sonicmenu | Sonic Boom – Why It's Okay To Keep Watching This in 2025

In my days looking after multiple young children it's just a gauntlet; a solid twelve-hour shift of making sure these tiny humans don’t injure themselves, with a mental barrage while keeping them alive. Beyond naps, the closest thing to a break is when I can convince them to watch Sonic Boom. It’s the closest thing to some time to enjoy something for me. The best episodes are what I call ‘dopamine episodes’. Regardless of my general day, or how worn down I get from handling my mutually terrible and amazing children, it always picks me up.

I’ve never been a massive Sonic fan. My Childhood Home was a Mario House. I could count great Sonic games with one hand but I always hoped for the blue blur to make a comeback. There was something special about the era where Sega and Sonic were really able to take it to Nintendo. That hope died playing the stress-headache-inducing Sonic 06 on release. I vividly remember the exact moment when I stopped playing. Sonic careened straight off a loop-de-loop floor for the Nth time and so did my dreams for fun Friday night. 

During most of the 00s and 10s it was a regular recurrence of Sonic ‘being back’ and back and back…It was a regular story of decent sales, but a scathing critical reception and downright ridicule by the everyman. Alongside this were cartoons. They, unlike the games of the era, were all generally well-received. When Sonic Boom was announced as a spinoff multimedia franchise kicking off with a TV series it seemed very positive. Then came the showing off of the redesigns. Each were plasticky CGI models with odd fashion choices. Sonic donned oodles of sports tape with a big scarf. Knuckles came off incredibly tall and W I D E. Amy and Tails had marginal differences. The new character was a feral female badger with a boomerang. It was a strange mix. It drained a lot of interest.

So fast forwarding to this year when I eventually tried it off the back of showing the kids the Sonic films. The immediate differences are the extremes in tone. For example, the first episode has Doctor Eggman lose to Sonic and Tails but Tails is almost badly hurt so Sonic fires him and holds auditions for a new sidekick. Tails applies as an incognito applicant. Knuckles thinks it’s for Sonic to join him as a sidekick, but adding the condition Sonic needs to rename to Knuckles Jr. Amy pitches too much like a formal job interview introduction, to which Sonic dryly says he already knows her. She quips, ‘Great! I’m totally for nepotism’. Eggman applies too but uses it as a ruse to attack them but it blows up in his face. In the second episode, Eggman has to stay with Sonic and Tails and tries to sleep-deprive them so they can't fight back against his robot minions. This is just a straight-up farcical comedy. And it’s just spot on. So much of it works. 

So the Sonic films have a lot of jokes and one-liners and are pretty straightforward. What makes it so different is the extremes of Boom. A ten-minute runtime of a self-contained episode makes for a speedy pace of quips, visual gags, and a lot of both self-referential and Sega-referential jokes. It borders on even niche Sonic superfan jokes. Anyone who needs to ask about the Chris-chan episode, the less they know the better. 

It unapologetically eschews telling character arcs even for the sake of comedy a lot of the time. Even Sonic comes off as edgy and disinterested, often learning little beyond how they should have worked as a team. All the characters are horribly flawed. Tails is egotistical, Amy is a perfectionist snob, Knuckles is beyond idiotic, and the new character Sticks is a feral paranoid conspiracy theorist. In a weird way, Sonic Boom is Sonic cast written as Its Always Sunny characters - they are all kinda not great people. Even the villagers they save every day are often little more than a yokel mob that runs with trends or gets tricked. A lot of the distinct behind-the-scenes are caricatures of someone obnoxious. Why does this work? Why are these even positives? It’s because we can relate to the frustration of dealing with these sorts of frictions from different personalities in real life. Because of all this, it has to be one of the most Classic Simpsons-feeling shows in years. And, much like The Simpsons, it's just unapologetically funny, not just “for a kids’ show”, it's just damn funny.

Despite this, what always sticks out for me are the most ridiculous characters. The best is generally anything focused on Eggman. He’s prissy, maniacally egotistical, but impatient. Any of his attempted plots are always ultimately thwarted by his own personality getting in the way. However, the pinnacle of dysfunction is Knuckles. Compared to his depiction in the films, he’s a dim warrior, in Sonic Boom he’s just the absolute dumbest meathead jock to the point he’s non-functional. He can’t read, or count past one, but frequently bumbles to success. In one episode where he's tricked into a mortgage, he takes an office job where his vapidness is seen as leadership. When his only employee says they did all the work, the executives congratulate Knuckles for successfully delegating all the work away. Corporate satire isn't what you expect from a Sonic the Hedgehog kids’ show but it's funny cause it's true.

Looking at this and seeing it retroactively, the original consensus was people really liked the show. However, some others felt that it was too focused on telling jokes and not telling longer or deeper stories more in line with the Sonic world or these established characters. This is an entirely valid critique, but it's often what people criticised Golden Age of The Simpsons for too before we left it behind. It's the difficulty of balancing something new with fan expectations, I suppose. What really killed the Sonic Boom franchise though, is ironically, the games. Three tie-in games around the same time, most notably the Wii U’s Rise of Lyric. In my vast research of finding someone who had played this, they gave the stellar review of “somehow worse than Sonic 06…it was just absolute dogshit.” After the critical failure of these games, the showrunners couldn’t keep  the Sonic Boom franchise alive and its planned third season was cancelled. Trust Sega to ruin Sonic with its own Sonic games.

I think it's important to understand that especially when you've got less time to tell stories, even in feature films, one-dimensional characters at least initially are essential. The characters have clear traits so you can describe them well. Even in Sonic Boom, I can easily describe distinct background characters. It means you understand them, particularly if you like them or not, and what the setup and tone of a situation is. It’s the canvas that is the essential backdrop of comedy. Further, Sonic's characters are a big reason why it's done so well in multimedia and branding. It is for that reason that  I’ll keep watching Sonic Boom, because it isn’t made for children, it’s made for jaded millennials. It’s made for me.