What Could Have Been / Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM)

If Dr. Robotnik looked less like an Eggman and more like a knock off Don Bluth villain.

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Pre-Production

• An earlier version of SatAM was unveiled in the UK’s Sonic the Poster Mag #1. Differences include Princess Sally being more feline-like, Robotnik resembling his in-game counterpart more with a white mustache, and robotization simply just transforming its victims into robotic monsters. The Freedom Fighters (referred to as the Freedom Team here) are much more different by having the group based on the animals Sonic rescues in the game, with one noticeable omission being Tails, with the cartoon possibly being in development long before Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was released (presumably, the red Flicky in the promotional art likely got swapped out for Tails mid-production). That said, this version of the Freedom Fighters was later reused in Fleetway’s Sonic the Comic, most notably Porker Lewis and Johnny Lightfoot, and SatAm would at least have its own rabbit and walrus (Bunnie and Rotor, respectively).
• The show bible makes reference to several unused episode ideas. For instance:
  • An early script for "Heads Or Tails" would have revolved around Princess Sally's birthday,
  • There were also character alterations:
    • Tails was originally the same age he was in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog (four-and-a-half as opposed to eight).
    • Rotor was established as Sonic's Childhood Friend and a huge nerd with bad breath as the result of his all-fish diet. He could not talk to girls, was a Bully Magnet and had a bit of a thing for Bunnie. The fish breath was never adapted, whilst there was only some mild flirting with him and Bunnie in the final show. Early episodes kept Rotor, a clumsy nerd and close friend of Sonic, but this disappeared as Antoine became a Straw Loser and Rotor got Demoted to Extra. Only one episode with Dulcy referenced Rotor's shyness around girls.
    • Bunnie's dream was to become Sally's royal hairdresser (which was jokingly referenced in her first appearance in the Archie comics). She also had a huge crush on Rotor, but was annoyed by his bad breath. She mentioned Antoine could maybe be her backup guy. Most of this is not referenced in the final show, though Bunnie is seen mildly flirting with both characters during the show's run. In the comic, Bunnie was paired with Antoine after the latter realized he was getting nowhere with Sally.
    • Antoine was British, had the surname, D'coolete, and laughed like Terry-Thomas. Whilst still a coward, Antoine's Jerkass and snobbish nature was much more emphasized. His role in the freedom fighters was established as guarding the Ring Grotto.
    • Robotnik was described as egg-shaped, wearing sunglasses, and was more comical in demeanor. He also mentioned his body-shape was getting into a Freak Lab Accident with a rotten egg, which implied a similar origin to Sonic the Hedgehog Bible.
    • Snively's original name was Quizley, and he was Robotnik's third cousin on his mother's side instead of his nephew.
  • According to the series bible, Nate Morgan (another human scientist from the Archie comics) is a refugee from SatAM; he was originally supposed to guest-star on this show, though his designs show him to have been intended as a tall, gangly human wizard as opposed to the rather short scientist of the Archie continuity. He was to have still been the King's ex-advisor (albeit having left willingly), being an environmentalist with a love for nature; he happened to be elsewhere when Robotnik pulled his coup.
  • The bible also mentions more-sinister renditions of Badniks from the games, such as Crabmeat and Caterkiller. Although a redesigned Buzz Bomber shows up in the pilot, the others do not appear; however, they did serve as comic relief villains in the early comics.
  • Some very early prototype designs were recently uncovered. Sally was a human(or perhaps humanoid) at one stage, and a proto-Seedrian at another. One sketch of Antoine was a humanoid with gravity defying hair and another was a muscular dog (in the final show, Antoine's species is unclear). Bunnie had some Disney-esque stylization and was organic from the waist up (or mechanical from the head down in another sketch). Robotnik, likely as a result of having no visual references, was drawn as both a cyborg-pirate thing and a green demon who looked less like Robotnik and more like Ganondorf if he were drawn by Don Bluth.

Pilot

• The original intro/workprint of this show, as seen in animated form here, and in partial video here, was far more cartoonish (much like the Lighter and Softer pilot episode) and offered an alternate take on how Bunnie became a cyborg. Only a couple of these elements made it into the final intro. It's debatable whether this was an intro or a pitch promo workprint for the ABC network, similar to The Real Ghostbusters pitch promo workprint (also by DiC). In addition, the partial video has music that was never used or heard anywhere else.
  • There is an alternative intro which is slightly different from the final product: Robotropolis is shown to be obscured by smog, the theme song is sung by a different person (who sounds like Jim Cummings), and includes the sound sound of Dr. Robotnik growling in annoyance at the end. This alternate intro was only seen in the ABC Saturday Morning Preview Special from 1993 hosted by the cast of Hangin' with Mr. Cooper. However, the VHS releases use the same vocals but with different audio details.
  • The unused soundtrack which was released a long while after the discontinuation of the show. This soundtrack has unused songs from the show written and performed by Michael Tavera. Some of the music can be used to match up with the intro, especially the "Burning Way Past Cool" track.
• The pilot episode "Heads or Tails" wasn’t originally planned as a regular length episode, but was planned to air in March of 1993 as a "standalone animated special". However, the airdate was scrapped and the episode was edited down to fit a regular-length episode. The original storyboard of the pilot with the scrapped scenes can be found here.

Production

• According to Hurst, the network's demand for Antoine-centric shorts in Season 2 scuppered his plans to include more Freedom Fighter cells, including a jungle-based counterpart to Knothole. Archie would eventually take that idea and run with it, some notable examples being the Downunda Freedom Fighters (led by a wallaby) and Rob 'O the Hedge (a cockney parody of Robin Hood and his Merry Men).

Season 3 and Attempts to Revive the show

• The show's third season was completely laid out before ABC swung the axe:
  • The Freedom Fighters, now dubbed "Freedom Builders", would have begun the process of rebuilding Mobotropolis, with Rotor spearheading the construction effort (some of that was explored during the middle part of the Archie Comic, but this coincided with the soap opera elements coming into play, and it later became moot when "Eggman" swooped in and took over his counterpart's base of operations). Sonic would discover that Victory Is Boring, but unbeknown to him, Snively is sneaking around Robotropolis and gathering intel on the Freedom Fighters. However, his stint as lead villain would prove short-lived, and in a moment of desperation he would free Naugus, Robotnik, and King Acorn from the Void. (The pair of sinister red eyes glaring at the viewer when the show closes belong to Naugus.) Naugus would immediately claim the villain crown: using the King as bait to lure Sally in, turning Robotnik into a Snively equivalent, and in turn downgrading Snively into essentially nothing. Snively was slated to defect to the Freedom Fighters, although he would plot to betray them at some point; Antoine would end up being the only one to notice — and ultimately stop — Snively's plans.
  • The show would have eventually confirmed, as some fans had already speculated, that Mobius was Earth All Along, with the plot set millennia after a human-purging nuclear war which caused animals to become sapient. Robotnik and Snively were to be the last humans left alive, having been off-world on a space colony mission before the war struck. After betraying and killing the rest of their crew, they returned to Earth and, due to relativity, landed after the animals had already taken stewardship of the planet. Once again, the Archie comic would reused this concept but with aliens bombarding the Earth with Gene Bombs after Robotnik’s ancestor dissected their emissary. Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie also had the concept of Sonic and co. living in an Earth After the End, with that film’s version of Robotropolis being located near an abandoned New York City.
  • Tails would have matured and played a much larger role in the Freedom Fighters, even showing a bit of a rebellious side and saving Knothole from a major disaster. His later relationship with Sonic would have been closer to the games.
  • Dulcy would have come into her full powers. All Ben Hurst said about that was, You don’t want to see a dragon when she gets mad.
  • Sally would be romanced by someone other than Sonic, though Sonic would come out on top in the end. The insufferable Geoffrey St. John (a faux-British skunk) was Sonic's rival for Sally's affections in the Archie storyline.
  • Sonic would also undergo a major personality change.
  • NICOLE's backstory would reveal that she was once a Mobian child who was downloaded into a computer by Robotnik. At some point NICOLE would be restored to her former self, becoming a member of the Freedom Fighters. This, too, was revisited in the Archie comic, with NICOLE turning into a Lynx as a pun on the Atari handheld.
  • At some point, Knothole would "get crunched", whatever that meant.
  • Knuckles was supposed to appear at the end of the season, and was going to be promoted to a main character in the also-nonexistent fourth season.
  • One would have imagined how the show would eventually ended, but with the passing of Hurst in 2010 without giving any known knowledge of a possible conclusion, we may never know.
• Ben Hurst was in talks with a Sega executive in 2000 about cobbling together a movie out of the unmade third season, including the origin of NICOLE. According to Hurst, the executive was receptive; but Ken Penders heard about Hurst's pitch, contacted him and offered to help out. Hurst in turn offered to include him in the project and shared with him his strategy for getting it approved. Shortly thereafter, the executive's attitude towards the project completely changed and it was ultimately rejected. Following this, Hurst voiced his suspicions about Penders going behind his back and sabotaging the pitch in order to promote his own potential Sonic feature. As for Penders’ movie pitch, titled Sonic Armageddon, it did gain some traction, but Sega was putting more focus on Sonic X and they felt it wouldn't be worthwhile to have two running series in two different continuities, especially one that was a darker and looser take on the Sonic franchise^note it also should be noted that by the early 2000s, Sega and Sonic Team had become far stricter with the franchise and have streamlined the brand to only focus on the original Japanese continuity, while erasing the Western continuity and most elements and characters created by the West (with Archie Sonic becoming the only holdout of the old Western continuity due to the Grandfather Clause), so a movie set in that continuity likely wouldn't have gotten far regardless. As a result it was backburned then dropped completely. Sega would then release a later Sonic film in 2020, with no ties to SatAM at all. Plus given Ken Penders’ infamous dealings with Archie Comics later that decade, it's likely that had the movie been made, it would’ve have been caught in the crossfire, due to it featuring his characters.

Misc

• At one point, a Recursive Adaptation of the cartoon based on the video game series was planned. This was one of many attempts at making a SatAM game revolving around stealth rather than speed. Unfortunately once Yuji Naka took a preview of the demo he insisted the game cease development, due to its slow pace and due to not wanting the franchise to have too many spin-offs too quickly. Characters from SatAM make cameo appearances in Sonic Spinball, and Sonic X-treme, which was eventually sidelined in favor of a Flicky revival: Sonic 3D Blast. The closest the show ever got to being adapted in a video game, outside of Spinball (which had a similar plot in the Japanese manual), was Sonic Forces, which used the general idea of Robotnik conquering the planet and forcing the heroes to underground resistance... but includes none of the unique SatAM cast or settings.
• Early concept art portrays Robotnik as a more generic, demonic-looking villain in a dark cloak. Oddly, Cluck was already present at this stage, appearing as a scruffy black rooster.

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