Any animation fan should fondly remember Robert Zemeckis’ tribute to the golden age of cartoons, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. To those who have never seen the movie (and you should be ashamed of yourself if you haven’t), the movie contained many cameos from various cartoons with characters like Donald Duck and Daffy Duck sharing screentime together. Disney’s upcoming movie Wreck-It Ralph does something similar (though it presumably does not contain live-action actors), but instead of being about cartoons it’s about videogames.
The movie is about that angry looking fellow shown in the movie’s logo, Wreck-It Ralph, who appears in a fictional arcade game called Fix-It Felix. His job is to destroy the buildings that the game’s titular hero has to fix. Because Ralph doesn’t like being the bad guy anymore and wants to be good he gets out of the game and jumps into other genres like first person shooters and kart racers. Though the games he gets into are made up for the movie, not all of the characters are. Like Roger Rabbit, famous characters from videogame history appear throughout the film.
One scene in particular has Ralph in a support group for villains, pictured in the above image (taken from Disney’s D23 Magazine). As you can see Eggman appears in this scene along with Bowser, Dr. Wily and Zangief. If he’s just going to sit there doing nothing or if he actually has a speaking role we don’t know, but it’s still neat to see him appear in a big Disney flick. Considering the nature of the film, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Sonic make a small cameo as well. Of course if he doesn’t matter because the movie sounds awesome as it is. You can find Wreck-It Ralph in theaters from November 2nd this year.
[Via Rockman Corner]
Amazon Prime is an ever growing service. Starting as a free shipping service, Amazon has added in benefits over time including offering a library service for Kindle devices as well as free streaming videos. While the season may be over, it’s not too late to relive the Christmas spirit with DiC’s Animated Christmas Special. Of course, it’s really just the Inspector Gadget Christmas Special followed by Sonic Christmas Blast. It’s at least in the highest quality possible, and it’s free!* What a steal!
You may recall that David the Lurker covered the special as part of the 12 Days of Sonic Retro Christmas. Those of you who have Amazon Prime memberships, why not take up on his suggestion? Keep in mind that the Sonic cartoon shows up directly after the Inspector Gadget special, and never mind that Princess Sally from the SatAM series appears for some reason, or the sloppy animation, or that Santa can’t seem to protect himself from Dr. Claw AND Dr. Robotnik on two separate occasions. Pretty sloppy St. Nick…
*Free with $79 purchase of Amazon Prime membership.
There are some great Tumblr blogs around, like Things Organized Neatly or Feeding Objects. Joining these is a new blog called Dumb Running Sonic:
This started with Magical Game Time’s Zac Gorman making a simple gif animation, which prompted Nedroid to make one as well. The latter challenged others to make dumb running Sonics as well and the result was this amazing new meme, with animations like the one above. (Which was made by Boxer Hockey’s Tyson Hesse.) You can see more over at the Tumblr blog.
Occasionally, there’s more than the standard “SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2 FOR GENESIS ~@SUPER RARE!@~” being sold on the international auction house that is eBay–for instance, right now there’s an ex-Sega employee selling a ton of official t-shirts, so if you ever wanted a Sega Frontline Marketing shirt, now’s your chance. However, what has appeared for sale today is quite possibly the greatest Sonic-related merchandise I have ever seen on the Internet: a frame of AoStH Robotnik. Naked.
Bidding as of this writing is at $10 USD. Go get it. You know you want it.
[Thanks to Flyboy Fox at the SSMB for pointing this out!]
Not one to be left out of the tradition of having a Christmas cartoon spinoff, Sonic too had a Christmas special, which includes a few cameos from the SatAM saga while being firmly based in the world of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.
Note the slightly higher quality animation. Sparkly.
Grab some cocoa or some egg nog and kick back. David may have given you 12 days of gifts, but here’s one more for you all.
Because we love to spoil you here at Retro. Merry Christmas, everyone! Hit the jump for the other parts.
If you haven’t had a chance to watch the 1996 two-part OVA Sonic the Hedgehog, stop reading this and immediately track down a copy to watch–it’s quite possibly the best Sonic-related animation out there and definitely is a nice contrast to the Western Sonic series from the early 90s.
However, if you happen to live in Japan and haven’t seen it yet (or would just like another shot at seeing it), Bandai Channel is offering the Sonic OVA ahead of its 15-year anniversary this upcoming May both for PC and mobile phones. Each episode is priced at the pretty reasonable cost of ¥210. You can check out a preview or watch on PC at the Bandai Channel website for the OVA (do note that you need to have a Japanese IP in order to access the movie) or you can see the mobile mini-site and download the episodes directly to your phone or mobile device by following this link.