Trivia / Sonic Boom

Tropes involving all three

• Ascended Meme:
  • Once Knuckles' new design first came out, a lot of jokes came out about him "skipping Leg Day". When his official mini-profile showed up on the Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter, one of the things under his Dislikes? "Leg Day".
  • The term "SonAmy" is used in the TV episode "The Biggest Fan".
  • "Ames" is Sonic's nickname for Amy in many fan-works. Sonic calls Amy this in Sonic Boom.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
  • One game magazine made the mistake of calling Tails, who is a fox, a squirrel.
  • The UK's free daily newspaper The Metro stated that Mike Pollock was appearing at an anime convention in London. Mike, of course, provides the voice of Sonic's greatest nemesis "Dr. Eggplant". Pollock himself stated: "You had one job!"
• God Never Said That: Sega had to go out of its way to assure players that Sonic Boom was not a reboot for the video game franchise.
• Meme Acknowledgment: When asked on Twitter asked if Sonichu was going to be a playable character in Sonic Boom: Fire and Ice, the official Twitter replied that it was possible if they gave him blue arms, three scarves and redesigned him as Big the Cat.
• The Other Darrin: Starting from this series, Colleen O'Shaughnessey has become the current voice of Tails in the franchise, replacing Kate Higgins (although Higgins briefly came back for Sonic Colors Ultimate).
• Promoted Fangirl: Before becoming the voice of Sticks, Aoi Yūki was a big Sonic fan growing up, providing her first plush toy and video game, and her favorite character was Shadow the Hedgehog.

The Show

• Acting for Two: Just about every actor on the show has at least two or three characters under their belt.
• Creator Backlash: An extremely minor example, since the show's writers have expressed that they're overall happy with the work they did with the show, but at least one writer jokingly admitted that, had he been aware that it was sort of a thing for Sonic cartoons to have an episode called "The Last Resort," he would've used the title, and thus considers it a missed opportunity. If it's any consolation, it wasn't the first Sonic series to miss its chance.
• Creator's Favorite Episode:
  • Bill Freiberger has stated on Twitter that his favorite episode of the series is "Tails' Crush".
  • Alan Denton has stated his favorite episode is "Battle of the Boy Bands."
  • Greg Hagn's favorite episode is "Just A Guy."
  • Jun'ichi Kanemaru, the Japanese voice actor of Sonic, considers "The Meteor" his favorite episode.
• Cross-Dressing Voices:
  • Lady Walrus is voiced by Bill Freiberger.
  • Colleen O'Shaughnessey voices Tails.
• Defictionalization: Sonic the Hedgehog: The Official Cookbook includes a recipe for the evil cookies from "Eggheads", with the evil removed.
• Directed by Cast Member: The French dub was directed by Antoine Nouel, who also voiced characters such as Comedy Chimp and T.W. Barker.
• International Coproduction: Technicolor Animation Studio (formerly OuiDo! Productions) serves as animation co-producer for the show, with further assistance from Technicolor's India studio and Korean studio SAMG.
• Invisible Advertising:
  • Cartoon Network did little to advertise and promote the show, which already had an awkward time slot at 7 AM Eastern. In fact, there wasn't an advertisement for the show on the network until after the premiere. What's more, Sonic Boom's TV show only had one full trailer which could only be watched on YouTube.
  • The advertising for Season 2 was arguably worse. Much like Season 1, the most promotion it had two trailers that could only be seen on YouTube, the second of which came out a week after the season premiere. The show was also moved to Boomerang after the season premiere with little to no fanfare.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Nika Futterman, Sticks' voice actress, is also known as a talented singer. However, when she sings a lullaby as Sticks in "Sleeping Giant", well...
  Knuckles: That's not a lullaby. That's what happens when I drop bagpipes into a wood chipper.
• Meme Acknowledgement: Show writer Alan Denton has retweeted several of the Knuckles "meme approval" videos, and generally seems to find them hilarious.
  "To everyone who worked on Sonic Boom, this may be our legacy."
• The Other Darrin: Iara Riça, the Brazilian Portuguese voice of Tails, quit the series after season 1, citing a problem with the distributor. She was replaced by Jéssica Vieira.
• Out of Holiday Episode: The episode "New Years Retribution", which aired in August, 2015, four months before New Years 2016.
• Out of Order: T.W. Barker's introductory episode, "Circus of Plunders", was one of the first episodes produced, but it was held back until mid-season, after his bit part in "Dude, Where's My Eggman?" had aired.
• Promoted Fanboy: Sonic's Latin American VA ,Jorge Bringas, is a big Sonic fan, who already made multiple fandubs of the character before actually getting the role.
• Quietly Cancelled: Despite the utter failure of "Rise of Lyric", the cartoon did well enough to get a second season as well as another game attempt with "Fire & Ice". However "Fire & Ice" didn't do well enough sales-wise and, combined with Cartoon Network's atrocious scheduling for the show (the first season was put in an early morning slot and the second got bounced to their "Boomerang" channel, a channel that very few have), once the second season finished its run, there had been no word for quite a while from Sega if the show would continue. Eventually, it was confirmed that the second season was the last one.
• Role Reprise:
  • Roger Craig Smith, Travis Willingham, Cindy Robinson, Nika Futterman, and Mike Pollock all return to reprise their respective roles for Sonic, Knuckles, Amy, Sticks, and Eggman. Kirk Thornton and Wally Wingert also return as Shadow/Orbot and Cubot.
  • For Mike Pollock, he doubles down on this trope since he also voiced Eggman in Sonic X.
  • The Japanese dub brings back the entire voice cast from the games.
  • The Italian dub brings back Knuckles and Amy's voice actors from Sonic X.
  • In the French dub, Alexandre Gillet, Marie-Eugénie Maréchal, Sébastien Desjours, Naïké Fauveau, Marc Bretonnière, and Benoît Du Pac respectively reprise their roles as Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Eggman, and Shadow from both Sonic X and the various games made since Sonic Generations. Benjamin Pascal and Philippe Roullier also respectively reprise their roles as Cubot and Vector from the games.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • Cartoon Network barely promoted the show and, as with Transformers: Robots in Disguise and Pokémon: The Series, stuck it in the Saturday morning 7am/6am slot, when not many people are awake. However, not only was the show renewed for a second season, reruns received a much better time slot on Boomerang, where it ended up moving to anyways. Make of that what you will. Keep in mind that Boomerang is not carried by major cable systems such as Comcast, Charter, and Cox.
  • The fact CN started premiering episodes on weekdays instead of Saturdays with low promotion (Only the witty Sonic The Hedgehog Twitter was promoting it) doesn't help either.
  • At one time, Boomerang UK only showed the first 13 episodes on a endless loop (which wasn't the first time, either). Thankfully, this changed around August 2015.
  • After first premiering on Cartoon Network, the show's second season was quietly moved to Boomerang with little promotion. While it was given a better time slot than on its previous home, Boomerang isn't in as many households as Cartoon Network. Coupled with the aforementioned Invisible Advertising, this caused its already poor ratings to drop to abysmal levels.
  • Fans often blame the network for screwing the series to free up timeslots for Teen Titans Go!, a massive Cash-Cow Franchise for the network that has screwed over many of the network's more popular series.
  • It's also worth mentioning that when the show first premiered, Time Warner, Cartoon Network's parent company at the time, were in a dispute with Dish Network that temporarily led to that and other Time Warner-owned networks being removed from the service. While all the other factors played a much bigger part in its cancellation, this can't have helped the show in finding its legs in its initial run.
• Short Run in Peru: Several episodes of the show aired earlier in France.
• Throw It In!: According to writer Alan Denton, it was Roger Craig Smith's idea to slip into his natural voice while saying, "He's talking to me," in "Give Bees a Chance".
• Trolling Creator: Alan Denton, a writer of the show, is very much aware how dead (and mostly unavailable) Boomerang is to many that the ratings are pretty low...so he takes advantage of it by getting way too many philosophical conversations because he knows very well not many children will get it (since not many can normally see the show anyway) and he can get away with it all. This has gone on to making the show very much infamous and enjoyable.
• Word of God: Despite some people comparing Mark the Tapir from "The Biggest Fan" to Chris Chan, both writers of the episode clarified on Twitter that Mark is not based on any real person.
• Written by Cast Member: Cindy Robinson wrote the episode "Give Bees a Chance".

The Games

• Christmas Rushed:
  • Rise of Lyric, initially planned for an unspecified console, was hastily ported to the Wii U, without being given any time to accommodate the CryEngine 3 for the console, for a release in mid November 2014, and its clearly unfinished state shows for it.
  • Inverted with Fire and Ice. It was originally scheduled for a holiday 2015 release, but Sega has decided to delay the game to a 2016 release, likely not wanting to repeat the same mistakes they made with Rise of Lyric.
• Creator Backlash:
  • During the Sonic the Hedgehog 25th anniversary event all the previous Sonic games were listed and described in a slideshow. However, Sonic Boom's entry on the list simply talked about the cartoon and how well received it is, with the actual games going unmentioned.
  • After the release of Fire and Ice, Lyric's profile on the official Sonic Boom site was deleted, which may also be due to this, as well as the direction the show has taken compared with Rise of Lyric.
• Creator Killer: After Rise of Lyric proved to be a critical disaster and an embarrassing flop at retail (it's the absolute worst reviewed Sonic game on Metacritic, with its metascore being even lower than Sonic 06, was outsold by two other Sega games ^note Alien: Isolation and Football Manager and didn't even break into the top 40 sales chart in the UK), and combined with many staffers leaving or getting fired during its turbulent production, it seems unlikely that the fledgling game company Big Red Button Entertainment will ever make another game again.
• Delayed Release Tie-In: Fire & Ice had a Carl's Jr./Hardee's kids' meal promotion in late 2015, around the same time the game was meant to be released prior to it being delayed into 2016.
• Dueling Works: Rise of Lyric did this with Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, which was released in the same month, and was likewise a Wii U spin-off title from a mainstay platform game franchise. Even though Captain Toad didn't sell anywhere near as well as its parent title, Super Mario 3D World, it still easily defeated Rise of Lyric in terms of both critical and commercial performance.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The Rise of Lyric was shown off in a CryEngine 3 showcase trailer a year prior to the announcement, though not recognizable as a Sonic game based on the environments shown.
• Executive Meddling:
  • During its development, Sega struck an exclusivity deal with Nintendo, promising them three exclusive games for the Wii U. Rise of Lyric was one of the three games. Big Red Button was very surprised at this because CryEngine 3 was not designed to work with the Wii U and it wasn't as strong as the other consoles at the time. They contacted Nintendo to try to get the game to work with the system and it was eventually released after much work, but it resulted in the game looking nowhere near as good when it was first revealed as well as having numerous bugs and glitches.
  • Likewise, Big Red Button were trying to inject some lore and make it more different from the main continuity and what not. Sega, however, gave them a list of rules for their characters which severely crippled what the development team could do with the series (Cliff for example, was suppose to be a mechanic you could buy objects from, but Sega insisted that, other than Tails and Eggman, no other inventors could be featured in the series. Likewise, it seems Echidnas were going to be involved in some fashion, given some of the statues in early concept art. Though considering the previous attempt to utilize them, it seems Sega still isn't over the fallout from that game quite yet). For fans of Sonic's comic books, that might sound very familiar.
  • The show was originally going to be unrelated to the game, but 8 months before the game's release, Sega gave the show's creative team total control over the game, causing the game's original story to be thrown out. The many changes they made include making Knuckles dumb, creating a large number of filler cutscenes and levels to accommodate the new story and inclusion of a large number of original characters who were supposed to appear in the television series. However, Sticks, Mayor Fink and Fastidious Beaver were the only ones to ultimately be used in the show. This can also probably be blamed for the game's undeveloped story elements, such as the unfinished Ancients plot line, Shadow's random boss battle and the game's arbitrary moral on friendship.
• Franchise Killer: Despite the abysmal sales of Rise of Lyric and Shattered Crystal, they pressed on with one more game, Fire and Ice. Sales-wise, it sold just as poorly, if not moreso, and ended up being the last game in the short-lived spinoff series.
• Invisible Advertising: The game only had three official trailers, the first of which was made using a different engine than the one in the game, and it also had only one commercial, which showed only 5 seconds of gameplay footage.
• Kids' Meal Toy: Fire & Ice had a set of four toys from Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, which included a splat ball, a figure of Sonic, a board game, and a wrist communicator with a secret compartment. This promotion is notable in that it was released in Fall 2015, the originally planned release date for the game, despite the fact that Sega delayed the game to a 2016 release to allow more development time and to coincide with the Sonic series' 25th anniversary.
• Licensed Game: It's based on the Sonic Boom cartoon. In Rise of Lyric's case, however, it wasn't meant to be, leading to some Early-Installment Weirdness.
• Lying Creator: While Sega misrepresented a number of things about Rise of Lyric, one has to wonder how much more they could've gotten in had CryEngine not been so obstinate; see Troubled Production below.
  • Was previewed with a gorgeous rendition showing off the new engine. The final product is nowhere near that level.
  • Was said to be a prequel for the TV show. The games don't seem to establish it. Heck, they don't even reveal how the characters even met each other or why they do what they do. This is because the game originally had nothing to do the TV show, but Sega gave the show's team creative control more than halfway through the game's production and they rewrote the story to try and force a connection between the game and the show.
  • Sonic was said to be a loner who goes through Character Development and learns to work with the others. When he first see him, he's working with the gang just like he always does. And his loner personality is an Informed Flaw at best.
• Milestone Celebration: Fire and Ice, technically. It was released on the year of Sonic's 25th anniversary, and not much else came out for the franchise that year, with the games made to celebrate it coming out the following year instead.
• No Export for You: Subverted; there initially weren't any plans to release it to Japanese audiences, but now it seems it's being localized after all, as "Sonic Toon."
• Not Screened for Critics: Reviewers had to buy their copies. Regardless of that policy, the reviews were certainly unkind to both games.
• Pre-Order Bonus:
  • Rise of Lyric had two; glowing TRON-like outfits for the player characters if pre-ordered from Amazon, and a figure of Sonic with the Ancients' Crystal if pre-ordered from GameStop.
  • Fire and Ice came with a DVD sampler, featuring three episodes from the cartoon; "Chili Dog Day Afternoon", "It Wasn't Me, It Was the One-Armed Hedgehog", and "It Takes a Village to Defeat a Hedgehog".
• Recursive Adaptation: It's a video game to a cartoon series based off a video game.
• Recycled Premise: Many of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric's concepts were recycled from an earlier rejected Crash Bandicoot pitch titled Crash Bandicoot: Evolution - a project that was much later heavily reworked into Crash Twinsanity. The use of the ener-beam (although in Crash it was a snake), the multiple playable characters, the layout of the stages, the time-travel plot, and some cut elements (both Rise of Lyric and Evolution proposed that the protagonist would meet Dr. Eggman/Dr. Cortex as a young man) are all recycled from the earlier Crash pitch.
• Screwed by the Network: As noted several times, Sega's deal with Nintendo promising three exclusive Sonic games for the Wii U pretty much doomed this game, since the engine the developers were using to build it, CryEngine, didn't support Wii U. This forced the developers to port the engine to the Wii U themselves, a difficult task for a small and young development studio, and one that eliminated any chance of them being able to produce a polished and working product.
• Stillborn Franchise: Opinions vary on the games' quality, but their sales were flat all around. Rise of Lyric only sold 169,000 units worldwide, which is embarrassingly paltry for a premiere franchise, and the game didn't even break the Top 40 Sales chart in the UK—and on top of all that, it was initially outsold by not one, but two other Sega games ^note Alien: Isolation at 378,000 units and Football Manager 2015 at 137,000 units. To add insult to injury, It's also the absolute worst reviewed Sonic game on Metacritic and Gamerankings. Their metascores are even lower than Sonic '06! The tie-in comic book series also met its end after a mere eleven issues. Sega, however, gave the series one more chance with a new 3DS game, Fire and Ice, likely due to the decent reception Shattered Crystal received as well as the popularity of the cartoon. Sadly, despite the game's improvements, Sanzaru Games couldn't really turn things around.
• Swan Song: Chikao Ohtsuka returned to voice Eggman for the last time in Rise of Lyric.
• Troubled Production: Tragically, this was the case for Rise of Lyric. Early trailers showed off very impressive graphics, running on CryEngine 3, but when the game was presented at E3 2014, people immediately noticed problems—degraded graphics, simpler lighting, non-dynamic shadows, and framerate issues. By the time the final game was released, the game's graphics had been degraded to the point that textures were being compared to Shadow the Hedgehog, and major glitches were found. This didn't make sense, considering the game had been in development since 2010. In fact, it was CryEngine 3 that was the problem—it simply wasn't ready to handle a speed-oriented third-person platformer like Boom. As one developer stated, the team "was fighting against the engine the entire time."
  • The engine might have been fine on the Xbox One or PS4, and the game was originally supposed to be published on those systems in addition to the Wii U. The only foreseeable trouble was that the Cry 3 engine was not known to work properly or smoothly, if at all, on the Wii U^note apparently, Crytek was able to make it work on the Wii U, as they did attempt to port Crysis 3; they even claimed it was closer to the PC version than the other console ports, but EA refused to let said port be released; although given that CryEngine 3 wasn't meant to be used for the type of game Rise of Lyric was, it's unlikely Crytek's help would've made much of a difference. Unfortunately, Rise of Lyric was eventually wrapped into the much-publicized three Sonic games-exclusivity contract Sega formed with Nintendo. Hardware constraints, combined with lack of documentation (Boom was the first Wii U game to run on Cry 3) and organization led to the final product as we know it today.
  • Part of the reason CryEngine 3 had such a hard time running on a Wii U is because developers had to delegate some processing power to the touchscreen, not just the console. Since no documentation existed for such a case, BRB were forced to contact CryEngine themselves for help. In the end, they got a custom version of the engine to boot up. Sonic Boom is the only game that has this version.
  • More ominously, many BRB employees left in July before the game launched—some voluntarily, some involuntarily. Chris Senn, for instance, "did not willfully choose to leave", even though he averaged "5am to 7pm" work days; an experience eerily reminiscent of the nightmare that was Sonic X-Treme. Frankly, the small team was not ready to handle such a high-profile game- the team never incorporated any combat designers, for example. In the months leading up to release, BRB practically stopped caring- their website and social portals never even acknowledged the game's release, and interviews were cancelled.
  • It also turns out that a big reason why the game appears so rushed is because it was developed for "unspecified next-gen consoles", and then Sega forced Big Red Button to do a Wii U port with very little time. Indeed, History Repeats.
• What Could Have Been:
  • An interview revealed that the character designs were actually far more wild than what was seen here, but Sega reined them back on those. When you see◊ the concepts for◊ Sonic alone,◊ though, you can see why.
  • Lyric was also originally envisioned as an owl,◊ instead of a snake in Powered Armor.
  • In April 2017, Michael Horwitz's pitch trailer for the game was discovered. It's essentially an extended version of the reveal trailer and it showcases concept art and more gameplay footage as well as scenes and dialogue cut from the final version of the game. It also revealed that the working title of the game was Sonic Synergy.
  • Shortly after the pitch trailer was found, a second trailer was also discovered that showed off even more concept art and unused gameplay mechanics. It showed off concept art for Dr. Eggman, Lyric, Sticks and Q-N-C, as well as artwork for a number of NPCs that didn't make it into the final game, a number of which would have been new hedgehog characters. It also revealed that chao were originally planned to be in the game with new designs. It also showed off a number of unused gameplay mechanics, such as four player mode or Amy, Tails and Knuckles holding onto Sonic with their enerbeams as he runs across water.
  • Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric was initially Sonic Origins where it tells the story of Sonic's origins, but Sega had certain mandates against that idea.
  • Cliff was originally an inventor but this was later changed because it violated Sonic Team design guidelines. Only Tails and Eggman can be inventors.
  • Dr. Eggman was once planned as a playable character.
• Working Title: Sonic Origins and later Sonic Synergy for Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric.
• The song featured in the game's debut trailer is "Bangarang" by Skrillex.

The Comic

• Creator-Driven Successor: To Sonic X comic, another wacky slapstick series that portrays Eggman as the friendly neighborhood supervillain, prominently features his bumbling hench-bots, and both series being published by Archie.
• Exiled from Continuity: Lyric, the antagonist to Rise of Lyric and Shattered Crystal, was declared by Sega off-limits for use in the comics.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Subverted for all but one issue. Archie collected issues 1 through 7, as well as issue 11, across two trade paperback releases. Issues 8 through 10, which were all parts of the Worlds Unite crossover event, were instead collected into said crossover's own dedicated graphic novel collections... every issue except issue 10, that is, as the third and final instalment ended up going down with the entire series when Sega pulled the plug. To make matters more difficult, for obvious reasons, all of these graphic novel collections are now out of print, and even if new Sonic Boom reprints were to come about, the legalities surrounding the aforementioned crossover would make a reprint of that elusive tenth issue even more unlikely.
• What Could Have Been: Even after the comic's cancellation, there were meant to be more stories featured in the Sonic Super Special and Super Digest magazines. Archie losing the Sonic license altogether killed even those plans.

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