Article: 261629 of talk.bizarre
From: solan@panix.com (Susan Solan)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: THE GREAT SONIC THE HEDGEHOG CONSPIRACY
Date: 2 Dec 1995 04:08:36 GMT
Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and Unix, NYC
Lines: 90
Message-ID: <solan-0112952306260001@solan.dialup.access.net>
Status: O
X-Status: 

Hello. I've been lurking here for a while now at the behest of one of your
regulars (who shall remain nameless to protect ... you know the drill...).
Anyway, when I felt brave enough, I posted a true post-Thanksgiving story
to, sadly, get no response. I have since heard from this regular that
cross-posted posts don't always make it, so for (what I've newly
discovered) Fail-To-Suck Day, I've decided to repeat it.

Hope it doesn't suck...


                    THE GREAT SONIC CONSPIRACY

My mother and I went to the Thanksgiving parade last Thursday. We got 
a pretty good spot between 53rd and 54th streets - across the 
street from Dave Letterman's theater (OK, the Ed Sullivan 
Theater), which had a good northward view up to Columbus Circle 
(this is important!).

Anyway, here comes Sonic the Hedgehog (tm), who takes a dive at 
around 57th street - a lot of the balloons had problems making the 
turns around Columbus Circle onto Broadway and were bouncing 
around, hitting the ground and such at this point.

But Sonic never recovered from his fall. He completely deflated 
and was pulled from the parade entirely. We watched in horror 
while the Sonic-less handlers walked by rather morosely. We 
quickly recovered, though, and went on with our lives, i.e., the 
rest of the parade.

Here's the kicker. My mother had been _taping_ the parade in case 
we ended up on camera (we didn't know where we'd end up beforehand 
and there were no cameras where we were). Later that day, we go 
to her place (my car was there), and watch the tape anyway -- I 
was curious to see how NBC would handle Sonic's demise. But 
_amazingly_ he's right there, coming down Broadway at 34th street, 
looking just super and inflated and like nothing happened to him at all!!

The announcers (Katey Couric, Al Roker and Willard Scott???) were 
babbling on with their canned Sonic commentary as well -- you know,
the typical character descriptions and chitchat written for them by 
the Sega Marketing Squad. It seems they believed that Sonic was there
as well.

Mom, always the optimist, postulated that, maybe, they somehow reinflated
him and he  made it down there. But, alas, no believer I. I rewound 
the tape and watched the sequence a couple of times.

While my mom's VCR is by no means the cutting edge of technology, 
(and neither is her aging Zenith), its picture tube was big enough 
to show that the Sonic footage was a _little_ degenerated - like 
it was a tape of a tape. 

THE BASTARDS USED LAST YEAR'S FOOTAGE!!!

Let me put it this way. There was no way they could have 
reinflated him and snuck him down to 34th street (why sneak it 
past us anyway?) in under an hour. A friend told me it takes at 
least two hours to blow them things up to begin with. And he could 
hardly have fit in the subway. A second Sonic? Maybe, but 
unlikely.

My fine parade-watchers, you've all been duped by NBC. 

Why did they do it? I donąt know, but I could imagine that the 
Sega Marketing Squad, furious that their free plug, er, beloved 
faux-cartoon character, not being able to make it all the way to 
Macy's front door on 34th Street, forced the parade's TV Director 
(or whatever the title is for someone who basically tells the cameras to 
stay focused on giant balloons) to dig into their archives for last 
year's footage. (Makes me wonder if they actually have this sort 
of thing set up for all the balloons?)

BTW, the Skydancer (some sort of ballerina with wings) balloon was 
another casualty of sorts - her face was deflated and she looked 
like what Michael Jackson will look like in a few years. NBC 
showed her from the neck down, with the commentaters admitting 
that "she needed a facelift." This is a new balloon, so there was 
no "last year's footage" available. And, obviously, they didnąt 
want to traumatize the millions of little girls so badly that they 
wouldnąt be beg their parents for Skydancer dolls for Christmas

Sorry I had to break it to you all this way, but THE TRUTH HAD TO 
COME OUT!



I hoped this failed to suck. Thank you for your time.

Susan Solan
http://www.panix.com/~solan/