The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog (Chaos Emeralds Saga 4) Prehistoric Sonic

 By Mark Rodriguez

The evil Dr. Robotnik has journeyed through time to find the 4 Chaos Emeralds that can give him the powers of Invincibility, Invisibility, Immortality and the Power of Life Itself. Sonic and Tails have ruined his attempts to get the first three.... now it's up to them to stop from getting the Power of Life Itself. This was a multi-part episode which is rare for a wacky episodic cartoon like this.... but let's see where this all ends.

Right on the heels of the last episode, the fighter plane blast the plane that Robotnik and his robots were on, which sends them falling in their time machine. They land in mud and are about to be run over by a tank. They quickly adjust the time machine and blip out of there, going further back in time. Robotnik says they're going after the Chaos Emerald of Life Itself and it can bring anything to life, even the robots. Scratch seems happy to be a real chicken and Grounder says he can be a real life....whatever he is.

Back to the beach...again... Tails is looking for Sonic and is hit by a blue ball that four bunnies were playing volleyball with. Tails is angry but sees that the ball was Sonic himself, and the bunnies grab him to play some more. Professor Canine-stein runs in before Sonic can get lucky and tells him that Robotnik is after the Chaos Emerald of Life. This time he downsized the time traveling surfboard into a time traveling skateboard, and the heroes rush off.

Robotnik and his robots arrive in prehistoric times and he points out that the emerald was ejected from a volcano when it first erupted. A dinosaur stomps on Scratch and Grounder and walks off with them. Sonic and Tails soon arrive and follow the dinosaur tracks with the imprints of Scratch and Grounder on them.

Robotnik and his robots arrive at the volcano and are attacked by cave bears. Robotnik uses his robot transmogrifyer from earlier and turns a dinosaur into a robot. He sends the robot dinosaur to attack the cave bears until Sonic and Tails arrive. He then sics the robo-dino on them. Sonic manages to ride the robot dinosaur and send him after the bad guys. He then makes the dinosaur turn into a giant buzzsaw. Robotnik, Scratch and Grounder are trapped near the cliff, with boiling lava waiting for them below. Robotnik sees this as an escape, and they jump. Tails is surprised and tells Sonic he 'really got them this time', but the bad guys return on a pterodactyl.  Robotnik also turns into a robot and the bad guys fly off.

The bad guys make it to the volcano and Robotnik spots the Chaos Emerald. He turns to it, but it's stuck to a rock formation. He uses Scratch as a crowbar but still can't get it out. Just then, the lava forms into a living creature called Magma the Volcano God and demands a sacrifice in exchange for the emerald. Robotnik is about to dump Scratch and Grounder into the volcano as sacrifices, as Sonic and the cave bears arrive.

Even as the heroes arrive, Robotnik still dumps the robots into the lava and the volcano takes the sacrifice. The emerald falls out of the rock formation and Robotnik gets his hands on it. He turns the lava into a monster, and though Sonic slices it in half, it forms into two monsters. The monsters grab Sonic, Tails and the cave bears. He tells them to throw them into the lava... but ties up Tails' tails first so he can't just fly out of this. 

I'm pretty sure the entire monster, including his hands, is made out of molten lava. Sonic and Tails should be melted goo here.

 The monsters drop them into the volcano. Sonic spins and quickly catches Tails and everyone else and gets them back to safety. Robotnik sends the magma monsters after them and runs off with Scratch and Grounder, that survived their little lava dip. Sonic and the rest easily toss the monsters back into the lava and head out to stop Robotnik from getting the other emeralds. They arrive just in time to see them use the time machine to get away.

Robotnik gets back to Mobiegypt and in the burial ground of his ancestor and steals the Chaos Emerald of Immortality. Sonic and Tails arrive too late and Robotnik gets away in the time machine. The mummy Robotnik comes at them again, but without the gem of immortality, Sonic quickly unravels him. Sonic and Tails dash off after Robotnik again.

Robotnik arrives in the middle ages and threatens the king, who is now wearing the Chaos Emerald of Invincibility. The king says he can't be harmed, but Scratch and Grounder grab his daughter and remind him that they can harm her. The king surrenders the emerald to Robotnik just as Sonic and Tails arrive. Sonic grabs some armor and runs into Robotnik with a lance... but since Robotnik is wearing the gem of invincibility, he's unharmed and Sonic looks like he ran into a brick wall. The bad guys get away and Sonic and Tails continue the chase.

Robotnik arrives in the time of pirates and Grounder digs up the gem of invisibility. Sonic and Tails show up to take the treasure chest from Scratch and Grounder, but find it empty. Robotnik was holding onto it the whole time and zaps the treasure chest with the gem of life, turning it into a crab that traps Sonic inside. The bad guys return to present time.

Back at his castle, Robotnik puts all 4 Chaos Emeralds around his neck and becomes the Supreme High Robotnik, master of the universe. Meanwhile, Tails finds a female crab to seduce the crab-chest into letting Sonic go. Sonic and Tails head back to present day.

Sonic and Tails arrive in time to see Robotnik terrorizing everybody as a giant. Robotnik grabs Sonic and Tails, ties them to their time traveling skateboard and tosses them to the beginning of the universe. They arrive at the moment of the Big Bang...which is literally a giant firecracker in the middle or nothingness. They chew their way out of the ropes and manage to escape into the time machine just in time before the Big Bang happened,

I guess it would make sense for the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog universe for it to begin with a literal giant cartoon firecracker floating in nothingness.

As they journey through time and space, Tails asks how they're gonna stop the Supreme High Robotnik. Just then another Sonic and Tails that were tied up to the skateboard and sent flying back to the Big Bang whizzes right by them. This gives Sonic an idea. Sonic and Tails arrive back in prehistoric times before they arrived there the first time. Just then another Sonic and Tails arrives and out Sonic fills them in on his plan.

Robotnik is making the towns people bow to him, when Sonic and Tails come back. Robotnik says he can't be stopped, but Sonic shows he went back in time again and again and brought back 4 more sets of Sonics and Tails. 

Robotnik uses the gem of life to bring a steel pole to life into some sort of monster, but the 5 Sonics quickly cut it down to size. Scratch and Grounder have anti-sonic gear, but the hedgehogs defeat them easily as well. Robotnik reminds them that he can turn invisible as well, but the 5 Tails dump flour all over him, making him easy to see again. The 5 Sonics attack Robotnik and mess with his mustache and whatnot, and manage to knock him down (though it's confusing how since at this point nothing should be able to hurt him). Once he falls, Sonic takes the emeralds away and Robotnik turns back to normal. Sonic gives the gems to the other Sonics and Tails and they'll use Robotnik's time machine to return them to their rightful owners and time periods and them destroy the machine afterwards. They all say he can count on them, and Sonic says of course he can, since he is them. Time travel is fun folks.

Sonic Says-

Tails is trying to fix the time skateboard to make it even faster. Robotnik steals it and gets electrocuted. Sonic warns not to try to fix electrical appliances on your own, have your parents help or send it to a repair man. I'll keep that in mind the next time I try to tinker with my time traveling air conditioner. Also this might be one of the times we see Tails tinker with machines before the Sonic Adventure series made him a young genius. 

My opinions-

It was a decent enough episode but the Supreme High Robotnik stuff was too short and rushed. Maybe it should have been its own episode, making it an even five, you know, since the show used to air Mondays through Fridays. Of course, once Robotnik grabbed the gem of life, there was little reason to stick around and risk Sonic stopping him, so it was smart of him to dash off and grab the others. It was nice seeing those time periods again and if you were smash these into some sort of 'Sonic cartoon movie' that does bring the whole thing full circle. It would also explain why Sonic is always at the beach. I guess this all took place in a day and he just wanted to get back to what he was doing? But dude, you knew there were four emeralds, you shouldn't get too comfy until you get all four.

The only hiccup in this episode was the visit back to Mobiegypt and Robotnik's ancestor. I guess he wasn't ashes because maybe they went back to grab the gem before they arrived the first time... but why didn't the Robotnik mummy turn into ashes again the moment Robotnik took the gem away? And why did he talk in a weird monstrous voice when he sounded just like normal Robotnik last time? Oh well. And now for...

Overanalyzing a kid's cartoon-

Not too much I really see here. It just HAS to be bad for the time stream to have 5 sets of Sonics and Tails though. The other mess up was the Sonics being able to bash into Supreme High Robotnik and have him actually say 'ow!!'... and then topple him. He used the emeralds of invincibility and immortality before and they had Sonic just bounce off him harmlessly.... so why was her vulnerable now that he was wearing all four? That's basically all I could think of in this episode.

And that wraps up this 4 episode saga. While the episodes weren't as insane as some of the others... and they weren't just the bad guys setting trap after trap after trap on Sonic only to have them backfire on themselves.. or somehow have Sonic trick them with some lame disguise.... I hope it still gave you guys the general idea of how wacky this series can be. Actually without the disguises and such, these episodes felt a bit more 'action-packed'. Well, it was good to revisit the series and remember those classic 16-bit days before the series became overcrowded with characters. If you want to see more, I think all of the episodes are available on DVD now.