A prat falls.
Cartoon Concerto is an eight-page complete story which opened The Official Sonic the Hedgehog Yearbooks.
Staff[]
- This story is uncredited, but the artwork is recognisably that of Richard Elson. In an interview with StC-O, Elson stated that the script had been written by Alan McKenzie.[1] Meanwhile, the lettering appears to be from John Aldrich.
Story[]
Sonic The Hedgehog is on a Power Ring-hunting expedition in the Marble Zone, gathering up their energy to strengthen himself against Robotnik. With his speed and athleticism, Sonic has little difficulty in retrieving rings from their difficult and dangerous positions above the Zone's firespouts and lava-flows.
Meanwhile, Doctor Robotnik is conducting research... watching a Tom & Jerry-esque cartoon! After delighting in the cat's demise on the screen, Robotnik decides to adapt the traps and contraptions that he saw on the show into devices to defeat Sonic, and follows him the the Marble Zone to do just that.
Firstly is that eternal classic, the painted tunnel. Robotnik daubs one onto a tomb-wall, and places a few badniks about as bait, trusting that Sonic will rush forward, bop the badniks, and then smash himself a concussion against the wall. Sonic appears, but mysteriously he just seems to fly down the tunnel as though it was a real one... when Robotnik tries to follow he gets a broken nose against the solid wall for his trouble.
Robotnik then endeavours to enhance the efficiency of his traps by adapting them for the setting rather than just pouring them neat. He suspends some phony Power Rings - actually plain iron, just covered in gold paint - with the intention that once Sonic has collected them, Robotnik will be able to use a giant horseshoe magnet to slow the hedgehog down enough to make him a target. The plan initially seems to succeed - Sonic gathers up an armful of the fake rings and then becomes puzzled about his slow progress as the forces between magnet and rings rope him back. Robotnik's omitted an engineering fault, however - the giant magnet is on wheels, and so instead of Sonic being pulled back to the magnet, the magnet instead rolls towards him... running over Robotnik in the progress.
Hoping to make it third time lucky, Robotnik goes back to basics with a simple trap with less to go wrong. He lays down a field of glue, and again scattering some badniks about as bait, he trusts that Sonic will destroy the badniks, then get entangled in the glue, so leaving him helpless and unable to avoid a lava surge from sweeping over and incinerating him. Robotnik is thwarted by Sonic's speed - the hedgehog travels so quickly that the glue simply doesn't have time to set. Fuming at the departing figure of Sonic, Robotnik lurches forward shouting curses, and is so lost in his indignation that he doesn't notice that he's blundered onto and got himself stuck in the glue - Robotnik promptly gets a pre-season tan.
Like all good children's television, there's a valuable, worthy and improving moral lesson to round off the fun. After being smacked, crushed and scorched, Robotnik comes to realise that cartoons rot your brain.
Trivia[]
Robotnik would later change his design to the AoStH version in STC because they ran out of "ex-" words in the dictionary...
- The title is a parody of Looney Tunes.
- Robotnik has a peculiar laugh: "Yok! Yok! Yok!"
- This story has a very high density of "Egg-" puns, with eight varieties.
- Eggs-tremely
- Eggs-pedites
- Eggs-piry
- Eggs-cuse
- Eggs-ultant
- Eggs-pect
- Egg-o-Magnet
- Egg-o-Matic (actually a misprint for "Egg-o-Magnet" above)
Timeline[]
This story is a standalone oneshot and does not influence any other stories.