The Ugly Sonic Disaster Is Still Freaking Hollywood Out
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When the first trailer for the original Sonic movie came out, it’s hard to imagine that we’d be here five years later looking at a franchise preparing for its third film, a spinoff show with Idris Elba as an Echidna, and a sea of potential in its wake. Mostly because people watching couldn’t imagine anything else but the unyielding nightmare of its Sonic design.
Reaction to the creepy creature—its teeth, its ungloved hands, its weird fur, its bizarre attempts to look weirdly human and yet also be in the vague shape of a ‘90s platforming game mascot character—was so bad the movie was delayed, the design reworked into something more akin to the game designs, and... well we here we are now, not just talking about the Sonic movies as an existent franchise, but a successful, actually pretty decent one. And now, Sonic sits among a sea of video game adaptations vying to be the next big thing, all united in one way or another by one sole thing: don’t be that original Sonic design.
“Every design now is vetted within an inch of its life,” marketing president Marc Weinstock recently told the Wall Street Journal (via Eurogamer) about the legacy of Ugly Sonic, in an age where we have the likes of The Last of Us, Borderlands, Fallout, and Halo (and plenty more to come, like a Mario movie sequel, Minecraft, and maybe even that Mass Effect show Amazon’s purportedly working on) all touting themselves as faithful takes on their source material, inspired by the legions of dedicated fans that made those franchises worth adapting in the first place. Some of those has fumbled in dealing with fandom expectations—Halo made a big to-do about trying to win gamers back after its controversial first season ended—but the threat of everything that went down with Sonic, and now the long tail of its success and survival, is reportedly driving Hollywood execs to gamer discords and Reddits to gauge approval and fan reaction, according to WSJ.
It’s not difficult to see that sort of hesitant faithfulness in the game adaptations we’re getting in ways—like Fallout’s desire to pitch-perfectly replicate power armor and pip boys to be just so. There’s certainly pitfalls to such rigidity (the whole point of adaptation is to do something suited for the new medium the material finds it in, and not everything that makes video games work from a narrative standpoint necessarily translates elsewhere!), but it’s wild to see that Sonic’s legacy as a successful media franchise beyond its gaming history is now tied into a pretty decent line of family action movies, and a reminder to never do what it first set out to do 5 years ago ever again.
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