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Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog - Sonic Christmas Blast
Sonic Christmas Blast (1996)
The episode begins with a group of people gathering in the middle of an unnamed town in Mobius as a robot disguised as Santa claims retirement in the yearly duty of sending presents every Christmas, thus giving the role to Dr. Robotnik.
Besides Sonic being the focus of the episode, there's also a lone young boy who curiously takes part in wanting a gift only for Robotnik to want the boy to give HIM one instead. So after getting a punch to the gut, he commands Scratch and Grounder to shoo the kid out, as the scene finally moves on to Sonic, but this is where the Sonic SatAM fans might have thrown a fit.
Sally makes a brief appearance, and her only appearance, in this part of the special. She doesn't have any dialogue either, which is weird but to move things along Sonic explains that he has a plan to get her a present from Robotropolis after she'd given him a ring. Tails tags along and has a different voice actor this time around, obviously because this special aired three years after AoStH. As for Scratch and Grounder, their only purpose is to go door to door to rid houses from citizens who don't give in to the demands of sending a gift to Robotnik.
If that's not an overbite, I don't know what is.
Sonic and Tails find out that all of the stores in the area have been raided of gifts and toys, as the young boy from earlier stops them to give them the news on what's been going on. Of course spilling the beans gets eavesdropped by Scratch and Grounder leading to a cliche commercial break with a giant present spiked deathtrap falling on Sonic and the little boy only for them to make it out alive.
Robotnik decides to have his other lackey robots build chimneys around his fortress, no longer sporting a golden statue of himself beside it as he wants every citizen to send gifts inside of each chimney that's built. As for Sonic and Tails, they just happen to ride a sled to Robotropolis to rescue Santa while fighting off some not-Swatbots. Santa has no real solution for stopping Robotnik, except for Sonic's ring that he got from Sally, or correctly dubbed "Plot device ring".
Santa drags Sonic back to the fortress to show some images on the wall of how it works, as Sonic himself says, "super speed". But to add more time to the special, he's given the challenge of running up a rather narrow mountain and snowboarding down a cliff all the while avoiding any obstacles.
Because animal abuse is funny to the kids, am I right?
And so with the challenges met Sonic delivers every toy and gift back to the homes of the citizens of Mobius, and takes Robotnik's Santa costume leaving him with only his Valentine's heart boxers. Santa goes back into his retirement leaving it to Sonic, and the special ends there.
So what do I think of this special? Well my six year old self would have probably eaten it right up given how much of a gamer I was then. Looking back now it's pretty hard to stomach with its attempts at humoring kids, and the only redeeming quality in my opinion is that it's the last time that we'd hear Long John Baldry voicing Dr. Robotnik. Not a good episode, but not bad either.
That wraps up my last article for this year (pun intended), stay tuned for what I have soon!
munkysrench Posted on Mar 04, 2016 at 04:07 AM
This is one Christmas special I'm glad I missed after reading your review. Good read, bud
Benjanime Posted on Dec 23, 2015 at 08:01 PM
i remember the art designer for the characters, milton knight said that he didn't like what they did with the production of the show. i guess looking at the episodes again a lot of the backgrounds look weird and out of place. i prefer the japanese dub of sonic x than the 4kids english dub, some of the characters tend to make puns too often.
Vaporman87 Posted on Dec 21, 2015 at 05:30 PM
I was never a fan of the AoStH series, as it was far cornier than the other Sonic cartoon series. My favorite American produced Sonic program was the Sonic The Hedgehog series with Sally and the Freedom Fighters. That one had Gary Chalk playing Robotnik (he later played Man-At-Arms in the 200X MOTU series).
But the best Sonic program produced by any country was the Japanese "Sonic X" show.
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