User:WaltK/Sonic the Hedgehog (franchise)

WaltK/Sonic the Hedgehog
Type:	Video game franchise
Release date:	23 June 1991 (original video game)

Sonic the Hedgehog was a series consisting primarily of video games released by the Japanese entertainment company SEGA, and a vast variety of spinoff media such as comic books, television series, theatrical films, and other merchandise.

The series follows the adventures of the titular character, an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog who is capable of running at supersonic speeds, who battles alongside his friends and allies against the evil plots of Doctor Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik, who is intent on conquering the world with his robotic minions.

Outside of a single explicit crossover in LEGO Dimensions, the Sonic franchise and the DWU each yield of number of references and shared backgrounds with each other.

Crossovers

Sonic's universe has had one official crossover with the Doctor Who universe via the mass crossover toys-to-life video game LEGO Dimensions. The Sonic franchise was added to the game via its second wave of figurines and adventure packs on 18 November 2016, joining Doctor Who and the other existing franchise elements that were built into the game upon its original release.

This inclusion allowed players to control Sonic and have him play through the Dalek Extermination of Earth story, and explore the Who-themed adventure world, as well as operate K-9 and interact with the Doctor's TARDIS.

Sonic steals Gollum's ring. (NOTVALID: New Adventures Await!)

In turn, this allowed the player to play as the Doctor or the Cyberman during the Sonic Dimensions story, and explore Sonic's own adventure world, as well as using the two related vehicles, the Blue Speedster and the Tornado in any world.

Sonic himself has a unique voice clip that plays when he is paired with the Doctor on the game board: "Hey, you're the Doctor, right? I heard you named a screwdriver after me. How cool is that?"

In promotional material related to the game, the two franchises first appeared together in the trailer New Adventures Await!, although they did not share any scenes together: following the Doctor and the TARDIS making an appearance earlier in the trailer, Sonic appears at the end, where he is seen swiping a ring from Golem.

Sonic meets the Twelfth Doctor. (NOTVALID: Sonic the Hedgehog Joins LEGO Dimensions!)

In Sonic the Hedgehog Joins LEGO Dimensions!, a trailer made up entirely of gameplay clips, a scene occurs in which Sonic appears inside the early 1960s rendition of the TARDIS, where he runs up beside the Twelfth Doctor at his blackboard, with the Doctor turning to the hedgehog and whipping out his Sonic screwdriver in surprise.

Sonic is voiced in the game by his regular English voice actor, Roger Craig Smith.

References within the DWU

Perhaps fittingly for a franchise introduced to the world only two years into Doctor Who's Wilderness Years, references within the series to Sonic have occurred most primarily within novels published during that time.

The first such reference to appear was in the 1994 novel Conundrum, in which Mel Joseph, a construct of the Land of Fiction, was said to be playing the original Sonic the Hedgehog game, a play through in which he'd cleared the games penultimate level, the Scrap Brain Zone.

Another reference appeared that same year in All-Consuming Fire, in which Ace jokingly told Dr John Watson that whatever the Rakshassi where worshipping, "it wasn't Sonic the Hedgehog".

The 1997 novel Business Unusual contained a reference that appeared to partially conflict with Sonic's real world history. In the story, the Brigadier made reference to Sonic, being aware that he was a blue hedgehog. As the story is set in 1989, this would appear to suggest that Sonic made his first appearance in the DWU at least two years ahead of his real world counterpart.

Mickey Smith claimed to own a copy of the original game on either his Playstation or Xbox in the 2005 novel Winner Takes All (the game could, indeed, be played on those platforms by that time, via such titles as Sonic Mega Collection Plus).

Martha Jones, in 2007's Forever Autumn, called the Tenth Doctor's hair "very Sonic the Hedgehog", to the Doctor's dismay, who claimed to be going for "more of a Sid Vicious vibe".

References to the DWU in Sonic the Hedgehog media

As with the DWU and its Sonic references appearing, thus far, in a single non-televised medium, Sonic's own nods to the Time Lord have also appeared in a single medium outside of the video games of which he originated. In this case, during the Hedgehog's extensive run in comic books.

The beloved UK-based series published by Fleetway, Sonic the Comic, which ran from 1993 to 2002, offered an inherently British style of story and characterisation to Sonic's world, including a, perhaps, very unintentional nod to the Daleks. Among the game's extensive rogues gallery was a group called the Brotherhood of Metallix, in which the comic took Robotnik's singular robotic Sonic-Doppelgänger from the games, and turned it into a fearsome, very Dalek-like, warmongering species led by an "Emperor Metallix". Nigel Kitching, one of the comics most prolific writers, and creator of the group, acknowledged the similarity after older readers began to pick up on it. Kitching explained that he did not initially set out to "rip off" the Daleks, but chose to run with the idea as the group were developed. He further stated that, since Doctor Who was off the air at the time, he believed the similarity was unlikely to jar the series' readership.

On the other side of the pond was perhaps Sonic's most prolific comic book run: the American Archie Comics series that ran continuously for a record-breaking twenty-four years, from 1993 to 2017. A subtle Doctor Who nod occurred toward the end of World's Unite, a massive crossover between Sonic and Archie's Mega Man comic book (based on the CAPCOM game series of the same name). At the end of a multiverse spanning plot that was ultimately undone by a time travel paradox, Sonic character Sticks the Badger finished off by explaining her own theory about time and space, during which she used the first half of the (in)famous phrase first coined by the Tenth Doctor and popularised by the Eleventh: "wibbly wobbly".

After the aforementioned comic's unceremonious cancellation, the American Sonic comic license was picked up by former American Doctor Who comic publisher, IDW Publishing, during which Doctor Who has, so far, been referenced twice.

The Dalek figurine. (IDW Sonic the Hedgehog #49)

In issue 19, the robot character E-123 Omega was seen taking out a barrage of enemies while exclaiming "exterminate" in a manner very similar to the Daleks.

The second reference was also Dalek-related: in issue 49, a shelf in Tails' house appeared to display, among other things, a Dalek figurine.

Behind the scenes connections

Video games

For the UK-based developer TT Games, LEGO Dimensions was far from being the only Sonic-related game title that they had a hand in. In the late 1990s, when they were still known as "Traveller's Tales", they developed the franchises first two three-dimensional titles: Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island (3D Blast in the US), and Sonic R.

Sumo Digital, developer of The Adventure Games developed the SEGA crossover videos games Sega Superstars Tennis, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, which all featured characters and elements from the Sonic universe. They later went on to develop the purely Sonic-centred title, Team Sonic Racing.

Fleetway's Sonic the Comic

Being a British series, Fleetway's Sonic the Conic had a particularly extensive list of individuals also associated with Doctor Who in some form or another.

Apart from Nigel Kitching, mentioned above, the series' other most prolific writer was The Daft Dimension creator, Lew Stringer. Stringer had contributed a number of stories significant to the comic's run, and even became the primary head writer for a period in the late 1990s when Kitching briefly left. He also created two of the comics' biggest breakout characters: Tekno the Canary, and Shortfuse the Cybernik.

Richard Elson, the illustrator of the untitled Brief Encounter short story in DWM 171, was the series' longest-serving artist, and one of the most prolific, having illustrated some of series' most narratively-significant stories and multiple covers.

Other comic books and literature

Virgin Books, the most prolific publisher of Doctor Who novels during the show's wilderness years, including the aforementioned Conundrum and All-Consuming Fire, also published their own series of original children's novels based on the Sonic series in the early 1990s.

Andrew Pepoy, one of the artists of the Second Doctor's prologue to Supremacy of the Cybermen, was a regular inker on Sonic's Archie Comics run.

IDW Publishing, the American publisher of Doctor Who comics from 2008 to 2013, is the current US publisher of Sonic the Hedgehog comics, with an ongoing series that began in 2018.

A reoccurring artist on the IDW Sonic team is former, occasional Doctor Who Adventures artist, Jack Lawrence.