I won tickets to see Sonic the Hedgehog the Movie. I suppose would be a good a time as any to mull over my complicated feelings on being one of the first in the country to see the character on the big screen.
Let me be vulnerable for a moment here: I LOVED Sonic the Hedgehog.
No, really – as a child, Sonic was my first cartoon crush.
There exists, floating somewhere among the deep, dark recesses of the Net, an excerpt of me waxing poetic about my crush on Sonic. I know exactly where it is, but I’m not going to divulge that here; have fun searching for that bit of cringe on your own. Or email me if you’re genuinely curious.
I watched the animated series on TV, and was a disciple of the short-lived Saturday Morning cartoon series, heretofore dubbed Sonic SatAM.
Ironically, mine was a Nintendo family, so I didn’t own the extensive library of Sonic games. Although I did own a Sega Genesis, and my first game was Sonic Spinball; a spinoff game loosely based off Sonic SatAM crossed with pinball mechanics. Good times.
So as I go into the weekend with the utmost trepidation that this movie will fail, and fail spectacularly, I feel that I owe it to myself, and to my childhood fascination with Sonic the Hedgehog, to be fully immersed in the experience.
In a way, this is a poetic and potential rebirth of more than one 90s creation. Jim Carrey, star of In Living Color and pretty much every slapstick comedy film of my youth looks to be in rare form in the trailers, displaying an exuberance I have not seen from him since the early 2000s with Ron Howard’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Indeed, if by some stroke of cosmic luck this children’s CGI film rekindles the appeal of two past titans, then I could be in for a real treat.
But historically, video games have had an atrocious track record in theatres. Sure, there are some that buck the trend of awfulness, but for every Mortal Kombat, there’s Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li; for every Resident Evil franchise, there’s a DOOM that threatens to prematurely end a promising actor’s career; for every Wreck-It Ralph, there’s some abortion of cinema sloughed out by Uwe Boll. After 30 years of this pattern, to expect anything more would be a fool’s errand.
And yet, even Nintendo is finally willing to give movies another go, trying again with Illumination’s attempt in 2022 after the abysmal nostalgic dumpster fire that was the Super Mario Bros. movie; perhaps Sonic is the precursor, the bridge that will soften the transition from super-sucky to acceptable cinematic fare.
After all, here is a studio that learned from its mistakes, bringing back the Vancouver team that botched the initial design of Sonic and sent the whole Internet into a self-righteous tailspin.
But it’s okay now! They’ve learned from their mistakes (never mind that the Vancouver studio shut down shortly after correcting their mistake, proving that no good dead goes unpunished).
No, it’s important to go into the Sonic movie with as much optimism as this jaded 30-something ex-fan can muster. I say ex-fan, because aside from the rigours of age and vagaries of real life beating me down, it was the culture itself that ultimately ripped the rose-tinted hue from Sonic’s once lustrous glow.
I’ve taken an interest in the video game history during the era of my childhood, and that includes the rise and fall of the cerulean mammal; I can practically recite the tragic tale by heart:
Sonic the Hedgehog debuted in 1991 on the Sega Genesis (Master System everywhere else that wasn’t ‘Murica) as the first viable rival to the powerhouse that was Nintendo’s Mario. Sure, there were other contendors vying for the spot (Aero the Acrobat, Bubsy the Bobcat, Alex Kidd), but Sonic seemed self-ordained for the role as soon as he zoomed onto the screen with all his 90s ‘tude.
For much of the 90s, these two became the flagship mascots of their own respective, warring consoles. And while Mario only occasionally strayed from his video game roots – sometimes with disastrous results as evidenced by the aforementioned Hopkins-Hopper-Leguizamo vehicle Super Mario Bros. – it was actually Sonic who took more risks to engage with Western audiences.
There were not one, but TWO animated series produced: one was a zany slapstick cartoon, the other a grounded, character-driven adventure that placed Sonic in the role of freedom fighter in an impossibly dystopic world. While the latter was the superior show, it was cancelled by ABC after two seasons, though it enjoyed new life as a comic that spanned over two decades.
In an inexplicable meta-marriage of everything that embodied the 90s, the Sonic of this generation would be voiced by none other than Jaleel White of Family Matters fame. Yes – Sonic was once voiced by Urkel!
It was an insane combo but I loved it. I loved everything about this blue blur and would tune in religiously, every day after school, to be proselytized into the hedgehog dogma.
I was a fan, I was a superfan…until I wasn’t. My interests had shifted; a new wave of cartoons were premiering on Nickelodeon, one of them including a kid with an oddly-shaped head. Pokemon would invade the culture for the latter half of the decade, proving there was only room for one technicolored rodent in the mainstream.
Sonic would re-enter my thoughts at the turn of the century when our family acquired a Gamecube, and the long-standing feud between Sega and Nintendo was put to rest with the port of Sonic Adventure 2. I still remember the smile on my face as I watched my brothers play that first stage, “rolling around at the speed of sound”, sliding down an inclined cityscape on the piece of an aircraft.
I loved the game, and I assumed the world still loved Sonic as much as they did in the 90s.
Then I got the Internet.
I learned that Sonic’s transition from 2D to 3D was not as smooth as his plumbing counterpart’s and that he was basically a vagrant mascot with the shuttering of Sega’s console market in 2001. The Sonic Adventure series was received well-enough, but it was plagued by a persistent camera issue that would continue to haunt games created by Sonic Team for years to come.
And then there were the characters. Oh Lordy-Lordy: the characters.
Let me just say I have no qualms with supporting cast members Knuckles and Tails. They were introduced early on in the Sonic franchise and cemented their place as the original duo that defined the games.
And I even enjoyed the cast created for Sonic SatAM. The woodland creature protagonists, while a bit hokey at times, seemed right at home in the world of Sonic and I was saddened by their shortlived animated presence.
But then Sonic team introduced this new batch of characters, and they were bizarre and foreign to the old group. In lieu of the strong, intelligent independent Sally Acorn, fans were subjected to the thirsty, clingy Amy Rose. Some characters were just lazy wastes of space, like Big the Cat, and others had really no purpose or logic behind them whatsoever (Charmy the Bee? Reeeeeeally??!!)
Perhaps it was an example of cultural dissonance at work. For example, Tingle is despised and reviled in North America, but in Japan he’s one of the most popular characters in the Legend of Zelda series, even spawning his own game on the Nintendo DS.
These characters were weird, and ultimately didn’t add much to the lore of Sonic, but they were inoffensive enough that they didn’t exactly tarnish his legacy.
Then along came Shadow.
What started as an interesting concept of Light vs. Dark from the aforementioned Sonic Adventure 2 game morphed into its own egregious EDGELORD entity with the spinoff title Shadow the Hedgehog.
It’s Sonic!…but darker…and with a gun…?…he rides a tank now!
After Shadow’s botched debut, the downfall of the Sonic brand proceeded rapidly until it reached its nadir with the infamous Sonic ’06 game on Xbox 360.
At that point, Sonic the Hedgehog was a punchline, a laughingstock, a figure of ridicule. Sonic became the poster child for everything that was wrong and toxic with Deviantart, with gaming, and with society in general. For every semi-decent game created, there were a myriad of half-cocked attempts that tore Sonic further away from his reputation as an enduring character of video game culture.
The culmination of a legacy came to a head with the “fan game” to end all fan games, The Sonic Dreams Collection. In this labour of love and masochistic self-reflection on a fandom gone mad, all of the worst facets of the Sonic the Hedgehog fan community are highlighted in glorious interactive next-gen graphics. Markiplier’s Lets Play of the game sums up the ordeal in spectacular fashion.
It seems that Sega may have finally accepted that Sonic is a product of its time, and does not have the ability to evolve in the same ways that Mario has done with effortless aplomb. Sonic knows his place, and is finally staying in his lane, as a 2-dimensional sprite that simply GOTTA GO FAST to get from point A to point B without losing his precious rings.
And you know what? That’s fine by me. It may look primitive to my other PS4 titles, but Sonic Mania is a fine game and celebrates what made the character so irresistible from the get-go.
Back-to-basics Sonic is all I really want from the character (that and for Jaleel White to voice him again someday. Dare to dream…)
For now, I’m content to go to my downtown cinema with my brother on Saturday morning, and amongst the youngins’ who are wide-eyed and still have hope in their eyes for what the future holds, I hope to crack open a beer and revel in a movie that let’s me feel all the feels, good and bad.
I love you, Sonic the Hedgehog.
Now let me hate-watch your damn movie.