Character Designs: Sonic The Hedgehog

Back in the mid-late 90s, I had a minor obsession with the Sega Saturn (I know, right?). Other than Daytona USA and Die Hard Arcade, all I ever really played on it was Sonic Jam. A compilation of the main four Sonic The Hedgehog games from the Mega Drive era. Basically a pre-gamecube era Sonic Mega Collection.

I do very much prefer Sonic Jam to Mega Collection, mainly for one reason. It fed my interests of the development of things I liked. In this case, the Sonic series. As we've already discovered, the game was pretty much my favoutite thing ever when I was a child. I just loved the spiky little blue rodent.
Sonic World was a small overworld for Sonic to explore (also I suppose Sonic's first proper 3D environment), with a lot of mini games to be found, but also buildings including the Music Shop (soundtracks), Movie Theatre (movies and ads), Hall of Fame (timeline) and Character House.

Character House would show some very interesting development artwork for the character designs. I used them as a reference to structure my own character designing back in the day. I used to do a shitload of face charts especially.

Here are a few from the gallery of Sonic and Dr. Robotnik:

Ah, a height chart! Something we all do, right?

Ah the many faces of Sonic. A lot of these not seen from post-Sonic Adventure Sonic. I wonder if the top right drawing is based on Felix The Cat?

How to draw Sonic. Yes, I did it.

Nose-tap.

A selection of poses. Love the third drawing. I think it was these designs where I discovered Sonic's shoes had buckles.

Perspectives!

Robotnik is quite big in comparison to Sonic.

I love how ridiculous his original design was. Back when he was just chasing down jewels and turning small animals into robots.

Unlike the heroes of this story, this guy had very good manners.

Robotnik love and Egg-Snow-Mobile. Whee!


What I'm guessing is a Sonic 2 era Egg Mobile. Good detail you never saw in the game itself. Oh god if only Sonic 4 was like this...

Jacky

Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Storybook Form.

Part of me would have preferred to have referenced the original lyrics for this project, but this is probably far more sensible considering what little grasp I have on the French language.










And as a guide, here is Scott Walker's rendition of the song:

ROBOTS!

Let's start off 2010 with some chocolate obsessed robots!

Pixeldogs

I think listening to Squarepusher and Joemus is doing strange things to my work...
Check out Pixeldogs in the real world under the cut!

Hairstyles Through The Ages....

Click to enlarge.

Some pixel art I did the other night. A medium I haven't practiced since like, 2002.
Doesn't look too bad actually. Might try it again sometime.

I was split between the two backgrounds so I'll just put up both this time around. Opinions?

87,658 Hours later...

Turns out ten years ago this month, David Bowie released Hours... His 21st solo studio album, as well as his last album of the twentieth century. Promising a new more laid-back Bowie and slow acoustic 'pop songs', the press anticipated this album would be the new Hunky Dory.

As it turned out, Hours... was pretty unremarkable by Bowie's standards. Especially considering it was standing between the drum & bass beast that was 1997's Earthling and 2002's Heathen, an album which the press kept referring to as Bowie's "return to form" and the rather clichéd "best album since Scary Monsters".

It's pretty unfortunate that Hours... turned out the way it did. Much of the material was as good as anything else that he produced at the time. It was just these small elements which held it back. I think the biggest problem is the mix job by Mark Plati. It's just too clean! It works for some of the songs, such as the first track of the album, Thursday's Child. But it takes the kick away from songs such as the guitar-driven The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell. Had Bowie and Tony Visconti patched up their differences sooner, they'd probably have a great album on their hands.

Fortunately, a few of the songs from Hours... were greatly improved in a live environment. Mike Garson's tickling of the ivories complimented the music a lot (he was unfortunately wasn't available during the recording of the album, instead touring with Billy Corgan).

I find the songs Something in the Air and Seven most improved live. Both of which have fortunately seen official releases. In fact, the former was remixed to sound more like it's live counterpart for the film American Psycho. The latter, which sounded much too overproduced for an acoustic song benefited from a more emotional vocal performance on the bonus third disk

of 2000's Bowie At The Beeb.

The sixth track of the album was something interesting and new for the time. It came about as a lyric writing contest on BowieNet. Contestants were to download an instrumental from the website and come up with some interesting lyrics for it. The winner would not only meet Bowie in the studio, but would also have their lyrics recorded by Bowie himself. The winner was one Alex Grant, the song was titled What's Really Happening? A guitar driven piece still possessed by the spirit of Earthling.

The following track, The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell wouldn't seem out of place on a Tin Machine album. As I said, it's a shame the mix was too polished for a song that should really sound much grittier. An alternative recording previously appeared on the Stigmata soundtrack.

The penultimate track was an instrumental called Brilliant Adventure. Bowie's first instrumental since 1993's Buddha of Suburbia. Nothing really to say about it other than it helps the end of the album flow. Not really a track you'd pull out of the album to listen to alone. Although it does have a very "Heroes" feel to it.

And the final song of the album, I must admit, successfully wraps up the album nicely. The Dreamers is something of a minor epic. Certainly one of my favourites from the album.

I think perhaps the reason much of this album is so weak may be due to lack of communication. Most importantly between Bowie and Reeves Gabrels, who wasn't really interested in this new direction Bowie had taken (he and Bowie parted ways very early on during the Hours... tour). He was apparently not happy with Bowie's interest in making a Ziggy musical. Also the rerecording of his 60s material for his next album. (Both were eventually cancelled anyway.) Besides that, many of the musicians for Hours... had never worked with Bowie before and never did again.

Other than the 2004 two disk reissue, that's it for the music. The two music videos released (Thursday's Child and Survive) were pretty dull in comparison to say, Little Wonder, Dead Man Walking and I'm Afraid of Americans. One was David singing at himself in the mirror, while the other was him floating around the kitchen.

One thing I absolutely love about the album though is the cover art. The front features a piece by photographer Tim Bret Day, featuring Bowie's previous Earthling persona, exhausted. Dying in the arms of his long haired successor. I liked this photo enough that I bought an hours promotional poster a couple of years back. It's not been on the wall since I moved unfortunately. My current bedroom is much too small for it.

So there we have it. I'm critically analysing a David Bowie album. I can do it! I'd rather talk about an album I'm indifferent about than one I love (Outside or Low). More to talk about, more conclusions to draw.

"Indie"

I had a conversation with a friend of mine on a coach yesterday about the current music scene. It became interesting for me when he said he absolutely hated "indie" music, which initially made me sit and think. My understanding of the term was 'any band on an independent music label.' How can you hate a band solely because of their current label stands on it's own legs in the music industry?

But then I remembered. Thanks to Q and probably some perverted game of Chinese Whispers, indie has a million-and-one meanings nowadays, and changes from person to person. I asked him what indie music was.

"Indie music is an (English) northern man singing over four chords about how he looks forward to a good piss-up on Friday night."

Of course! Taking his response loosely (as I often do), I realise he's obviously talking about Arctic Monkeys indie. He's talking about Kaiser Chiefs indie. And if for this example, we replace

"northern" with any strong accent, The Libertines, The Kooks, The View, Klaxons and so on. I'm sure Kate Nash would make it in here, she's like the lady version of these guys.
If I were to use his definition, I would have to agree with him. I also am not fond of indie music.

But then again, I like music that other parties would class as indie,

such as Psapp or Ambulance LTD or Final Fantasy. All three very different from each other, but still pigeonholed in the same

genre. More importantly, all three don't sing

about working class situations in a strong english accent. In fact, all three are from the other side of the Atlantic!
Of course, the whole western world also get into a confused mash of what indie music is.

Very popular acts such as The Arcade Fire, The Flaming Lips, Kings of Leon, Radiohead and The Killers are also listed as indie. As with Björk, Death Cab for Cutie, Beck, Franz Ferdinand, Placebo and so on.

Then you get older bands often grouped with indie in some kind of pre-indie link, such as My Bloody Valentine, Josef K, The Stone Roses, Jesus and Mary-Chain, Talking Heads and even The

Velvet Underground.

Instrumentation might have something of a hand in this. They don't want to impress you solely with their guitar, nothing too metal, nothing too progressive. They might not care about a rich perfect recording, imperfections can be welcomed with open arms. Some of them aren't afraid to use a xylophone, saxophone or stylophone if they wanted. Acoustic guitars will be found somewhere or everywhere.

Lyrically, they can sing about absolutely

anything. Alcohol, semen, robots, girls, Franz Kefka, whatever.

Indie is the worst music genre.

There is no common link that holds all indie bands together. Every other genre works like this:

a has x
b has x
c has x
x is common in this genre.

With indie it's like

a has x
b has x and y
c has y
d has y and z
e has z
a, b, c and d are all indie because they can be linked together.

But I assure you, a doesn't sound a thing like e.

This leads me back to my friend's definition and the bands he considers indie. Why are those

bands considered indie at all? I think it's one of two things:

• These artists, as with most artists, started out on small labels. Making them remain "indie" even after they are bought out by EMI.
• Lyrical content is often very explicitly brought down to the consumer's (i.e. the common working-class man's) level. And usually each word can be taken at face value without the need for thought or imagination.
  

The latter point is most likely what also makes it so popular, since these kind of people make up a majority of the popular music consumers in the United Kingdom. That's also the reason why bands like that never make much of a mark stateside, these songs just reek of British culture.

In twenty years these songs will sound so unbelievably dated. I've been trying to avoid politics throughout this post (which is really impossible when writing about a music movement), but they will most certainly purely exist as a reminder of what the country was like

back when no one wanted to do anything. That is in the hope that people will be doing things by then, of course. People would be wondering if Britpop ended at all.

God, it's like the greasy, unmotivated stepson of the punk movement.

I prefer to consider indie music the same way I'd consider any other art form with "indie" in

front of it (indie film, indie comics, indie design). A small collective of DIYers standing up against the mighty publishers and labels and forming a small, but successful little niche for themselves.
This would include bands like The Delgados, who owned their very successful scottish music label Chemikal Underground Records purely from scratch and with little money in 1994. This will also include lo-fi royalty like Daniel Johnston, R. Stevie Moore and Nick Currie, who prefer making albums in their own home with often terrible self-production and absolutely no input from their music label, but still release brilliant records nonetheless.

But now I don't have a genre. My definition does not describe a style of music. It decribes a style of making music, but not a style of music.

If any genre can be pulled from this, it'd be that the music doesn't necessarily have to be pleasing to the ear. It can deviate entirely from the poptone laws that create the perfect number one hit, and it usually does. But it doesn't have to as to be "indie".

All in all, I hate the use of the term "indie music". Not even a thousand word article brought me any closer in understanding what it all means. From what I can tell, it's just a lazy blanket term for artists that can quite easily be put in a more suitable slot.

Tune in next week when I rant about how much I hate the "alternative" music genre! Or not.