Sonic X Season 1

I just finished the first season of Sonic X.

I plan on watching the other two but I wanted to take the time to ingest the first batch of episodes.

When I first discovered Sonic was getting an animation it was in a video game magazine. I wouldn’t be able to tell you which magazine. At this time, this was how we all got our gaming news. Flip through a magazine and read through delayed news coverage. That’s right, things were not instantaneous. Apparently Sonic had an animation running over in Japan. This was exciting to me as I was heavy into Sonic Adventure, so I craved more story. Unfortunately once I sat down and watched its first airing I was not impressed, but thought, ”it’s just the first episode”. Turned out that was the best. At least from what I saw at the time. The more I watched it, the more I realized it was a show for kids much younger than me. I tuned out and decided I had better things to do than to watch the “Chris Thorndike show”. I would see it randomly from time to time and watch it passively but I always knew this show wasn’t for me. Though the space episodes intrigued me. Why are they in space? Maybe I’ll find out later.

Many years later I decided to sit down and watch. I didn’t binge the show. I actually don’t like binging content anymore. I like to give episodes breathing room. To my surprise, this series was not really episodic it’s very much serialized. If you watch it in order changes actually carry over to the next episode. This was interesting and made the stories have more substance. Isolated it was hard to care about all the issues the characters encountered. Honestly 80% of the episodes felt like filler, but in that filler the story did move forward and characters were built up. By the end you knew these characters better than when they were introduced.

I noticed through the season, they would send Sonic on a wild goose chase to take him out of the episode for a bit. Like in ”S01E11 - Fly Spy“, the president sends out a trap to capture Sonic. For this episode he searches for an emerald but Rouge tricks him and leaves him looking for the emerald in the wrong place, taking him out of the story to allow Rouge to be the main character for some time. In this plot Rouge is given time to interact with the human characters, building our appreciation for Rouge and her new companion Topaz. This is the “quiet before the storm”, the next couple of episodes are a big battle against Eggman.

One change I don’t appreciate about this show is the X-wing Tornado. It’s now a generic transformer military grade aircraft. I much preferred the old propeller plane tornado. It had much more character than this futuristic fighter jet. Also, what the fuck, these minors are flying jets and nobody bats an eye. Totally did not realize that. I also never appreciated Tails as a genius fox. I think that is too overpowering as Eggman is already an evil genius. Takes away the wit versus integrity.

Watching this more than 20 years later I can appreciate it more for what it is. I’ve, by this point, accepted that characters’ voices will change. Speaking of voice acting, I can recall the backlash to the new 4Kids voice actors. I was not in that bubble but even I noticed the reduced quality in the voice acting. Tails was very girly (many acquaintances thought he was a girl fox), Knuckles sounds too much like Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh, and Eggman had this undertone to his voice that I hated. This would eventually change for me as now I can’t imagine Eggman as any other voice. Pollock, Eggman’s voice actor, really improved the voice in the 2008 game Sonic Unleashed where Eggman’s voice got a lot raspier. If I was 5 at the time this would have been my show, but I was 13 when it finally aired in the US. I watched this and said this is not for me. Worse than that, the only episodes I saw were the syndicated reruns that seemed to only be the fillers. If the show consisted of episodes similar in scope of episode 1 and the final episode 26, this would have been a much better show.