Sonic Underground, Episode 1.40: Virtual Danger
Original Air Date: October 22nd, 1999
To this day, there's still a lot of misinformation out there about "Sonic Underground's" series finale. It's a popular fan theory that the show was canceled abruptly. This seems to explain why "Sonic Underground" only ran forty episodes, as opposed to the sixty-plus run of the previous syndicated "Sonic" cartoon, and why it ends without a proper conclusion. Despite the urging of the theme song, the vow Sonic and his siblings made that their mother would be found would go unfulfilled. This rumor continues to circulate to this day, even on otherwise creditable sources like the Sonic News Network Wiki. Considering the show was under-publicized at the time of airing and never all that popular, an abrupt cancellation seems totally plausible.
Yet this is not the truth. Ben Hurst, in a 2008 Q&A, explained that forty episodes is all that was ever planned. This raises the question of why DiC ended "Sonic Underground" without concluding the story. We don't know if they were hoping for a second season or if they just wanted the show to air forever in syndication in a continuous loop. Unless someone tracks down one of the bastards who produced this show for an interview someday, we'll probably never know. Either way, "Virtual Danger" – the fortieth and final episode – would not see the prophecy come to life.
If not about the triplets being reunited with their mother and defeating Robotnik forever, what is "Virtual Danger" about? Playing video games. Sonic and Manic have become fixated on a VR game called Castle Conquest, which involves flying jets through a 3D castle. They form a rivalry with another player called Destructo. Sonia doesn't think this is a very productive use of their time but it actually prepares them to remote pilot the shipping convoys the Resistance has been ripping off. Their victory is short lived, as Sonic and Manic soon learn Destructo is actually Robotnik. The entire scenario has been an elaborate trap. It's up to Sonia and Cyrus to save their asses.
In the nineties, as gaming rose from a niche hobby to a billion dollar industry, there were a lot of well-intentioned but hopelessly uninformed concern about the technology. Parents saw their kids obsessed with these noise-making boxes and got worried. This was mostly based in a boomer fear of new technology, with some good old fashion scapegoating and xenophobia thrown in. (It would actually take another generation before gaming started turning kids into psychopaths.) Out of this concern arose a number of hilariously out-of-touch stories about how gaming was bad. Low budget horror movies like "Brainscan" or "Arcade" and mediocre episodes of "The X-Files" and "Star Trek" pushed the narrative of "if you die in the game, you die in real life" into the mainstream.
"Virtual Danger" has a lot in common with those types of stories. Eventually, Sonic and Manic are literally sucked into the game, where their lives are in danger. How this is possible isn't really explained and it's just one example of how this episode doesn't really understand gaming. Destructo can also send files to Sonic and Manic through the game, when it doesn't quite work that way. Mostly, you have to laugh at how a VR headset and some controllers create a completely immersive experience for Sonic and Manic. It's been almost twenty-two years since this cartoon aired and they still haven't figured that shit out. Lastly, with its single level and simple premise, "Castle Conquest" doesn't seem like it would be a very fun game. It's pretty obvious Ben Hurst and Pat Allee didn't play many games themselves.
Misunderstanding the technology the episode is ostensibly about is not the most vexing thing about "Virtual Danger." More annoying is that Robotnik once again displays his incompetence here. If he's able to play online with Sonic and Manic, and send them files, obviously he's hooked up to their computer. Why not just use that to track where they are? Wouldn't that be easier then sucking them into an elaborate simulated reality? Imagine that: Sonic and Manic are just playing their game when Robotnik swats their asses with SWATBots. Despite going to all the effort to create this technology, he doesn't use it very well. If Sonic and Manic are sucked into a perfect simulation that Robotnik controls, why doesn't he just immediately crush them? Why does he give them a chance to run, to fight back, to escape? How did this incompetent buffoon ever take over Mobius?
There I go again, actually exploring the episode's premise in a meaningful way. Let's talk about what "Virutal Danger" does and not what it fails to do. Destructo has one of the worst designs in this show if hideous characters. He looks like the inbred offspring of some "Doom" demons. Somebody – I'm assuming Maurice LaMarche – gives him a Woody Allen-style voice, I guess to emphasize the stereotypical nerdy gamer image. There's a minor plot point about how Sonia can't just unplug the console, once Sonic and Manic are sucked in, which is an amusing and certainly coincidental parallel of "The Matrix." The action scenes, especially the moments devoted to Sonic piloting the shipping shuttles, are poorly animated. It's almost amazing how this show routinely took potentially exciting action scenes and rendered them boring via utterly lifeless animation.
Since we are at the last episode, it's time to confront the last song of "Sonic Underground." After the mission, Manic lays down and takes a nap. He dreams a scenario where Sonic, Sonia, and Manic fly through "Castle Conquest" on hovering disc and play their instruments. Which means the surreal quality of the musical number is justifiable, for once. As for the song itself, it's not too annoying. "Don't Let Your Guard Down" has a kind of catchy synth backing track. The lyrics, which talk about standing up for yourself in a sometimes cruel world, are a smidge darker than this show's music usually is. Sonic's singing voice has gotten slightly less nasally and annoying as the show has gone on. Compared to some of the terrible fucking musical dreck "Underground" produced, this song is one of the better ones. At least we kind of went out in a high note, in that regard.
As I said earlier, "Virtual Danger" provides nothing in the way of finality. Aside from her opening monologue, Queen Alena isn't even referenced in this episode. Neither are Sleet and Dingo, so maybe Robotnik finally fired/Roboticized their dumb-asses. Hurst does bring Cyrus back and even references the events of "Come Out Wherever You Are," so there's a little bit of continuity here. While it's hard to know for sure if anyone knew this would be the show's last installment, its final moments do feel a little significant. Sonic crashes some shipping convoys into Robotnik's tower, exploding it. He then proclaims "Game over!," before the show dramatically irises out. If they hadn't included Robotnik crying out in annoyance after his fortress blows up, you could almost believe the villain is killed in this scene. That's the closest "Virtual Danger" comes to a climactic moment for the whole show.
Now that I think about it, doing an episode about how playing too many video games is bad for health for a show based on a video game is amusingly ironic. Did Sega know, or even care, that this cartoon they lent their mascot to was encouraging kids not to play games? But I suspect, once the licensing deal was done, Sega didn't pay much attention to "Sonic Underground." If I've learned anything from running this blog for five years, it's that Sega let overseas licensors do almost anything with their characters in the nineties. And let that – a complete lack of effort and oversight from people at the top – be the epitaph for "Sonic Underground." I'll save the rest of my closing thoughts on this program for next time and just say, for now, that "Virtual Danger" is indistinguishable from most of "Sonic Underground's" episodes: Sloppily written and animated in service of an unrelated premise, resulting in a grating and mediocre product. [5/10]
You know, if season 3 of Satam have been produced, would have this bad animation? Granted, Satam was animated by Saerom while Underground was animated by Hong Ying, and have different character designer
ReplyDeleteIt might have, especially if it had been produced instead of Underground. But it probably would've had better writing, which would go a long way to forgive bad animation.
DeleteI wrote a long comment here, did blogspot eat it, or is it still being approved?
ReplyDeleteDo you want me to retype it, I'm ok with that?
Here's the retype, took a while to do, so I hope you like it.
ReplyDeleteRobotnik’s yell of "Hedgehogs" at the end sounds like Mr. Wilson yelling at Dennis or Dave yelling "ALVIIN", basically it sounds less like an dictator screaming in rage about his base being damaged by rebels and more like a bumbling dad angry about his kids playing a prank on him.
I can’t remember where right now, but I read that Sonic Underground ended like this in case another season would be ordered, which sounds reasonable.
Cartoons back then rarely had televised finales, especially if they were over 13 episodes. Another DIC series, I read about, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, was only allowed to write an ending in a movie if the series was successful enough. So Sonic Underground not planning to have a conclusion in an episode sounds about right.
It makes SatAM’s ending look better in hindsight as they did make a lot of progress in the finale even if there was a final cliffhanger.
This episode’s aesop is suspiciously like Shadow Claw from Double dragon by DIC, which was also by Pat Allee and Ben Hurtst. That episode also had a gamer plot and the heroes being trapped in virtual reality.
However the aesop there was much clearer that playing video games is cool, the only problem is if you’re not doing other activities and indeed the kid was still a gamer at the end of the episode.
So not only was the last episode, a non conclusion, it was an inferior rehashed script too!