Sonic Retrospective: Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik’s Teeth

Yesterday over on Instagram, the unused opening cinematic for Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood began to circulate, showcasing how the cinematic would have appeared running on a Nintendo DS. The cinematic is actually not a new discovery, as the video of the full unused intro released back in December 2021. All that said, this article was really just an excuse to post the unused intro but since it isn’t news, I thought instead I’d take a quick look back at Doctor Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik’s teeth!

As seen in the unused Sonic Chronicles intro, Eggman was given some really gnarly yellow teeth. This rendering of Robotnik’s chompers fly in the face of the pearly whites we are used to seeing in the video games. In fact, I’ve always seen his oddly perfect teeth as coming in second to his giant moustache when it comes to defining elements of the character.

Early concept art of the character gave a hint at his lovely white perfectly aligned teeth, with the design of the character himself being based partly off of American President Teddy Roosevelt who also had large (presumebly white) teeth. In fact, Roosevelt was famously known as the “first smiling president” because he regularly showed a wide, toothy grin in photographs and public illustrations, a major break from 19th-century presidential tradition.

Every piece of classic Eggman art from 1991 through 1997 made it clear that Eggman had large, white, perfectly aligned teeth.

The design trait carried over to the Sonic Adventure era where Eggman’s modern design kept his teeth white and clean. This design trait continues to this day, as his most recent renders show his teeth remain perfect 35 years later.

Interestingly, Western interpretations of Eggman often went in the opposite direction, using Robotnik’s (as we called him at the time) teeth as a visual gag. In SatAM, Robotnik asked Snively to check the color of his heart by looking inside his mouth, which gave us this ugly scene:

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, meanwhile, had Robotnik’s teeth do this:

Despite these gags, most of the time Robotnik did have quite white and perfect teeth in both cartoons.

In conclusion, Doctor Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik has teeth. Most of the time they are perfect, sometimes they are really nasty, they can also shatter if it’s funny. The unused intro for Sonic Chronicles were yellow and uneven. Maybe this is why Sonic Team didn’t want to use the animated intro? Who knows. Thank you for reading.