Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Episode 1.40: Zoobotnik

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Episode 1.40: Zoobotnik

Original Air Date: October 8th, 1993

As I've pointed out before, "Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog" contributed roughly a hundred new characters to "Sonic" lore, as the writers would often throw some random numbskull into the stew to generate a new story. Most of these characters were never seen again and are forgotten by all but the most hardcore "Sonic" obsessives. However, a few would become small-time cult favorites. The comics resurrected Von Schlemmer, Wes Weasly, and Breezie to minor acclaim. Breezie, being a female Sonic character, was already a point of fixation for a few fans. The other minor "AoStH" character to be fondly recalled by some psychos is Katella, for reasons that will become all too obvious in a minute. Her only appearance is in "Zoobotnik," an episode I'm not sure I've ever seen before. 

Fuzzy animal people and other assorted weirdos all over the planet Mobius are disappearing. Sonic at first dismisses this news as media sensationalism but changes his tune after Tails is snatched right in front of him. After Coconuts spies a UFO, Robotnik soon deduces that Katella the Huntress is responsible. She is an intergalactically renowned alien, who collects creatures from different planets and imprisoned them in a space zoo. Robotnik invites her to dinner in hopes of forming a partnership. This works too well, as Katella immediately falls in love with Robotnik, smitten with his evilness. She's actually too much woman for Robotnik to handle but he tasks her with catching Sonic anyway. Sonic soon realizes he can use Robotnik's psychotic would-be fiancée to his advantage. 

Mostly as a joke, I've made repeated comments about how "Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog" accidentally triggered a hundred fetishes in budding young furries, "Zoobotnik" suggests the fetish-y undertones were never an accident. Katella is a realistic looking cartoon woman, far more vividly animated than most of the show's characters. She's about seven feet tall with blazing red hair, Christina Hendricks-ian proportions, and a smoky voice. Her standard outfit is a low-cut jungle woman dress and blue high heels. Other costume changes include a bikini bottomed conga outfit and a low-cut wedding dress. Surprising absolutely no one, Katella has spawned a mountain of fan art, some of it rather clever, most of it way too thirsty to share here. 

The occasional horny character design is not totally unknown within nineties kids cartoons, because these shows were all drawn by lonely nerds. But Katella really takes it further than that. She's a thinly veiled dominatrix. The episode's central joke is that her affection for Robotnik is so overwhelming, she physically smothers him with attention. She's constantly beating him, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes intentionally, which he doesn't enjoy. More than once, she's depicted squeezing his head between her legs or putting him in a chokehold. A series of frames are focused on her heels, which trampled on Scratch and Grounder, who are transformed into a welcome mat. Robotnik even refers to her as an "Amazon" while Katella talks about "wrasslin'" with him. Her violent actions, collecting habit, sudden attraction to big fat stupid Robotnik, and domineering personality all make the sexual preferences of the people who made this episode clear. Kids would never catch this stuff but anyone with a passing familiarity with porn – so every adult alive now – would recognize the intent behind these moments. Yeah, the show runners definitely got horny on main with this one.

Wholly inappropriate horniness aside, "Zoobotnik" remains a very strange episode. Every single installment of "Adventures" features Robotnik being humiliated but this one is laser-focused on it. The central joke could have been funny, as Robotnik desires control but Katella undermines that at every turn. However, the show repeats this gag – a terrifying woman loving Robotnik so much, she kicks his ass every minute – until it loses all value. After a while, it just looks like the writers thought spousal abuse was inherently hilarious. (I was hoping we'd get a tin-earned "Sonic Sez" about domestic violence but, nah, the writers focus on an unrelated moral about being cautious around strange animals.) 

And it's not like we've never seen Robotnik emasculated by a frightening woman before... Something this episode is all too aware, as it ends with Momma Robotnik stepping in and fighting Katella. She doesn't want her son marrying some space bimbo, causing the two ghastly women in Robotnik's life to duke it out. Katella isn't willing to put up with such a horrid mother-in-law, bringing this episode to an end. (Sonic called Momma Robotnik, so he's partially responsible for resolving the story even if it mostly wraps itself up.) As if this episode couldn't get any more uncomfortable, we have an extended cat fight between two unnecessarily busty characters. Katella and Momma Robotnik represent opposite ends of the dominating woman spectrum, proven by Momma Robotnik ending the episode by spanking her son. But I really don't want to talk about this anymore. 

Anyway, let's change the subject please. Alien abduction was a point of cultural fascination in the nineties! Even before "The X-Files" got huge, abductee stories and Roswell conspiracies were common in that decade. "Zoobotnik" is this show's spin on that topic. Katella's saucer even resembles the infamous Phoenix Lights sighting that would occur in 1997. But an alien collecting other species is a not-uncommon sci-fi trope. (The Archie Sonic comics would do their own riff on the idea two years later.) While this is ostensibly the premise of the episode, the focus soon turns more towards Katella beating the shit out of Robotnik. We never even see Katella's zoo and the premise is really just an excuse to get this wildly out-of-place character on the show. 

The extreme weirdness of this episode continues throughout. The style of gags are a different breed of zaniness than usual. Sonic runs into a swami on a mountain and an obese Tarzan lookalike throughout the episode. The Mobians we see in this episode look like more traditional funny animal characters, very at-odds with this show's usual style. The character animation is, in general, far stretchier than usual. Katella bends Robotnik into all sorts of goopy shapes. Sonic and Tails stretch and squash and squat throughout in disturbingly vivid ways. While Katella is realistically animated otherwise, even she gets squished into a heart shape a few times. The final scene features Tails flying around with Sonic's ass clenched in his teeth, a gag that raises a number of extremely distressing implications. 

In other words, "Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog" continues to find new ways to baffle me. This is another aggressively weird, off-putting episode that manages to be aggressively weird and off-putting in markedly different ways than the previously aggressively weird and off-putting episodes. I can see why it's memorable, even beyond the obvious fan service appeal of Katella. It's not like any other bit of "Sonic" media out there, even within this very odd iteration of the franchise. Even though I didn't enjoy this, on account of it making my skin crawl continuously through its twenty-minute run time, it's too unforgettable for me not to give it a middlingly positive score. [6/10]