Literature / Sonic the Hedgehog in Robotnik's Laboratory

Sonic the Hedgehog In Robotnik’s Laboratory is a book written by the collective Pseudonym Martin Adams published in 1993. The first part of a series of books penned under that name at the time, starring the eponymous videogame character.

Sonic and Tails have been away on holiday and upon returning, discover that all of their friends have been kidnapped; turns out Robotnik is once again attempting to conquer Mobius. It’s up to our bodacious spiky sprinter and his awesome twin tailed fox, Tails, to save their pals, stop Robotnik and to get something to eat!

The Book Contains Examples of the Following Tropes:

• Adventurer Outfit: Tails wears the pilot version them momentary before Sonic does a Double Take and tells him to take them off.
• Airborne Aircraft Carrier: Wing Fortress makes a return.
• Ass-Kicking Pose: Tails gets one as he wades through the smoke of a destroyed door and faces Robotnik down with a toaster. Rather ruins the effect when he tries to ‘’sound’’ badass.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: Flying badniks will often creature squadrons while receiving these types of orders.
• Big Eater: The book rarely goes a page without mentioning either somebody eating something or somebody worrying about running out of food, the amount of food the characters go through is staggering, and it’s all junk food; pizzas, nachos, peanuts, ice-cream, sodas and crisps with bizarre combinations (no chilidogs though). Sonic at least has the excuse that he requires vast amount of food because of his hyper metabolism; other characters don’t.
• British English: Mickey the Monkey speaks in Cockney rhyming slang and liberal use of British phrases, a counterpoint to our heroic duos lexicon. Sonic and Tails calls his slang outdated
  Tails: “Sonic, people stop saying things like that ages ago. It’s awful!”
• Canon Foreigner: Eggor, Stevie, Caesar, and Mickey.
• Carnivore Confusion: Sonic and Tails wish they could sit at home with a bucket of chicken at one point; despite the fact they have a Rooster as a friend.
  • Also Stevie the mole is worried when Sonic and Tails turns up looking for their friends. He asks sheepishly if their friends are worms…
• Department of Redundancy Department: The author is fond of these; “A huge ship lumbered across the sky. It was mega-mega-ginormous. Gigantic to the max. Endlessly vast. Totally, unbelievably massive. Look, it was BIG”.
• Evil Laugh: Robotnik is prone to trail off his sentences with one of these.
• Face Palm: Tails does one after Sonic lies that Computer-Terminal is actually code for blueberry ice-cream soda.
• Fun with Acronyms: There are few; Fabulously Advanced Robotnik’s Original Universal Transmogrifier (FAROUT) for example.
  • And again with Stevie’s Wideband Interfacing Minimaxing Polyphonic Outreaching Unisunthesizing Toppgraphizer (WIMPOUT)
• Goofy Print Underwear: Caesar wears boxers with big yellow flowers on them. Tails laughing at them gets the pair thrown into the coliseum.
• Green Aesop: Gets a couple of lines from Sally and the book follows after the games; Green Hill Zone good, Scrap Brain Zone bad.
• The Igor: Robotnik’s new robot assistant Eggor.
• Mecha-Mooks: Badniks.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: When Tails says he works out every day Sonic says he better be careful or he’ll end up facing a Schwartzneggbot.
  • Later Eggor wishes he could be a robot movie start like Robot Di Nero.
• No Fourth Wall. The author is constantly talking to the reader, even going so far as to not tell us what FAROUT acronym stands for when Sally overhears because it would scare us, or breaking away from the action and telling the people in the back to stop booing.
• Not Quite Flight: Tails can fly using his normal method while Sonic jumps, spins and otherwise uses his momentum to go high distances. The book does get confused over whether Sonic can fly or not sometimes though.
• Objectshifting: Robotnik has invented a machine that will physically transform anyone put in it into an inanimate object. (The victims mostly turn into electrical appliances, but Johnny Lightfoot becomes a mop).
• Pie in the Face: What kicks of the events of the book. Sonic and Tails are bored so they dress Tails up as a ghost, make a luminous custard pie, and attempt to lure Router out with a “special delivery”.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Tails goes into full action-hero mode when he gets to use an automatic toaster as a gun; “Eat hot waffle death, you ‘orrid ratniks!”
• Projectile Toast: After Sonic is transformed into a toaster Tails and Mickey covert him into a waffle-gun. Tails uses him to launch an assault on Dr. Robotnik's lab.
• Pungeon Master: Robotnik is constantly cracking eggstremely lame puns, but it’s not him as it turns out to be rather infectious.
  • Lame Pun Reaction: Pretty much every furry character in the book has one of these to the constant puns, Sonic even calls him out on one where it doesn’t make sense.
  Robotnik: Eggor, prep the eggscape capsule!
  Sonic: That’s cheating.
  Robotnik: What, eggscaping?
  Sonic: No, escape doesn’t even have a “X” in it.
• Oxygenated Underwater Bubbles: following on from the games this is how Sonic and Tails breathe underwater for their extended search of the lake.
• Sapient Eat Sapient: Almost happens to Chirps the chicken; after Robotnik realises that he doesn't lay eggs, he plans on roasting him for lunch (pretending the oven is a spaceship that will take him to "the planet Kentuckee"). For no apparent reason other than For the Evulz, Robotnik also plans on cooking him alive (never mind that a chicken cooked with its head, feathers, intestines and gall bladder still in place wouldn't be remotely edible).
• Saw It in a Movie Once: repeatedly used as justification for why Sonic and Tails know something they realistically shouldn’t is “I saw it on a video”.
• Sdrawkcab Alias: The book uses the Dr. Kintobor created Sonic and turned into Dr. Robotnik in a failed experiment as the backstory.
• Sheathe Your Sword: The only way to get out of the spring traps (which are literally coiled springs) was to stop struggling at which point they just break apart.
• Space Romans: Like Earth Mobius has Romans, unlike Romans on Earth they’re scared of Lions.
• Spike Balls of Doom: Some activate when they “hack” into the master system.
• Spikes of Doom: It’s sonic, of course there are spike traps hidden around!
• Super-Speed: Again, it’s Sonic.
• Time for Plan B: What’s Plan B? I don’t know I haven’t thought of it yet.
• Totally Radical: from start to finish the book is filled with the most bodacious, rad and totally hip dialogue ever devised by man or beast. It start’s Sonic “Way Past Cool” The Hedgehog and it was written in the early nineties so it’s to be expected.
• Unwilling Roboticization: Robotnik’s plan is to transform every living organism into a machine while they’re fully sentient. Johnny Lightfoot for example gets turned into a mop and is used to clean the floors.

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