Saturday Morning Cartoons: The original Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog are streaming free

Sonic the Hedgehog has been rolling his way around video game consoles since 1991, and movie screens since 2020. Now, the latest chapter in the saga is streaming on Paramount+ with live-action/CG hybrid series Knuckles. But if you’ve already watched the two movies and six episodes of Knuckles too many times, why not take it most of the way back with the original animated series, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog?

In fact, there’s a bizarre history of the Sonic cartoons worth highlighting here, before we can explain what you and your kids can check out this AM. In 1993, right after the first Sonic game dropped on Sega, the company approached ABC with a bold plan to extend the reach of the franchise: produce two cartoons, one for the Saturday Morning Cartoon crowd, and another for after-school.

So not one but two Sonic cartoons were produced and released at the same time. Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog was the Saturday morning version and leaned into goofy slapstick and jokes for kids mainlining sugary cereal. It ran for 65 episodes over one season (yes, seriously). The older-skewing Sonic the Hedgehog ran for 26 episodes over two seasons and focused on a post-apocalyptic world where villain Doctor Robotnik had taken over and Sonic was leading the resistance fighters.

As you can probably tell, neither lasted that long, and the 1999 follow-up series Sonic Underground was also canceled after 40 episodes of a planned 65.

Perhaps the weirdest part of this experiment, though, is that Jaleel White, aka Urkel from Family Matters, voiced Sonic on both series. Jim Cummings initially voiced Doctor Robotnik on both series as well but was recast on Adventures after an unaired pilot.

That’s the extremely weird backstory of this property but how can you watch any of this? The good news is that most of Sonic’s animated adventures are streaming free on Tubi. Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog is streaming in full, though the service has broken it up into five seasons. Meanwhile, Sonic the Hedgehog is only streaming in Spanish, and Tubi only has the first 13 episodes.

If you want to keep on the Sonic animated bent, the service is also streaming Sonic Underground, as well as the 2004 anime Sonic X. But hey, why not start with Adventures, where it all kicked off? Throw it on the TV, hear the dulcet tones of Jaleel White, and coyly ask your kids: did I do that?