Dreamcast era onward has in itself been so inconsistent and incoherent that it has only added to the gigantic mess of an identity crisis that the brand has had almost since its onset.  People used to say the SatAM cast didn't fit in with the game characters, but then they saw the people in Sonic 06.

I wish that people at SEGA would acknowledge the following.

1) They are not the creators of Sonic.  The creators of Sonic have left SEGA.

2) They have had no flawless victory with Sonic since the 1990s.  A fair amount of fans have always felt left down by at least some games they made since.

3) They by their own admission do not maintain a consistent canon for this brand.  Perhaps at one time they did, perhaps they hope to again from Frontiers onward, but I tend to see this as a result of Point 2.  They keep hoping one of their overhauls sticks and becomes the guidepost for all subsequent games, but until one does, they keep making their overhauls.

Whereas all of the above are true, I declare that SEGA has no moral leg to stand on if they intend to suppress other people's attempts to remimagine Sonic to be more successful, because they, themselves, are other people attempting to reimagine Sonic to be more successful.

 

[Starnik]

49 minutes ago, Scritch the Cat said:

You know, it occurs to me that a big part of why the brand unification push happened at the time it did, is because of the Internet.  Or rather, the Internet getting better.

While the Internet did, in fact, exist when Sonic was first created, it was a pain in the ass to use because it was slow, required you to co-opt a phone line to use it at a time when the phones were much more used than the Internet, and because of the inconvenience there wasn't all that much to see online yet.  Email already existed and of course, it delivered faster than conventional mail, but it wasn't an overwhelmingly popular way to communicate when again, using the Internet was still more trouble than it was worth for many people.  I think that effected how Sonic was marketed and perceived in the 1990s in two primary ways. 

First, at the production level, it just wasn't all that easy to coordinate across countries and time zones how a brand would be presented in each.  When SEGA was finalizing its concepts for Sonic 1, they usually didn't even bother with mail or phones to communicate; they just took flights between Japan and the USA.  That would obviously be too expensive if they did it to make every major decision, so they instead just delegated separate marketing divisions to each territory and hoped for the best.  I just don't think they wanted to find themselves in a situation where the best happened abroad while in their own country sales were disappointing.

Second, at the consumption level, well, what the above resulted in was what we got.  People watching a show or playing a game in one territory weren't likely to see what it was like in another territory.  They had no reason to even yearn for it.  As far as they were concerned, a show or game was what it was anywhere, it was good or it was bad, and if it sucked in their country there was no reason to suspect it didn't suck in other countries.

But as the Internet got faster, more available, and more equipped, that all started changing.  People who didn't know much about Japan still knew that the games and at least some of the shows they loved were made there, and they used the Internet get a glimpse of what was going on there.  It wasn't long before it got blown wide open that many things had been changed quite a lot in their export.  It was only natural, then, that companies were also using the Internet to coordinate better what people saw in every country.  It maybe isn't so much that native branches of corporations got more draconian towards their foreign divisions as that those foreign divisions got downsized and handed less localization tasks as they became less necessary.

But while that much is to be expected, I do think SEGA of Japan doesn't necessarily have a grasp of what makes Sonic its most successful with the greatest number of people.  As I said earlier, it's not just the USA where Sonic is more popular than it is in Japan; it's most places.  Even SEGA of Japan's retool of Sonic in the Dreamcast era probably has more fans abroad than it does in Japan.  So as much as SEGA of Japan is trying, sometimes you have to wonder why. 

There isn't really much argument to be made about artistic integrity, because Sonic was literally designed by committee, in order to make money.  No one person dreamed of making a game about a hedgehog running at mach speed; the whole company sought to make a mascot game that would make its console competitively viable, and as they bounced ideas around, a game about a hedgehog moving at mach speed just fell into place; then a similar process happened to create his world, friends and enemies.  So given that Sonic the game was so much a collaborative evolution based on circumstance, why shouldn't the franchise be?

I will concede that DIC didn't make a great case for having multiple different Sonic cans for having two different Sonic cartoons made and aired in the same time period albeit on different days.  The idea of a multiverse wasn't all that common back then so that situation presented the brand with an erratic grab bag of things from the games, one cartoon, and the other cartoon when making every new bit of Sonic merch, and DIC arguably made it even worse by making Sonic Underground with its shitloads of DeviantArt Sonic OCs at a time when both the games had developed a big cast and the Archie series had carried on with the SatAM cast.  That was a bigger mess than anyone working on Sonic needed.

And yet!  It didn't seem to hinder the brand's success.  It likely helped turn Sonic into what it still is, whatwith different fans of different segments of Sonic bickering about which versions were best and which versions sucked, but in the case of this brand, maybe it really is true that no publicity is bad publicity...to an extent at least.  Sonic was everywhere in the first half of the 1990s, and even if in most places it wasn't good, that kept everyone talking about it.  Perhaps the reason Sonic has endured so well when so many other totally radical 1990s things have died off, even after some legendarily awful games, is that we've always been laughing at many things about this brand, and that means it fits pretty well into the era of Internet trolling and memes, for better or worse.  And as much as SEGA of Japan might have wished that its revisions about this brand conquered all, its handling of it from the Dreamcast era onward has in itself been so inconsistent and incoherent that it has only added to the gigantic mess of an identity crisis that the brand has had almost since its onset.  People used to say the SatAM cast didn't fit in with the game characters, but then they saw the people in Sonic 06.

I wish that people at SEGA would acknowledge the following.

1) They are not the creators of Sonic.  The creators of Sonic have left SEGA.

2) They have had no flawless victory with Sonic since the 1990s.  A fair amount of fans have always felt left down by at least some games they made since.

3) They by their own admission do not maintain a consistent canon for this brand.  Perhaps at one time they did, perhaps they hope to again from Frontiers onward, but I tend to see this as a result of Point 2.  They keep hoping one of their overhauls sticks and becomes the guidepost for all subsequent games, but until one does, they keep making their overhauls.

Whereas all of the above are true, I declare that SEGA has no moral leg to stand on if they intend to suppress other people's attempts to remimagine Sonic to be more successful, because they, themselves, are other people attempting to reimagine Sonic to be more successful.

Sonic was NOT designed by committee. This post is ridiculous in so many ways. 

 

[Scritch the Cat]

4 hours ago, Starnik said:

Sonic was NOT designed by committee. This post is ridiculous in so many ways. 

I have heard a variety of different versions of Sonic's origin story.  Perhaps "designed" was not the right word for this because that could imply the character's own appearance.  But multiple people contributed to the game and its mechanics and world, and there were many “drafts” on the way to the finished product.  In fact, that video you embedded corroborates my point within the first half-minute.

[SolidSurgeTT]

I keep wavering on whether or not Sonic Prime is coming out this year...

[caitash]

The recent teaser trailer specifically said ‘winter 2022’, if it was coming anytime after 31 December 2022 they would have said ‘winter 2022/23’

[Scritch the Cat]

I don't think there's any good reason to suspect it isn't coming this year.  This doesn't come off as the sort of thing that would be so hard to make that it would hit a bump and get delayed.

[Leebo4]

On 9/30/2022 at 10:04 AM, Scritch the Cat said:

Yeah, though to be fair TF’s portrayal of the Mirage Turtles was probably even more absurdly off the mark.  I think TF might as well be awful Internet fan fiction, except somehow made into a movie they expected money for.  And it got away with it at the time because back then people weren’t used to seeing such a story done in movies and TV shows, but now that has become commonplace, so the luster is gone and people expect better, thankfully.  They don’t always get it, but still...

I might not get support for this but to me turtles forever is really good and I find trans dimensional turtles to be pretty lacking, too short, recycled the plot of the other crossover and overhyped 

[Leebo4]

About the redemption themes said in promotional material; what do you think it will be used?

 

will sonic be facing a shadow off his flaws in an alternate counterpart or was it that a mistake of his made the multiversal crisis?

[Rabbitearsblog]

On 10/7/2022 at 11:17 AM, SolidSurgeTT said:

I keep wavering on whether or not Sonic Prime is coming out this year...

They did say it was coming out Winter 2022 and there was just a recent trailer about it.

[KingMario05]

On 10/8/2022 at 12:42 PM, Leebo4 said:

About the redemption themes said in promotional material; what do you think it will be used?

will sonic be facing a shadow off his flaws in an alternate counterpart or was it that a mistake of his made the multiversal crisis?

Probably the latter. The teaser says that he'll "shatter your world," so I'm assuming that whatever he does (or whatever Eggman tricks him into doing) destabilizes the multiverse enough that the Zone Cops/Gods force Sonic to fix it, no matter the cost. Sonic agrees to that in principle, but if he has to choose between the multiverse's stability and protecting his friends... which does he pick?

 

That's my guess, anyway. Personally, my expectations are still on the floor because we know so little about it.

[SanPolo4389]

 

[KingMario05]

Well, there's the date settled. Shame it doesn't tell us much else... assuming that this is even legit, of course. (Something about it just seems... off, to me.)

[The Famous Sonic]

I think it's fake. 

[DaBigJ]

New footage this Thursday 

[KingMario05]

Hell yeah, it's about fucking time! Any word on if YouTube is costreaming?

[The Famous Sonic]

This better have over a minute of footage and show kitsume Tails and prehistoric Amy as well as locations that ISN'T Green Hill and a release date. If it doesn't I'll rage. 

[KingMario05]

4 minutes ago, The Famous Sonic said:

This better have over a minute of footage and show kitsume Tails and prehistoric Amy as well as locations that ISN'T Green Hill and a release date. If it doesn't I'll rage. 

Seems to be a bit much over a (hopefully NOT) crummy Canadian import, lol. But yeah... if this dump ain't a proper trailer, it's either been pushed back to 2023 all of a sudden or time to write it off as yet another failed experiment.

With other companies, that last part is catastrophizing. But with Sega? Ehhh... I wouldn't bet money on it, but also wouldn't be surprised one bit.

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

11 hours ago, Jake_LeOFFICIAL said:

New footage this Thursday 

Well, there we have it. Surprisingly good timing in regards to the proximity of Frontiers' release as well. Keeps that synergy flowing pretty well.

[Shiny Gems]

New posters for the different characters in the show.

 

[Blueknight V2.0]

Honestly think Rouge's design is the best one in the series! But I get why they changed her design tho.

[Kuzu]

Oh wow, Rouge is a major character in this? Feels like forever since she was.

[Soniman]

Rouge’s outfit is fucking awful oh my god

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

There's yet another costume that Rouge has sported throughout the series, lol.

[DaBigJ]

CYBORG AMY

WHAT SHE DOIN'

(Referencing the main poster btw)