Out of all the movies this struck me as the oddest. What was this supossed to be? Some sort of pilot episode? This was most likely made by TMS, who had also worked on Tiny Toons at the time. What's the dirt on this?
I know the answer to this one!
I believe it was a pitch video for a potential Sonic cartoon. The work was done by TMS Entertainment, who also did some episodes of Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Batman and a ton of other Japanese anime and foreign works.
I love their stuff, even though I wasn't aware of them at the time I was watching their work. But you can tell. There were always those select episodes of Batman and Sonic and Chip n Dale that had awesome animation.
Anyway, the Sonic cartoon ended up being Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, and a majority of the work was done by DiC. I think DiC got the job because they were less expensive than TMS. DiC also made a pitch video, which I assume was made at the same time as Man of the Year. I'm guessing a call was put out for studios to show what they could do with a Sonic cartoon and DiC and TMS answered the call.
DiC's pitch:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EZ54vXrcVU[/youtube]
However, TMS did animate a few episodes of AoStH, namely the best episodes of the series: Quest for the Chaos Emeralds 4-parter and the episode Super Robotnik. Not sure why TMS was given the task of doing these episodes when DiC was handling the show. My guess is DiC was overloaded and farmed the work out to another company that had experience animating Sonic. Or the episodes were too complicated for DiC.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ke5QF1ngNU[/youtube]
I always wondered what AoStH would have been like had TMS animated the whole series and kept the Man of the Year aesthetics. Imagine AoStH with Man of the Year quality animation, humans interacting with Sonic years before Sonic Adventure and Eggman with his Japanese design. I'll bet the appearance of humans in SA1 wouldn't have been such a shock if that happened, plus the Saturday Morning show with Sally and the freedom fighters wouldn't be as good by comparison (though I personally prefer AoStH to SatAM still).