Another indie animated surprise, I just finished watching the pilot for “Lackadaisy” and my god I’m very impressed with this show!
I hope it gets picked up! The 1920’s prohibition setting, high action, fun and interesting characters, great designs, and overall fun tone was a delight! Takes me back to the days of those weirdly violent but charming Don Bluth animated movies we all watched as kids with a mix of new age flair.
It’s only 27 minutes on YouTube and one of the main characters is the same person who voices Angel Dust in Hazbin Hotel! One of the main antagonists is also a favourite of mine, the wonderful SungWon Cho! We need more adult cartoons like this floating around. Shows with proper long term story development are needed in this day and age more than ever.
Also it reminded me of the music video for “Lone Digger” by Caravan Palace because of the cats and club setting. Bonus points for me right there. Go watch Lackadaisy!!
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Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog - The Pilot! (Screenshots & Review)
They waste no time showing off how sadistic Sonic can be at times. Poor Robotnik!
I was actually going to be wrapping up this review series today with "Sonically Ever After", but I recently got a request to review the Aosth pilot, so I'm giving it a go, first!
There isn't much of a cohesive story to this pilot, as it seems like it thrown together more to give a feel of the shows tone, character personalities, and segments such as “Sonic says”. Also, before I start, I should mention that there are several different uploads of the pilot on Youtube (as well a download on the internet archive), and I decided to go with the one that had the longest length. Part of that extra length turned out to be clips from an episode included in the main series, so I'll be leaving that segment out. And, I do apologize for the incredibly fuzzy screenshots, but sadly I could not find any high-quality recordings of this pilot. I really hope they still exist somewhere!
The first scene starts out with Sonic introducing himself (And Robotnik) in front of a funky looking black and white background.
We then jump to a zoom in of planet Mobius, with a narrator, no less! That's definitely different from the final show. The narrator Gary Owens is fun and over-the-top like something from an old radio drama, and he also guest-starred as the voice of Powdered Toast Man in a Ren & Stimpy cartoon. No wonder he sounded familiar!
We see Sonic vandalizing a wanted poster that Robotnik put up of him, and hot damn, I need to praise how smooth this animation is! As cute and fun as Aosth is, it does feel unfortunate that this level of fluidity couldn't have been present throughout the entire main series.Though, on the other hand, there are a couple of moments in the pilot where Robotnik feels “overly” animated to the point of being visually confusing. Think something like the weird animations in CDI Zelda, but sped up really fast.
Blue arms?! Yup, despite some really nice and art and animation peppered throughout, there was a coloring error even in the pilot. Whoops!
We then see Robotnik telling his badniks about Sonic, in a scene that should look very familiar to anyone who's played Dr. Robotnik's mean bean machine. He's also voiced by Jim Cummings at times, which is odd to hear when I'm so used to hearing him be played by Long John Baldry (which is an awesome name by the way, wish he was still around... ). Sonic enters the room to taunt Robotnik, and all the robots chase him out of the tent in Emerald Hill Zone - which looks really nice! Again, it's a damn shame they couldn't have had this level of quality in the whole series' backgrounds.
I love that pretty and highly accurate Emerald Hill Zone background!
We get to occasionally see Scratch and Grounder in the pilot, but they don’t have any speaking scenes.
At this point, the "story" just kinda ends and the rest of the pilot is just a bunch of unconnected scenes - but they're still a treat to watch. We get to see Robotnik launch a cactus out of a cannon at Sonic. This part of the pilot was reused in the episode “ Untouchable Sonic “ (review here) , which is cool because at-least some of it was preserved in a higher quality this way.
The next scene clip has Sonic rallying freedom fighters and vandalizing a Robotnik billboard (another clip that got included in "Untouchable Sonic”). We then also see the scene that ended up being used for the show's credit sequence, where Robotnik gets squished by his own trap while trying to kill Sonic. The mystery of how he recovers form this at the end of every credits sequence is revealed - Scratch and Grounder come to re-inflate him like an old timey cartoon.
Next, there's a scene where some ...frog?...guy asks Sonic for help with a pond that Robotnik seems to be polluting or sealing the water from. Sonic traps Robotnik in his pipe then goes to relax at the beach with Tails. This is yet another scene that fascinates me because there's an old Archie Sonic comic where a fan submitted pretty much the exact same drawing on Sonic on the beach...but this was an unaired pilot. Maybe the kid who sent the art had a parent who worked on this show's pilot? I’d link the art but I can’t find it online. Maybe later I can do some scans from the original comic...
Wanting revenge for the pond incident, Robotnik attacks again using his little drilling vehicle from mystic cave zone in Sonic 2. He causes Sonic to fall into a hole in the beach, and we hear Tails' voice for the first time, too. It's definitely a different voice actor, whom is apparently rumored to have been a gal named Russi Taylor, but no voice actor was officially credited. The voice for Tails wasn't bad, but I'm so used to kid who voiced him int he mains series that it sounds quite odd to hear, much like with Jim Cummings.
Sonic and Tails take out Robotnik’s drill vehicle, and there's a bunch more chaotic slapstick scenes between him and Sonic shown. We also see a clip of Sonic talking to a character called "King Leo" and eventually a glimpse of Sonic running through Hill Top Zone, too!
I like this goofy screenshot I managed to capture of Tails. Looks like he’s having a sugar rush. :D
I enjoy how Robotnik looks comically small in this shot, and the look on his face is fun, too.
Sonic and Tails have the best little impish grins here. :)
Hill Top Zone!
Lastly, we get to see the very first "Sonic Says!". Sonic saves Tails from being hit by a car, and feeling embarrassed, Tails acknowledges that he knows he was careless to just run out into the road. Like many characters in the pilot, Tails' animation is much more "wild" and exaggerated, but nod distractingly so like Robontik was at times. The scene is quite cute and gives a chance to hear much more of Russi's (?) Tails voice.
“I don’t want any of my pals gettin’ turned into road pizza!”
And, well, that's the pilot! Not much of a story of course, but what makes it such a treat is seeing all the early ideas for elements in the final show, as well as all that great animation and art. I'm really glad this was preserved online by several folks, though I do still hope one day there will be a version with better visual quality and possibly more sound too. Oh right, the sound - another thing I forgot to mention was that some edits on YouTube add music and sounds to make things feel less awkward and empty in the audio department, as it seems the original video was quite lacking in music, sound effects and surprisingly, a lot of voices, too!
Til next time, stay cool, and don’t become street pizza!
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An alternately animated scene from the Gravity Falls Pilot has been quietly released!!
The scene was done by Kevin Martonick and revealed on his demo reel recently.
I reached out to Kevin given I've been trying to contact people who worked on the pilot for a project I'm making and this was what I got as a response when asking about this scene from him…
"I was only on the project for a couple scenes. I'm not even sure the scenes I did are the actual ones they used for the show. The character "Norman" looks different than the one in my demo reel."
So, long story short, this scene was made by Kevin for the pilot but wasn't used.
Check out Kevin's other work here
Original video source:
Song: Intro by XX
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