The Sonic The Hedgehog trailer can best be described in one word: cringy. The music for the trailer calls back to some sort of 90’s nostalgia that the tone of the movie doesn’t support, Jim Carey as Dr. Robotnic plays on conflicting emotions, and the design for Sonic has had the biggest backlash in the form of memes and Instagram outrage. If you haven’t had the opportunity to feast your eyes on this face-scruncher we have the trailer here.
As I said before the internet lost its collective mind upon seeing trailer resulting in hilarious memes.
Since then Paramount has acknowledged that the design choice was not the best and has assured fans they are going back to the drawing board and all will be fixed.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, these movie meatheads have a lot of nerve thinking they can carelessly tamper with decades of perfected characters and somehow think they can do better overnight. Everything needs a new interpretation but they clearly wanted to stray far from his short, round, and stocky design. If the directors chose to change that so much they will do the same for everything else. To save ourselves the headache we should start thinking of this movie as a “strange blue half-man, half-rotten quip monster” than Sonic The Hedgehog. He has a hard enough time fitting into the modern era in his own games, I can’t see it being any easier in film. The design is only one of the big hurdles of this movie succeeding.
It’s painfully obvious they are going with the quirky Ryan Reynolds Deadpool personality for Sonic. There’s nothing wrong with that style but it’s kind of already currently being done by Reynolds himself with another fast furry CG character in Detective Pikachu. The biggest reason this style might not work as well for Sonic is that he was not built on being talkative, cute, or even funny.
He’s all about action.
Sonic was designed to compete with his greatest rival Mario by being everything Mario wasn’t; cool, brash, edgy, adventurous, and full of attitude. Back then he didn’t talk so everything was conveyed through his actions and body language. He was like a silent 90’s version of Bugs Bunny and Sega went to great lengths to highlight those aspects of his design and personality in order to set him apart from the crowd. For example, if the player waited too long to press any buttons Sonic would impatiently tap his feet while looking directly at the player until he would eventually leave the stage out of boredom costing the player a life.
That’s the 90’s for you, but it’s 2019 and the attitude era is over. Sonic’s had trouble regaining his footing for over a decade for a slew of reasons regarding character design, level design, gameplay mechanics, tone, story and target audience. That’s a whole other topic altogether, however, it’s evident from the controversy surrounding the trailer that the issues surrounding the video games are leaking directly into the film. Paramount may have been looking for a quick buck off of a popular character but may have bitten off more than they could chew.
Source: Youtube, Knowyourmeme, Gfycat,
