Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Episode 1.10. Big Daddy

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Episode 1.10. Big Daddy

Original Air Date: September 23rd, 1993

Because it was largely written by lazy and bored boomers, lots of early nineties kids media featured parodies to “King Kong.” Though black-and-white monster movies aired on television with a little more regularity back then, I don't think the kind of kids watching “Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog” had actually seen “King Kong.” I didn't see it until I was a teenager but, because references were so omni-present, I was familiar with all the beats. This isn't even the first time “King Kong” has come up on this blog. “Big Daddy” is seemingly covering this oft-trot territory. It features a giant gorilla scaling a tall structure. Just when you expect the over-sized ape to grab a blonde and start swatting at bi-planes, the episode swerves in another direction. This meant that “Kong” parodies were so common at the time, that sometimes shows referenced the movie accidentally.

Anyway, that's not super relevant. In “Big Daddy,” Adam Sandler adopts an adorable moppet... I mean, Robotnik has captured a giant gorilla and outfitted it with a mind-control device. He plans to have the jumbo ape climb the highest peak on Mobius and rain hot laser death on all who oppose him. (Why he specifically needs a gorilla to do this, I don't know.) Earlier, Robotnik had kicked-out Coconuts following an incident where the robot wrecked his Egg-O-Matic. By chance,  Coconuts runs into Boom-Boom, the super strong gorilla child of Robotnik's latest capture. He attempts to convince Boom-Boom to fight Sonic with him. Instead, Sonic and Tails ends up helping the childish ape reunite with his father.

Usually, “Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog” looked like it was animated by the most underachieving of Korean sweatshops. This holds true for the majority of “Big Daddy.” However, surprisingly, the opening chase scene between Sonic and Coconuts is really well animated. There's a real sense of motion to this sequence. The movements are far more fluid and the characters more detailed than usual. A shot of Sonic spin-dashing through the air looks especially good. The Sonic News Network Wiki tells me more time and effort was expended on this episode, owing to the head animator being a deaf-mute. Which I guess explains that. 

The fluidity of that opening chase ends up being the high point of an otherwise dreadful episode. For a series with no shortage of annoying characters, Boom-Boom ends up being one of the more annoying ones. Garry Chalk provides another moronic voice to play the simpleton gorilla. His dialogue is composed entirely of extremely irritating baby-talk. He's not very smart, as he mistakes both Coconuts and a sketchy gorilla suit for his father. The show finds his trademark move – swinging people overhead and smashing them into the ground – so inherently hilarious, that it repeats it several times. “Adventures” being the show that it is, Boom-Boom also sprays Coconuts, outside and inside, with squashed banana guts. It's awful.

Sonic is really only in about half of this episode. For a brief moment, I was hopeful that “Big Daddy” was attempting to summon some Wile E. Coyote energy. In that it would focus on Coconuts' increasingly absurd attempts to defeat an enemy who, with the power of casual surrealism on his side, is unbeatable. Instead, it soon becomes clear that sadism is “Big Daddy's” only goal. We are meant to laugh at poor Coconuts as life continuously subjects him to more humiliations. By the time he was squirming around inside the ass of a gorilla suit with Scratch and Grounder, I was feeling a little disgusted that this cartoon show expected us to be amused by the poor robot monkey's continued suffering.

It's easy to feel sympathy for Coconuts. After all, he's got a bad boss. Viewing Robotnik's relationship with his mechanical underlings as a toxic work environment continues to add a more interesting layer to this poopy cartoon. Yes, Coconuts was wrong to wreck his boss' ride. At the same time, Robotnik's reaction – ejecting the monkey through a window – was perhaps a bit overzealous. And Robotnik isn't a bad boss just to Coconuts either. Once he has the giant gorilla fully under his control, Robotnik similarly tosses Scratch and Grounder. That's just like an employer too, to treat years of loyalty and hard work with nothing but dismissal the minute a cheaper, better option comes along. Truly, even robots are but victims of progress. 

Compared to the fantastical dreamscape that was “Boogey-Mania,” “Big Daddy” is a much more grounded episode of “Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.” Yet even a relatively straight-forward installment like this has a baffling moment. During a chase scene through the jungle, a stereotypical witch doctor – who sounds like an old Jewish comic – pulls a shrunken head out of a cauldron. The shrunken head then comments on the situation, via a lame pun. This gag has no relationship with anything else happening in the episode. It's simply there because, I guess, someone in the writer's room thought it was funny. Once again, “Adventures” commitment to just doing what-the-fuck-ever threw me for a loop.

By the way, this episode's Sonic Sez teaches children the valuable lesson that they should inform their parents where the hell they are going before they wander off. Ah yes, the nineties, when it was still considered appropriate for young children to get into shenanigans totally without adult supervision. It was a different time. As for “Big Daddy,” it is probably my least favorite episode of this god-forsaken series so far. Just painful stuff. [4/10]