Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Episode 1.21: Sonic Gets Thrashed

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Episode 1.21: Sonic Gets Thrashed

Original Air Date: October 19th, 1993

If you were hoping "Sonic Gets Thrashed" was going to be an episode about our favorite hedgehog absolutely getting the shit kicked out of him, get ready to be disappointed. This one's title seemingly has no relation to its actual plot. Instead, it involves Robotnik planning on building an evil luxury club that will trap and enslave all its visitors. In order to build this, he intends to flood near-by Junk Valley. Which is where all his rejected robots live. Sonic, being on the side of the little guy, decides to help save the village of mechanical mess-ups. 

"Sonic Gets Thrashed" is built upon an unlikely idea: Robotnik rejects malfunctioning robots?! Then why the hell has he been putting up with Scratch and Grounder's ineffective asses all this time? It seems to me that the doctor has really lax standards for what he considers "ineffective." Considering his ruthless nature, why would Robotnik allow malfunctioning robots to continue to exist? Wouldn't it make more sense to disassemble them and reuse the parts? It's almost as if the people who wrote this show didn't really think anything through. 

Mostly, the residents of Junk Valley exist for this show to introduce a whole flock of new, minor characters with incredibly annoying voices. Foremost is Wallace Ditso, a robot that was meant to be a master inventor but none of his machines function properly. He's depicted as a stereotypical nerd who speaks with a wheezing, nasally voice that makes my skin crawl. (And I guess it would've been too on-the-nose to have Jaleel White voice this character with his Urkel voice.) Next is Torch, a flamethrower bot with an anger problem, who has a slightly gruffer nasally voice. I don't know why Robotnik would throw out an angry, flame-spewing robot but never mind that. Let's move on to Wolfgang Puke – the typical level of wordplay you'd expect from this program – an insane pig chef robot who only cooks disgusting food. I think Puke is supposed to have a French accent but it just sounds like someone doing a loud, throaty voice with an indeterminate accent. Anyway, they are all annoying and terrible. You don't really relate to Sonic's desire to rescue this non-island of misfit robots but it is sweet that he immediately feels the need to save these rejects. 

As a comedy, "Sonic Gets Thrashed" is typically dire. None of the joke robots are amusing. The slapstick is pedestrian. But there is one sequence that kind of stands out. While the bad guys are on a blimp, Sonic sneaks aboard by dressing as a pizza delivery boy. What differentiates this moment from a hundred other ones like it is that Scratch and Grounder actually realize they've been fooled. Granted, it's after they already let Sonic inside but I'm still calling this progress. Afterwards, while Robotnik has Sonic chained to the wall, the hedgehog uses some verbal tricks to fool Grounder into freeing him. Maybe it's just because this is an episode about defective robots but Sonic so utterly mindfucking two machines that are just trying to do their jobs feels kind of mean. You are a cruel taskmaster, Sonic, and perhaps you should take it easy on these dingbots. 

In the aftermath of Donald Trump's presidency, we are probably in for a decade of media that signals someone is underhanded and evil by showing them playing golf. Robotnik building his own Mar-A-Lago makes it seem like the episode is going in a similar direction, making fun of yuppies and businessman-types and all that. But the vacation resort ends up being a totally superfluous part of the plot. Instead, Robotnik's mockery comes when he attempts to give a big speech to the local residents. I guess he's hoping to encourage them to join the club but instead spends the whole speech self-aggrandizing his evil ways. Anyway, Sonic and the gang disrupt the rally by cutting in embarrassing personal photos – such as Robotnik in the shower, an image we really didn't need to see – or making the doctor sound like he's saying aggressively bad shit. His evil nature revealed, the audience pelts him with rotten tomatoes and other vegetables. 

If you have any familiarity with the pop culture of the early nineties, you may recognize this as very similar to a sequence from "Batman Returns." There's no harps from hell being played but it's pretty close. Tim Burton's bonkers superhero masterpiece was released in 1992, a year before this episode aired. While the production timeline for animation makes it seem like a stretch that the show creators were directly influenced by this movie, the similarities are a bit too strong for me to think otherwise. Especially considering there's no real reason for Robotnik to suddenly shift between land developer to politician in this story. (Though that is another eerie Trump parallel two decades before it mattered.) Then again, maybe this distrust of glad-handing public figures was just in the air at the time.

 

While I like to give this show some credit for its occasional flash of anti-authoritarian politics, you really can't laud "Sonic Gets Thrashed" for that too much. A story of little guys taking on greedy land developers, forcing them to move, is nice and all. But the "Sonic Sez" segment ruins a lot of that good will. It begins with Sonic and Tails wandering through Junk Valley and Tails asking who's responsible for all this trash. Sonic then says we are and that, if we want to keep our planet clean, we should avoid wasteful packaging and styrofoam. I don't blame the "AoStH" writers for this, as they were surely good natured. But trying to shift the responsibility for global pollution to the individual was a (wildly successful) tactic created by the massive corporations actually responsible for these crimes. The kids of the nineties should've enjoyed their McDLTs and instead screamed at the Coca-Cola Company for the three tons of plastics they dump annually. 

Anyway, tri-weekly political screed over. "Sonic Gets Thrashed" is another mediocre, largely annoying episode of this mediocre, largely annoying cartoon. But I guess I did find something interesting to say about it, considering I just typed 1039 words on the subject. [5/10]