BW Media Spotlight

Well, it looks like this two-parter just became a three-parter. Blame Japan and Jetix.

In 1996 an animated Sonic movie, simply titled Sonic The Hedgehog: The Movie, was released in Japan, hitting US shores on home video in 1999. It’s…not very good, but it would be the last animated Sonic and Tails adventure until 2005, when TMS Entertainment, a Japanese animation studio who has worked on many US productions at least as far back as the 1980s if not earlier, brought forth Sonic X, featuring brand new adventures of the Sonic crew, this time on Earth. 4Kids Entertainment would dub the show as part of the “Fox Box” programming block they ran on Fox Kids’ Saturday Morning lineup.

The series follows our heroes and villains as an accident during another Sonic/Eggman battle (this would be the first time Doctor Robotnik was called by his Japanese name in the US extended media unless the comics beat them to it) sends the gang to Earth. There Robotnik continues his goal of world domination and destroying a certain blue hedgehog. Our heroes team up with Chris, the son of rich and famous parents, and his family and friends as they tried to stop Eggman and deal with other situations on Earth. The next season would feature Chris ending on Sonic’s world (the name “Mobius” is now a memory) just as Sonic and friends go into space to help a girl named Cosmo free the universe of the Metarex, with Eggman following to cause more mischief.

Japan would, per usual, produce two intros, with 4Kids creating their own. That would already make three intros total but Jetix, an international channel and distributor who also had a programming block on certain ABC and Disney networks in the US, decided to create their own into. Yes, I ignored international intros for the DiC shows (though I did find Portuguese intros for Adventures and SatAM in my searching) but since I now have to give Sonic Boom it’s own entry thanks to all the Sonic X intros, why not?

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