GameTap's Sonic Retrospective

[CM August]

Yeah, it it looks like they wanted him to appear more threatening. It worked too, I was quite unsettled by those pitch-black gaping eyes.

[Syntheticgerbil]

I've never understood all the hate for the U.S. Sonic video game covers. At least he still looks like his character, unlike pretty much every game that got imported from Japan to America well into the late 1990's. Yeah he looks better on the Japanese Mega Drive covers, but those "backgrounds" of random swirling shit around him always ruined for me an otherwise good piece of character art (CD being the only non-portable Sonic game until Dreamcast to not do this crap made me happy).

I'll agree that Eggman looked like ass on the U.S. covers, though. Those eyes always bothered me.

Well that's actually the problem, backgrounds aside. The US covers have a really crappy foundation, which would be the characters, which is what the cover should be advertising. If you get some artist who can't draw forms or keep Sonic solid looking and not propped up on an awkward pose, not to mention that weird fat belly, it doesn't matter how much airbrush and background you fill in the gaps with, you've still got an ugly cover.

[Oompa Star]

Yeah, it it looks like they wanted him to appear more threatening. It worked too, I was quite unsettled by those pitch-black gaping eyes.

That's because those eyes will swallow your soul!

[Shadow Hog]

Y'know, speaking of soul-swallowing, I've been trying to remember how much impact we had on that god-awful Tails Doll fad. I know that GG! has said, numerous times, that Tails Doll's eyes do NOT go SCHLUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURPY, but I could've sworn there was a tad bit more to it than that.

Although we're not the ones who made it the overblown POS it now is, certainly, I'm pretty sure we may have started it. <_<

[Popcorn]

It was also in Sega of America's style guide (see the "Sonic Bible" thread) that Dr Robotnik has blank black eyes and no gloves. Those two slight design changes make all the difference.

This was the kind of stuff I used to pick up on as a kid and it used to drive me nuts. (I remember staring at the Sonic 2 title screen printed in the instruction manual for minutes on end, wondering why it didn't look like that in my version of the game.) I've looked up this Sonic Bible thing and it seems to be a bunch of officially-sanctioned fanfiction. Where can I see this SoA style guide you speak of?

On an unrelated note, I had a brief e-mail exchange with Nigel Kitching (lead writer on Sonic the Comic) a few years ago and asked him why they changed Robotnik's design from the black-eyed SoA model to the SATAM/AOSTH version. (My God, I didn't know I still had those acronyms in my brain.) He said "because Sega told us to".

[CM August]

On an unrelated note, I had a brief e-mail exchange with Nigel Kitching (lead writer on Sonic the Comic) a few years ago and asked him why they changed Robotnik's design from the black-eyed SoA model to the SATAM/AOSTH version. (My God, I didn't know I still had those acronyms in my brain.) He said "because Sega told us to".

This is really interesting. I did have a clue already, given the merchandising of the former Segaworld, Sydney theme park that used to operate down here. I also own a few short children's novels that, while ostensibly SatAM-related, feature AoSTH Robotnik's design. But this clears the whole thing up.

On the one hand I'm tickled by the fact that they chose Milton Knight's design to represent the character, but on the other hand he was played as a straight villain in non-AoSTH mediums, the opposite of what the design was supposed to convey.

[Crazy Penguin]

This was the kind of stuff I used to pick up on as a kid and it used to drive me nuts. (I remember staring at the Sonic 2 title screen printed in the instruction manual for minutes on end, wondering why it didn't look like that in my version of the game.) I've looked up this Sonic Bible thing and it seems to be a bunch of officially-sanctioned fanfiction. Where can I see this SoA style guide you speak of?

http://nemesis.hacking-cult.org/MegaDri ... Draft2.pdf

Page 20 of that has Robotnik's colour guide. I misspoke though, his "eyes" (not acknowledged as glasses) are still blue there, but the hands are indeed "tan".

So this would have been "on model" at the time.



Before it the eyes eventually became black for whatever reason.

On an unrelated note, I had a brief e-mail exchange with Nigel Kitching (lead writer on Sonic the Comic) a few years ago and asked him why they changed Robotnik's design from the black-eyed SoA model to the SATAM/AOSTH version. (My God, I didn't know I still had those acronyms in my brain.) He said "because Sega told us to".

I still can't understand what the hell Sega of America were doing with Robotnik. They did away with the name Eggman, but increased the number of egg puns in the merchandise. Then they had two very different Sonic cartoons running side by side, each with two very different designs for Robotnik, neither of which were the video game version.



Even with the westernising of Sonic and some often dodgy artwork the character essentially looked the same, so why three versions of his antagonist active at the same time? Madness.

Even when Sega of America tried to incorporate these Robotnik designs into the video games they didn't really seem to know what they were doing.

The "Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog" Robotnik made it into Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine and the American cover art of Sonic Triple Trouble and the Game Gear/Master System version of Sonic Spinball. Oddly enough the stage title card in the Game Gear version of Sonic Spinball featured a Robotnik head based upon the Saturday cartoon version and the rest of the Robotnik imagery in the game was more traditional.



There was an unused image of the Saturday morning version of Robotnik in the Sega Sonic the Hedgehog arcade game, presumably for an American localised version that never panned out. There was also going to be an entire game based upon the Saturday morning cartoon that ended up evolving into Sonic X-Treme and eventually getting the axe.

The Archie comic book had the Saturday Robotnik, albeit with the black parts of his outfit coloured red, throwing off the balance of the design somewhat.

In Europe the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog model of Robotnik seemed to prevail. I even recall seeing an activity book based entirely on the Saturday show, even including Robotnik's lackey Snivley, but with the AOSTH design of Robotnik.

Richard Elson gave some interesting insight into the design choices for Sonic the Comic in an interview from a while ago.

http://www.stconline.co.uk/back/243/243 ... wzone.html

* Were you and Nigel Kitching planning to use the characters from the "Sonic the Hedgehog" cartoon? I heard that, at one point, Mr Kitching wanted to use Snively.

I rang Nigel to ask him about this. It turns out that when he was sent information about the animated series he assumed that he was to use all of those characters for the comic, so wrote a script with Snively in it. Richard Burton informed him that Sega didn't own the rights to the character as he was a creation of the animation company, so Nigel created Grimer to replace the Snively character in the plot that he had written.

* Before the Sonic CD adaptation, the design of Dr Robotnik was changed to look like the one from "Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog". Whose decisions was it?

The only times I remember costumes being changed without Sega's direction were at Nigel's request. He wanted to change Amy out of the little girl clothes that she wore in the early game designs and originally suggested a Scully (from X-Files) type Trench coat. Richard Burton didn't agree with that idea but was quite happy to get her out of her 'girly' attire. It was also at Nigel's suggestion that we introduced the Sgt. Pepper-type jacket design for Robotnik, for the Chaos storyline. I think Nigel thought that the redesigned jacket from the game [Sonic Adventure] made Robotnik look less of a comedy figure.

I'm quite surprised that Sega of Europe allowed them to just change Robotnik's clothes to the Sonic Adventure version and keep his Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog face and figure. Richard Elson did do a fantastic job of making the character more menacing than his cartoon counterpart in both costume designs though.




Even before the switch to the AOSTH design Elson drew Robotnik as a sort of hybrid version (other artists used the gamey design, sans gloves and glasses). Not sure where he got this model from!