Sonic Boom, Episode 1.04: Buster

Sonic Boom, Episode 1.04: Buster

Original Air Date: November 15th, 2014

The fourth episode of "Sonic Boom" begins with its heroes, seemingly, in their natural environment: Fighting some wacky new evil robot Eggman has made. After defeating the machine, Sticks is tasked with rescuing a cat stuck in a tree. Her solution is to shake the tree until the cat falls out. The rest of the team decide Sticks needs some sensitivity training around animals and figures her getting a pet would be the best solution. That's exposure therapy, I guess. Yet Sticks dislikes the traditionally adorable options available at the pound. Instead, she bounds with a robot dog who constantly vomits and leaks green slime everywhere. She names him Buster and immediately falls in love with him. Everyone else, of course, finds Buster disgusting and intrusive. Oh yeah, he's also an evil robot created by Eggman. Which becomes a real problem when the doctor activates his murderin' instincts. 

We are only four episodes into this show and, given the short runtimes, we still don't know a lot about these particular iterations of the "Sonic" gang. Yet we know even less about Sticks, because there was no prior version of the character to compare the wacky sitcom version too. Aside from her conspiracy theorizing and unpredictable quality, what defines Sticks? This episode seems to suggest that she was raised in the jungle, maybe explaining some of her eccentric behavior. But it really seems her aggressive weirdness is her most prominent characteristic. This is why she goes nuts for Buster, a critter that is obviously repellant to everyone else. Sticks just doesn't like cute puppies and kittens. She loves gross shit. You could definitely read into that and see Sticks as some Keaton-esque outsider who is a contrast against the polite impulses of society. But "Sonic Boom" isn't that kind of show.

It's also, up to this point, not the kind of cartoon I would expect to impose a moral lesson on the children watching... Except this episode kind of does. See, I recently made the decision to bring a puppy into my life. Meet Spooky. She's adorable. She's also a massive amount of work. It's taken some time to break her of the habit of randomly pissing and shitting around the house. Maybe it's just cause these things are on my mind lately but: Buster's habit of excreting a viscous green fluid at all times really reminds me of the rigors of house-training a puppy. The climax of the episode involves Sticks finally imposing some boundaries on Buster, disciplining an unruly new pet that requires those lessons. 

If “Buster” is an admittedly tongue-in-cheek attempt to teach kids about how new pets are a lot of responsibility, it kind of blows it at the end. There’s a joke at the beginning about how building evil robots is just what Dr. Eggman does. When it’s revealed that Buster is one of those evil robots, Sticks makes the hard decision to send him packing, back into the wild. I get that “Sonic Boom” is a sitcom and status quo is king, so Buster obviously couldn’t stick around for long. Yet it’s weird that they explicitly wrote him out of the show, instead of just not referencing the little guy again after this. That ending makes the episode’s moral seem like “If you can’t train a new pet quickly, just give it away.” This is not a great message to tell kids. I know I'm probably (definitely) thinking too hard about this but it’s still a weird ending. 

Obviously, Sticks loves Buster, finding the traits that repel the others charming. But what do I, the viewer, think of Buster? Well, he's more cute than disgusting. He's dog-shaped but made from random objects. His nose is a lightbulb. His body appears to be some sort of toolbox. His tail is an old-timey crank and his feet are little plungers. He's rusty and discolored but overall still more cuddly looking than grotesque. His behavior is written as very puppy like, in the sense that there's no malice behind the misdeeds he wreaks. His habit of pissing and puking globs of green shit all over the place could easily be mitigated with training and Sticks just needs to be firmer. (And her friends just need to be more patient.) The joke probably would've been funnier if Buster was genuinely ugly, if Sticks was over-the-moon for this horrible little goblin. The most off-putting thing about Buster, truthfully, is how badly animated his green slime is. The way it sluggishly plops through the air looks like something out of a PS1 game. I still generally dislike the stiff, weightless, crunchy animation of this show. 

Overall, this is probably the least funny episode of "Boom" I've watched thus far. It starts out with some strong gags. The evil robot in that first scene is dressed like a firefighter but actually sprays fire. Amy points out how counter-intuitive this is and Eggman – who is still denying at this point that the robot is his – says that's entirely the point. Instead of just leaving that one-liner there, the script runs with the absurdity of a reverse firefighter. He doesn't save a baby from a burning building, he attempts to put a baby into a burning building. He doesn't get a cat out of a tree, he puts one up there. It's a simply enough structure but, honestly, made me chuckle. The show could've taken this bizarro logic even further and given him a black dog with white spots or have him chop down a large axe with a small door. Go even further into that silliness. 

Instead, most of "Buster" sums up why "Boom's" humor doesn't always work for me. This is an episode that does a joke and then draws attention to it. Knuckles makes an obvious, goofy pun about "firing" the robot. Sonic then repeats the joke later, getting praised for it where Knuckles' quip was ignored. There's a scene where Cubot and Orbot rob an inexplicable warehouse of villainous resources, a gag that definitely needed to be way subtler to work. The best example of this occurs at the end, when Buster goes fully evil and attacks Sticks. She seeks to remind him of all the good times they had together. What follows is a montage of events that never happened, like the two performing in a circus or discovering some sort of ancient temple together. That's a good joke! Sadly, the script doesn't let the absurdity of that moment ride and has to have Sticks throw in a line about how she "doesn't remember that stuff either." Or the very last scene where, after going through this whole ordeal with Buster, Tails immediately decides a giant octopus is the pet for him. This is punctuated with an unnecessary gag of the cephalopod attacking Tails. The episode seemingly has to draw attention to its own jokes, as if it doesn't trust audience to grasp the absurdity on their own.

This is episode is all the more disappointing, especially because the previous one was the funniest installment of "Boom" yet. Oh well, can't win 'em all. I think the premise of "Sticks becomes enamored of a horrible pet" is amusing but the execution fumbles it. As I progress through "Sonic Boom," I guess I'll see if this is a regular problem with this cartoon or dependent entirely on who the writer was that week. It's still better than any of the "Sonic Underground" episodes that feature the characters getting splattered with slime, which I'm thankful for. [5/10]