Sonic 'Toons And Me: Part Three: Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog

I'm pretty sure this one aired alongside the SatAM series.

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog was shown on weekday afternoons, usually in an after-school timeslot, whereas the SatAM version I talked about last time was shown on, well, Saturday morning, but I've been over that.

These two shows may have been airing the first time around the same time, in the early to mid 1990s. I knew about SatAM right from the start, but I didn't happen to stumble across Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, or AoSTH for short, until after the fact. This would have been sometime in 1994, I believe, because I remember that it was before I got my driver's license in 1995. I really only bothered trying to watch a few episodes of this one at the time because it was vastly different from the SatAM version, to the point of having a completely different target audience.

That's not exactly a bad thing, mind you. I might have been a little old for SatAM when I was watching that, but I was really too old for AoSTH at the same time. AoSTH was more in the “adventure of the day” genre, much like almost all of the Mario cartoons out at the time. I might do something about all one of those I watched later, but for now, I'll focus on Sega's Blue Blur.

When it came to watching AoSTH, all but the most basic of the things I might have expected from SatAM were gone. We had Sonic, of course, and his little buddy Tails the Fox, who were facing off against Doctor Robotnik, but beyond that, it was an entirely different world. There were, from what I can recall from various attempts to watch more in the twentysome years since, no continuing storylines, no characters who returned for more than a handful of episodes, and even then, usually only on a sporadic basis. Even the art style was vastly different.

There's really not much more to say about AoSTH than I already have. Pretty much all the episodes I remember at least trying to watch followed pretty much the same storyline, in that Robotnik and his two robotic flunkies Scratch and Grounder try to do a thing only to wind up foiled by Sonic, Tails, and the guest heroes of the day. Wash, rinse and repeat for somewhere in the area of 60 episodes, I think, though I could be wrong.

I'll give you that this wasn't especially bad for something meant to keep the kiddies entertained for a half hour after school. It just wasn't particularly memorable, either, compared to the ones either side of it, from my perspective.

From what I understand through reading the Drazen reviews I mentioned in the previous installments of this series, I guess they did try doing this in the Archie comic for awhile, and it didn't work out so good. That's understandable, really, because the original continuity of the book and AoSTH were reasonably different types of things, and fans of the comic book had good reason to not really want to stray from the original continuity, on account of quite a lot of reader loyalty having been built up in that over the years.

This is not to say that it's completely impossible to successfully blend the two styles, of course. I'll get more into that in the next part. Until then, stay Sonic, everyone!