#resaurus

A friend of mine is working on a personal project to model Sonic action figures and make them in the style of some old toys. Complete with mold making and plastic pours (pretend I know what I'm talking about) These are their plans so far:

and the old toys in question:

Barely any. Until 2017, the only Sonic merchandise I can ever remember seeing was:

These Sonic and Tails plushes. They're pretty "big", which is a definition I use to mean they are bigger than, say, the average claw machine plush. We'll say about a foot tall, maybe a bit bigger. I have both, packed away in a box somewhere.

The Sonic 3 McDonalds toys, obviously. I had Sonic, Tails and Knuckles but I think I ended up getting Robotnik off Ebay at some point in the mid-2000's.

This Sonic gumball toy. Basically the closest thing we ever got to a proper Sonic action figure. Sonic's quills on the back of his head comes off, which is where the candy was kept. The whole figure is hard plastic, but the nose is soft rubber, which has a habit of getting torn off (or even just rotting away, since its getting old enough). Mine still has his nose.

And honestly... that was it. There was a big gap from 1993/1994 all the way until the Resaurus and Toy Island Sonic Adventure figures in 1999/2000. By then I was starting high school, meaning my "kid status" was rapidly evaporating.

(I had Sonic from Resaurus and Eggman from Toy Island).

I think right around that time, Denny's, of all people, had small Sonic Underground plushes.

I believe my girlfriend at the time got me Sonic and my brother ended up getting me Knuckles.

Then, for seventeen years, these were the last Sonic toys I ever saw. Now, there were Sonic toys out there -- I believe in the early 2010's there were RC cars based on the Sega All-Stars Racing games, and there were apparently Sonic Generations figures in 2011. No store I visited ever stocked them. They may as well have not existed.

When Sega launched Sonic Boom in 2014, they made a deal with TOMY to create Sonic Boom toys. It was a big deal. Part of the cross-media machine Sega was cooking up. Problem was, they were exclusive to Toys 'R' Us. There wasn't any Toys 'R' Us where I lived -- I had to travel two towns over to find one. So again, I never saw any.

It wasn't until 2017, when we moved from Colorado to Nevada, and we stopped in at the Reno Toys 'R' Us that I ended up seeing Sonic Boom merch for the first time. They were all shoved off on an endcap like they were clearance.

I ended up buying a set of 25th Anniversary toys there.

A better picture of them out of the box with the Eggman and Mecha Sonic figures friends bought me a year and a half ago (they're almost the correct scale to each other!):

Toys 'R' Us shut down in America early the next year (2018) and TOMY's exclusivity deal with them didn't matter anymore. That felt like it threw open the flood gates and Sonic merch is everywhere now.

Edit: while digging for the final photo, I happened to find this, which I took in 2019 or so, showing my Sonic Gumball toy, plus the Knuckles and Robotnik McDonalds toys sitting next to some Mario Party 2 pencil toppers I got out of a capsule machine in 2007.