Sonic the Movie may suck but Sonic X is better

... I cannot believe i just posted a message for Sonic: the Movie...

...holy shiiiiiit

Amen to that.

What wrong with anime? Anime is awesome!

Anyway, people who utterly and bluntly throw mud at satam and this obviously disrespect history and sonic's roots,

Ummm... No. Not as far as I'm concerned, anyway.

Here's the viewpoint of a 25 year old who's been with the franchise since 1991:

As far as SatAM goes, plenty of people I've met who throw mud at it have no problem at all with the darkness or the quality of the plot, but do fail to see what turning Tails - Sonic's best friend, tech prodigy and supposedly inseparable sidekick (which Sonic: the Movie acknowledged) - into a ten year old kid who screams helplessly at even the thought of a Swatbot whilst DiC crowbarred their own cast into the limelight has to do with "Sonic's roots".

"Sonic's roots" lie in Japan, and have never involved a bionic rabbit, a comic relief coyote or a Mary-Sue whiny squirrel who gets more screentime and character development than the eponymous lead.

(Ditto fat old owls, new locations or screaming catgirls in this movie, even though I'd say that - with the exception of making Knux a treasure hunter - the character dynamics and general feel of the whole thing were very, very faithful to the source material.)

Even my parents knew enough about the franchise in 1993 to recognise that this had nothing to do with Sonic and kept asking where Tails was.

Even AoStH actually admitted that Tails was a prodigy and let him do things, rather than being basically one big fanfic full of DiC characters - including a walrus who had no other use to the entire plot than to sit around and fulfil that exact function - in which Sonic just happened to feature.

Judged on its own merits rather than as a piece of the Sonic canon, SatAM's a reasonably well-written series with quite high production values for its era, even if it should have had its title changed to The Adventures of Sally Acorn.

But to say that it has any relevance to "Sonic's roots" just doesn't work, when it's only really relevant in the West, and even then (since the Archie comic isn't distributed outside the US and Canada) in limited areas.

Even back when SatAM was first screened - and we didn't know much about Sonic plotlines in Japan - the above facts were still obvious, due to the level of deviation from the games. To say that disliking something for not being canon is disrespecting the franchise just doesn't make sense to me.

I just don't understand this viewpoint that a fan has to sit back and take whatever gets thrown at them just as long as it has the franchise's name on it. For me, it's that exact attitude which encourages sub-standard efforts, because whoever's producing the product knows that it can be as crappy as they like as long as it has Sonic on it (for example: the amount of ported/glitchy games recently, or Sonic Underground).

And for me, that lack of effort is what's really "dissing" the franchise - not fans who actually care about it enough to want to see quality products.

"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
- Tom Clancy

Actually, I happen to be 24, born December 17th 1981. I grew up watching Knight Rider and He-Man. I -HAVE- watched SatAm, infact I watched it EVERY Saturday morning on WCHS (ABC channel 8) when I still lived in Ironton Ohio, it was a decent show (as was Project Geeker, which I also would not remember if I was a 14 y.o.) All I am trying to express is the ultimate superiority of japanese animation over US animation. I remember when anime was this barely-known obscure thing I'd catch on Sci-Fi Channel in the mid 90's. Stuff like Project A-Ko, 8-Man, and Casshern: Robot Hunter.

People actually looked like PEOPLE, and not sh*tty abstract picasso paintings (Dexter, Johnny Bravo, Samurai Jack) or some bubbly inkblot test (Power Puff Girls, which ironically there is an ANIME version of on Cartoon Network in Japan, that blows the original US animation outta the water) I like Sonic X for the fact it is actually done by SONIC TEAM, the people who do these games you all say you love soooooo much. Every character is ripped straight out of a Dreamcast instruction booklet. Tails looks how he SHOULD, flawlessly cute. And Sonic doesn't spout off about chili-dog's in every 5th sentence.

Anime was once underground, now it has encompessed the whole g0d damn globe! Japanese music is taking over America too... I used to love Marilyn Manson and NIN, but now Dir en Grey has taken up all the room in my little fan-boi heart. And I made this comment ages ago before IMDB even started listing Sonic X as a series, I have watched the 4kids dub on Fox Box and I totally regret praising them for buying the rights to the series... THE ENGLISH DUB SUCKS, they tried to de-japanify it. The fansubs that Team-Artail and WolfPackProductions made are a million times better.

You are absolutely right, sir. I couldn't have said it better myself.

[deleted]

Yes, exactly.