Sonic Boom, Episode 2.38: Eggman's Anti-Gravity Ray

Sonic Boom, Episode 2.38: Eggman's Anti-Gravity Ray

Original Air Date: July 29th, 2017

At the beginning of "Eggman's Anti-Gravity Ray," the titular scientist is having a pleasant weekend morning when his Sunday paper gets blown away by a persistent breeze. He decides the best way to resolve this is to move his base several degrees to the right. He plans to accomplish this with an Anti-Gravity device he cooks up seemingly in an afternoon. The scientist leaves the room long enough for Cubot and Orbot to start playing with the gizmo. This results in it getting stuck on Cubot's head, while casting anti-gravity rays all over the general area as the robot continuously floats upward. Before Eggman can contain the situation, the same breeze carries Cubot over Hedgehog Village. Now it's Sonic and the gang's problem, as more and more innocent bystanders and their stuff starts to levitate towards the mesosphere. 

"Eggman's Anti-Gravity Ray" is an episode built around a true statement of physical comedy: People floating around in zero gravity is funny. The fact that we are held to the ground by the rotation and mass of our planet is perhaps the most unavoidable truth around. That stuff falls down is probably the first scientific law we all learn, when we are still babies. To strip away that ever apparent status is an innate violation of something our brains understand to be inherent about life. It's why the sight of people floating in space, or Superman taking to the sky, always fills us with a sense of wonder and whimsy. Such an upturning of the status-quo is also an upturning of something standard and evident, one of the principles of comedy. I know, I sure wrote a lot of words to explain why it's funny when people are flailing around in the air. But that's true and it's also the kind of physical comedy not many shows can do, at least outside of cartoons with some sort of sci-fi element.

That alone probably could've provided enough gags for a ten minute cartoon. However, "Eggman's Anti-Gravity Ray" amusingly keeps escalating. We begin with the funny premise of Eggman cooking up a wildly impractical solution to a commonplace, extremely mundane problem. That rises to Cubot getting the machine stuck on his head, which raises to the anti-gravity effects wreaking havoc on the village. This is a big, sci-fi, action movie problem the heroes must think of a solution too, before everyone floats off into space. After seemingly solving that problem, the episode keeps going. The machine is reversed and now extra-gravity is slowly flattening everyone, forcing our heroes to rethink a solution to a new challenge. In other words, every incident in this script builds organically on the one before as the story moves towards bigger and more exciting events. That's what writing is supposed to do when it's good! 

Another indicator that scripter Marie Beardmore was paying attention during screenwriting class is how Knuckles gets a tidy little character arc in this episode. At the beginning of the episode, while Eggman is engineering the shenanigans that will occupy the rest of the runtime, Team Sonic are playing soccer. (Otherwise known as "football" to anyone not born without a screaming bald eagle wielding an American flag and an AR-15 tattooed on their heart.) Knuckles gets kicked off the field because he's embracing his masculine need to dig holes. At the very end of the episode, after the Anti-Gravity Ray starts producing excess gravity, Knuckles' digging skills are what end up saving the day. A minor detail from the first act becomes important in the last act. An element of a character that he was previously scorn for ends up earning him respect. This only amounts to two scenes but it adds so much to the episode, making this story feel like a pair of gears smoothly clicking together and working to power a bigger machine that gives the audience satisfaction. I think my metaphor might've gotten a bit obtuse but the point remains: Knuckles has a real purpose in this episode and the script is nicely structured. To think, the domino that led to this moment all started with Takashu Yuda looking up animals that burrowed and deciding the echidna was the coolest looking one... 

Knuckles is also central to a moment in this episode that, unexpectedly, became something of a meme in 2017. What with the series' prominence in millennial pop culture, and subsequently being extremely recognizable among the terminally online, there have been a lot of "Sonic" memes. However, there are definitely layers to the "Sonic" Meme Iceberg. Bimmy is a meme among Archie "Sonic" obsessives but will result in nothing but a blank stare even from a person familiar with Sanic or Ugandan Knuckles. This fandom is composed of circles within circles and the cartoon shows are definitely deeper than the video games or movies. However, a scene from this episode – of Knuckles displaying an unexpected flash of brilliance by having an insightful feminist response to Amy girl-bossing it up – managed to break containment and gain notice outside the insular "Sonic" fandom. It went viral on Twitter shortly after airing, prompting reactions and think pieces from several industry news websites, including Entertainment Weekly. A YouTube clip of the scene currently has over two million views and it still gets reposted on social media from time to time. Considering most people probably weren't even aware of "Sonic Boom" in August of 2017, the show long since shuttled off to Boomerang where it could be safely ignored, this was a fairly big deal for the franchise. I definitely recall some folks commenting on the scene with bemused reactions like "whaaaat even is this show?!" and so forth. Weirdly, I mostly saw left-wing people applauding the joke as "based" or accusing it of "Echidnasplaining." I didn't see much in the way of right-wing hand-wringing over those dastardly feminists corrupting the minds of impressionable children with their woke agenda. I guess "Sonic the Hedgehog" cartoons are beneath the notice of Republican pundits and the deeper tentacles of the far right outrage echo chamber. 

But it is a good joke! It plays off "Boom" expectations of Knuckles being a total simpleton while, also, being a good general bit of absurdity. You don't expect a salient point about feminism in a children's cartoon, ya know? It's a sign of this episode being quite funny overall. There's a good mixture of the typical "Boom" gags here. There's self-aware jabs at the franchise and medium, such as a quality pun about "effecting cannon." Typical moments that are just good old fashion silliness, such as Eggman getting excited about fashion week or French fries, are present. Mostly, the laughs come from watching these characters interact with each other, their long-since-established personalities bouncing off one another. A good pile-up of jokes tarts with Eggman threatening to cut Orbot's wages, before Fastidious Beaver and Leroy the turtle pipe in with corrections. Even Comedy Chimp got a chuckle out of me, with a blatantly cheesy one-liner. Sonic's reaction to Amy being free to express herself, Sticks reacting with expected zeal to the sight of floating towels, or Knuckles murmuring "Touchdown" in a sad voice are all solid jokes built largely off of everything we know about these guys by now. Good, character-based comedy writing.

Not every gag hits. A bit about Eggman doing a gymnastic landing or Knuckles having a wacky line about pizza are fairly lame. This is a dense script, meaning another quality joke is right around the corner even if one whiffs. Cubot, unexpectedly, becomes a good source of yuks here. The droid's unobservant nature leads to some typical bits, such as his inability to understand levitation or to answer a simple question about his status. A wacky glitch leads to Cubot shooting levitation rats out of his hands, the machine immediately transitioning into a would-be New Age cult leader. Like I said, this episode packs in the jokes because imbecilic Cubot starting a touchy-feely cult could easily be the basis for a whole episode. Here, it's another delightfully unexpected joke in an episode that has an abundance of them. 

I guess my point is that "Eggman's Anti-Gravity Ray" is "Sonic Boom" operating in top form. The jokes are clever and abundant, nicely building atop each other as the episode pushes towards sillier moments. The notice of a comedy script being good is when, if you took out most of the jokes, you'd still have a decent story. This is also true of "Eggman's Anti-Gravity Ray," as you can imagine this same premise leading to a decently entertaining season one "Sonic X" episode or the like. And all in ten minutes too! This is what happens when a show is allowed to run for a little bit, so it can really build up its cast and characters, and you hire decent writers to bang out good scripts. The end of "Sonic Boom's" second season, and the entire show with it, is starting to loom. Episodes like this make me realize that I'm actually really going to miss this program when I'm done with it. [8/10]