Sonic Boom, Episode 1.18: Dr. Eggman’s Tomato Sauce

Sonic Boom, Episode 1.18: Dr. Eggman’s Tomato Sauce

Original Air Date: March 21st, 2015

As the rather plain title of this episode makes it clear, the eighteenth installment of "Sonic Boom" concerns the blue hedgehog's archenemy branching out in a new direction. Eggman begins selling a canned tomato sauce. Everyone in town is eager to try it but Sonic and the gang assume the villain's newest venture to be some sort of evil scheme. To their shock, the tomato sauce is totally safe to eat and delicious to boot. This seems to redeem Eggman's image in the public's eye, much to Sonic's annoyance. That's when the mad scientist reveals the truth: The sauce is safe but the cans are evil robots. They awaken when no one is looking and reprogram household appliances to be evil Eggman robots. Now Team Sonic has to undo the villain's latest plan before he totally takes over the island. 

"Dr. Eggman's Tomato Sauce," at least at first, seems to return to one of "Sonic Boom's" funniest subversions of the superhero/supervillain relationship. Eggman's goals are far pettier than world domination. In the first half of this episode, it seems Eggman simply wants to hurt Sonic's ego. By reinventing himself as a celebrity chef, Eggman quickly becomes a beloved public figure. Soon, the rotund doctor has seemingly eclipsed Sonic's own level of celebrity. He mocks the hedgehog's appearance on television. While signing an autograph for a child that Sonic at first assumed was one of his fans, Eggman asks "whatever happened to that guy." None of this stuff is evil. It just wounds Sonic's sense of pride, greatly annoying him. A villain devising a scheme with no other motive than to simply irritate his archenemy is a pretty funny idea. 

Of course, that turns out to not be Eggman's goal. Or, at least, not his only goal. Once the reveal comes that the cans are actually the devious part of Eggman's latest plan, the episode shifts focus. Now, we get several sequences of common, household appliances coming to life and attacking people. A lamp entangled the person sitting next to it. A toaster sprouts spider legs and shoots toast at people. A vacuum chases off the woman using it. This is a much more standard supervillain scheme. In fact, it's so standard that Eggman has tried something similar before... On "Sonic X." The season two episode, "Huge Home Electronic Panic!," doesn't feature tomato sauce but it does have Eggman reprogramming everyday electric devices to be his evil minions and reek havoc on the public. 

I don't know how aware the "Sonic Boom" team, much less writers Alan Denton and Greg Hahn, were of "Sonic X." I imagine the similarities are probably coincidences. Yet this still results in an episode that starts out feeling like a subversion of traditional action/adventure cartoon premises and then becomes a fairly standard example of just that. There's definitely some absurd comedic value in watching people be terrorized by mundane household appliances. Yet the scenes of Sonic and the gang smashing machines, stopping the bad guy, and saving the day are played fairly straight. And once you factor in "Boom's" rural setting and the limitations of its CGI animation, it can't even feel as wide in scope as "Sonic X's" take on the same idea. 

Aside from the obviously goofy idea of Eggman using pasta sauce as a major element of his latest evil scheme, the other main joke of this episode concerns Tails. The engineering fox is introduced installing powerful speakers in his airplane. From there, it's made increasingly clear that Tails is infatuated with his airplane. When Knuckles teasingly asks if Tails loves his plane, he flatly responds that he does. Obviously, this is meant to poke fun at guys who baby their automobiles as if they were their girlfriends. When Tails starts talking about giving his plane "her propeller-to-tail fuselage massage," I was remind of the objectophilia episode of "Taboo" — the best ever episode of "Taboo" — and the guy who actually fucks his car. Who believed this inanimate object to have thoughts and feelings and that his car literally loved him the way a romantic partner would. Ya know, I don't assume the "Sonic Boom" team watch the same obscure cable documentary shows as me. Nor do I presume that they meant to imply Tails does anything non-PG rated with his plane. But I imagine the implications of their joke were similar. Some folks are really into their vehicles, in the ways the cross the traditional boundaries of human/inanimate object relationships. It's weird and that's funny. 

This set-up pays off at the end, when Eggman's evil cans have turned Tails' beloved plane against him. The fox has to confront his mechanical love, stop it from trying to kill him, and remove Eggman's evil programming. At that point, I began wondering why the writers led with the whole tomato sauce business. Shouldn't Tails' unnatural bond with his airplane have been the main focus of the episode? Wouldn't the expected arc of this story have Tails coming to understand that his plane is just an object and that his flesh-and-blood friends matter much more to him? Or, since this show is a comedy, a humorous subversion of that expected moral at the very least? Once again, I have to look at the short runtimes of the "Boom" episodes and wonder if it really gave the writers enough time to fully explore the stories they wanted to tell.

In fact, a lot of elements of "Dr. Eggman's Tomato Sauce" feel kind of incomplete. Some of the jokes trail off without a punchline. Knuckles makes a comment to Tails about something called "brainitis," Tails says that's not a real thing, and Knuckles responds by saying "Then how do you explain?" I get that the joke here is that Knuckles is stupid and doesn't understand what a brain is but it feels like the gag just kind of awkwardly stops. I feel similarly about a moment where Sticks' use of the phrase "who's laughing now?" leads to a brief, tense exchange with Sonic that doesn't really feel like a joke. The same is true of Tails' nostalgic montage of memories of his airplane, which moves Sonic to tears which has to quickly cover up. The timing is off. 

When the various objects from around the island assemble themselves into a robot, via the evil cans, Sonic says "Now I get it." But I genuinely don't get it. How does this clarify Eggman's scheme? Denton and Hahn's episodes are usually funnier than this. The episode changing premise midway through and the comedic pace being out-of-sync reminds me of “Aim Low.” We know that episode was among the first “Boom” scripts written and I theorized that maybe it was quickly cut down to eleven minutes, resulting in its awkward feel. (Or maybe the writers just hasn’t found their groove yet.) I wonder if “Dr. Eggman’s Tomato Sauce” wasn’t a result of the same situation. “Eggman becomes a celebrity chef” or “Tails is in love with his plane” are both premises that easily could’ve occupied episodes of their own. Seeing them jammed together like this does not do either idea justice. When combined with a lack of really strong joke — a pun on Meh Burger and mayonnaise got the biggest laugh from me here — you get an episode that isn’t very satisfying. [5/10]