 | |
| Series | Sonic Boom (TV series, 2014–2017) |
| Season | Season 1, episode 52 (S01E52) |
| Episode no. | 52 of 104 |
| US premiere | 14 November 2015 · Cartoon Network |
| France | 20 September 2015 · Il faut tout un village pour vaincre un hérisson |
| Written by | Alan Denton & Greg Hahn |
| Storyboard | Jeremy Corbeaux |
| Directed by | Natalys Raut-Sieuzac |
| US viewers | 0.69 million (Nielsen, premiere) |
| Previous | Counter Productive (S01E51) |
| Next | Tommy Thunder: Method Actor (S02E01) |
It Takes a Village to Defeat a Hedgehog is episode 52 of Season 1 of Sonic Boom, the CGI comedy series made by OuiDo! Productions with Sega of America. It premiered in the United States on 14 November 2015 on Cartoon Network.
Synopsis
While Team Sonic loses a long war with a flat-pack bookcase, Eggman is assembling something more dangerous: every villain on the island, from the Lightning Bolt Society to T.W. Barker and the newly evil Charlie, united to destroy the heroes. The guest of honour, to the doctor’s starstruck delight, is Shadow the Hedgehog.
Team-building does not go well. Shadow lets Eggman fall during the trust exercise, refuses to play zip-zap-zop, dismisses the rest as fools and teleports away. The other villains rally round their boss anyway, and their ambush works at first: Team Sonic is split up, each hero tied down by a different enemy, and Sonic faces Eggman, Charlie’s mech and a Giant Robot at once.
His secret weapon is a spare bookcase plank, turned into a seesaw that launches him through two robots. Then Shadow returns, purely to fight Sonic himself, and has the upper hand until the flash from an Eggman selfie blinds him. Promising a rematch on his own terms, he vanishes again. The heroes celebrate with a game of volleyball using the Eggmobile, Eggman included, while Orbot and Cubot wonder whether to start a petition for more episodes.
Trivia
- The Season 1 finale, shown on 14 November 2015.
- Eggman calls Shadow the second most popular character in the canon, one of the show’s best-known meta jokes.
- One of three episodes on the bonus DVD in launch copies of Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice.
- On DVD: Universal’s UK volume No Robots Allowed (10 Oct 2016); in the US, NCircle’s Season One, Volume Two (2020) and The Complete Season 1 (2021).
- French title: Il faut tout un village pour vaincre un hérisson. The episode aired in France on 20 September 2015, before its US premiere.
- About 0.69 million US viewers watched the premiere broadcast (Nielsen figures as listed by Wikipedia).
Watch the Episode
This episode does not have an official full upload on YouTube at the time of writing. Season 1 is on DVD from NCircle in the US (The Complete Season 1, 2021) and Universal in the UK (2016), and has been available on services including Hulu, Netflix and Tubi; see the series page for details.
Part of our Sonic Boom Season 1 guide. See the series page for the cast, the redesigns, the games and the comics.
Sources: air dates, writers and storyboard artists from Luke’s original Sonic Scene episode list, cross-checked with Wikipedia, Sonic Retro (Wayback copy) and Sonic Wiki Zone; synopsis written for Sonic Scene from the episode summaries on those sites; title card and screenshots via Sonic Wiki Zone, copied to our media library.