Sonic the Hedgehog (1993), Episode 2.06: Fed Up with Antoine \ Ghost Busted

Sonic the Hedgehog (1993), Episode 2.06: Fed Up with Antoine \ Ghost Busted
Original Air Date: October 15th, 1994

As I’ve mentioned previously, the second season of “SatAM” — while perhaps stronger narratively than the first season — was hassled with some typically clueless executive meddling. At least speaking for myself, kid-me loved the show’s darker atmosphere. Watching this blue hedgehog cartoon made me feel all sophisticated and shit. However, I guess somebody in charge thought the first season was too dark. The second season introduced the frequently cutesy and comedic character of Dulcy. It also included two comedy-centric episodes, both containing two stories apiece. The first of which was “Fed Up with Antoine / Ghost Busted.”

Presumably because he already functioned as the show’s comic relief, both of these segments prominently feature Antoine. After reading the Archie “Sonic” comic for twenty years, where Antoine would grow into a very different character, it can be a bit of a culture shock to revisit “SatAM’s” Antoine. Archie’s Antoine started as a coward, who often covered up his insecurity around his own cowardice with a self-inflated ego. He got over that pretty quickly, growing into the actual brave soldier he always wanted to be. The original cartoon Antoine never got to that point. If anything, he lost ground in the second season. While season one Antoine was occasionally useful, when not being a buffoonish stuffed shirt for Sonic to riff at, season two Antoine is nothing but a grandstanding fool. (Or “fuel,” as he would say.) He’s pretty annoying, honestly.

Which means basing nearly an entire episode around him wasn’t a great idea! But here we are anyway. The first of episode 2.6’s segments, “Fed Up with Antoine,” begins with the coyote and Sonic on a mission into Robotropolis. After a stop by the anachronistic gothic cathedral where Uncle Chuck hangs out, Sonic gets so annoyed with Antoine’s bragging that’s he threatens to leave him there. Later, Antoine asks Bunnie to train him in self-defense. This ends so badly that the former royal guardsman leaves Knothole. He’s soon picked up by a motorcycle gang calling themselves the Nasty Hyenas, who start worshiping him as a king. Antoine, being a bit of an egomaniac, loves this. But the Freedom Fighters soon discover the Hyenas are actually cannibals that eat their kings. Meaning Antoine is soon to be on the menu.

There’s about one really good joke in “Fed Up with Antoine.” While the Hyenas are attempting to cook him, in one of those giant stew pots that seemingly only exist in cartoons like this, Antoine complains... Not about being eaten but about being cooked with a pedestrian spice like pepper, instead of something fancier like paprika. That made me chuckle. Otherwise, the humor is derived here from extremely frantic slapstick. We have a gag like Antoine flailing about ineffectively while attempting to do king-fu. Instead of leaving it at that, things quickly escalate to him tossing a dummy into Sonic’s hut, which gets tossed back out. This kind of manic physical comedy occurs again, when Dulcy ends up wrecking a bedroom at the end. Maybe it’s just because I’m old but I found this stuff a little too aggressively goofy.

And what’s further disappointing about Len Jansen’s script favoring this kind of humor is it would’ve been easy to make a funny episode of “SatAM.” The show has a wonderful cast of fleshed-out characters. Since trying to topple Robotnik can only take up so much of your day, the Freedom Fighters presumably have a lot of downtime. What’s life in Knothole like when there’s no freedom fighting to be done? There’s a lot of potential for slice-of-life comedy there. We even get a brief taste of that. When Bunnie is training Tails, and Antoine not-so-gingerly asks for the same treatment, it’s cute and amusing in a more low key manner than the rest of the episode. I guess asking a kids cartoon to do a funny episode based in character interaction and no-stakes hang-out humor would’ve been too much to ask.

So Antoine’s egomaniac bit grows tiresome pretty quickly and the slapstick is mediocre at best. “Fed Up with Antoine” leaves us with one thing of interest. And that would be the cannibalistic hyena motorcycle gang. Their designs are kind of ugly and uninspired. Their voices are indistinct. (One member seems to cycle from gruff to Australian and back again.) They also participate in the wacky slapstick, when one is knocked over by the odor of Antoine’s feet. Yet I feel like this group of characters had potential. A group of humanoid hyenas who wear leather, ride on hover-bikes, and eat people? Throw in some body modification/mutilation and you’ve got a Clive Barker creation there. While the comic book featured other animal hover bike gangs, they never featured the Nasty Hyenas. Which is a bummer because it would’ve easy to turn these mildly interesting enemies into something much creepier, weirder, and interesting.

The second segment is “Ghost Busted,” which I’ve already discussed a little in the context of its bad comic adaptation. The story concerns Sonic and Tails camping out in the Great Forest, as a teaching exercise for Tails and to facilitate some brotherly bonding. They discover Antoine, who has fallen into a pit of mud and is screaming his head off. They decide to let him tag along. That night, Sonic tells Tails some ghost stories. The first of which concerns an evil spirit that changes into a duck. The second is about a headless horseman/gopher with a glowing medallion. The stories clearly get to Tails, as he has nightmares that night. He wakes up and sees a strange glowing entity, convinced it’s a ghost. Turns out, it’s just Antoine covered in some glowing leaves, a thing that apparently exists on Mobius. But the story doesn’t quite end there either.

“Ghost Busted” features similar humor to “Fed Up with Antoine.” There’s a lot of pedestrian slapstick here, much of it centering on Antoine. There's a mildly funny gag, of Antoine dragging a canape bed on a camping trip and sleeping in footie pajamas. Otherwise, we are expected to laugh at sights like Antoine fumbling helplessly in mud, sucking his thumb, or his repeated mangling of the English language. Maybe this stuff would make a really young kid laugh but I'm betting, even back in 1994, “SatAM” was targeting slightly older kids than that.

The element of “Ghost Busted” that does work, sort of, is Tails being led on an adventure by Sonic. Even by this point in the series – there's all of seven episodes left – the two-tailed fox hasn't done much. So his little camping trip with Sonic allows Tails the chance to shine. The story of a kid getting a little overly excited by a campfire ghost tale, letting his imagination getting away from him and becoming scared by something that's not-so-frightening in the day light, is a classic one. Yet there's an important moment here. While flying around freaked-out, Tails pauses in a bush. He stops and considers the situation, gets his thinking straight. It shows the kid's growing bravery and forethought.

What's probably most memorable about “Ghost Busted” is its, well, ghosts. Or “ghosts,” as it were. Pat Allee cooks up some very goofy, odd ghost stories for Sonic to tell. (I like to think Sonic makes the stories up off the top of his head.) Tails imagines the sinister duck monster as a demonic figure forming in the moon. He next has a vivid imagining of the Headless Gopher, which easily ranks among the odder homages to Washington Irving's seminal ghost story. (And like Irving's story, this episode has an ambiguous ending that leaves the reality of the ghost up to the audience.) Yet neither are as odd or enduring as the image of Antoine, bathed totally in glittery leaves that look like both gold or like fire. Sonic describes these as from a Firefox Bush, presumably because this plant doubles as an adaptable internet browser.

As an experiment, I could sort of see the point of this farcical double feature. Taking a break after the fairly serious “Blast to the Past” two-parter with a breather like this wasn't a bad idea. Not that the show was ever so serious, even in its grimmest moments, that it needed a breather quite this... Breathy. I almost get enough out of 'Ghost Busted” to say I enjoy this episode – also, this episode aired a few weeks before Halloween, which is close enough for me to officially declare it a Halloween special, so therefore I have to at least partially love it  – but “Fed Up with Antoine” is pretty rough to get through at times, if only because it continually pushes that character's most irritating aspects.

And one last thing. The episode ends with a  dedication to Owen Fitzgerald. In the years before the internet came along, such a jovial episode concluding on a black notice of someone's death confused and baffled many a young viewer. Now that the entirety of human knowledge is at the tip of our fingers, we know that Owen Fitzgerald was an experienced layout and storyboard artist who had been working in the animation industry since the forties. He was most prolific at Hanna-Barbera in the seventies and early eighties. “SatAM” was his last credit before his death in 1994 – he also worked on “Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog” and tons of other stuff – and clearly the creative team felt him worthy of a dedication. But, after a light-hearted episode about ghosts, it certainly ends things on a weirdly morbid note. Anyway, I just had to mention that as I know someone would have brought it up if I hadn't. [6/10]