Being pretty old around here, I was four or five when they started the two initial Sonic animations, and I remember waking up just to catch SATAM. As a result, Sally, Uncle Chuck, Snively, etc. etc. are all burned in my memory, even though I never followed up on the comics to a great extent.
I must've missed the initial showing of Underground, but I watched exactly one episode five years later on the CW or PAX, one of the two really obscure channels picked up on our antenna. It sort of looked cool at first: It was dark and dystopian, kind of like SATAM, and apparently Sonic and Co. roved from place to place in an RV. Neato, the whole series was one big grimy camping trip.
Then came the first song of that episode. I think I lasted ten seconds before switching the channel.
I wonder if SATAM was genuinely a better cartoon than Underground (at least in terms of lacking ear-wrenching music), or if I was a doddering idiot of a tike when SATAM came out and would watch anything with robots and explosions and cartoon hedgehogs shoveled into it. Watching snippets of SATAM on Youtube, I'm almost positive the latter scenario is more accurate. I wonder if it isn't true for many individual people in the crowd that cares to bash Underground as the worst of the Sonic cartoons.
Nowadays I like AoStH the most, because I'm a lanky, twentysomething doddering idiot easily amused by Internet memes created and perpetuated by people five to ten years my junior. How far I've come.
