Earliest Ever Tails Artwork Found

In their effort to preserve and document as much from DiC’s Sonic cartoons as possible, Sonic DiC preservationist @Fieryfurnace has found never-before-seen early Tails artwork, likely the earliest ever uncovered. The bulk of the artwork is from Yasushi Yamaguchi, who originally designed Tails. Two pieces are some turnarounds from Moore & Price Design, while the final piece is a sketch from US Sonic game box artist Greg Martin.

Check them out below.

Yasushi Yamaguchi:

Moore & Price Design:

Greg Martin:

Notably, Yamaguchi’s Tails artwork is less consistent between pieces, and also features a Tails that is far fluffier and furrier than the final design. He gave more details on Twitter:

Quote

These are the earliest character set-up drawings. Since the development period for Sonic 2 was short, we used these drawings as a base and brushed up the design as we created the game.

This artwork was found in a box of Sonic SatAM pilot material that Fieryfurnace paid to have scanned, and then posted to Twitter. These were the reference materials SEGA of America sent DiC during the development of the SatAM pilot, likely as far back as April 1992. You can find out more about their efforts to find and preserve various materials from the Sonic DiC cartoons here.

They’ve said they will be uploading all future scanned materials to a drop box, which you can find here.

via Twitter