It's no great secret that the Sonic the Hedgehog fanbase is exuberant about their chosen blue idol. For many, their love of the Blue Blur goes all the way back to the halcyon days of the Sega Genesis and the franchise's first entry, Sonic the Hedgehog. That game, as well as its follow-ups -- Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and the addon cart Sonic & Knuckles -- fundamentally changed the platformer genre with their sense of speed and divergent level design. But to be a Sonic fan is also to suffer by acknowledging that, for the most part, the franchise's quality took a serious dive after these initial four games. Now, with the emergence of teasers for the upcoming movie Sonic the Hedgehog, it looks to many fans that the iconic hedgehog's big screen debut will continue that depressing trajectory.
The evidence at hand is a pair of swole blue legs included in a motion poster advertising the film. Those legs are, of course, attached to none other than the titular Sonic, who has been redesigned to sport his most human physique ever, rather than his iconic, noodley blue limbs from the games. Unsurprisingly, the core Sonic fanbase has been having none of it, filling the poster's comments section (as well as its snarky follow-up post) with lewd Photoshops and brief messages akin to affronted mourning.
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Online fandoms have been reacting poorly to redesigns for as long as they've existed. Look no further than the past 10 years of Michael Bay-directed Transformers movies or any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot if you want a glimpse into the world of spirited online discussion regarding the appearance of cartoon anthropomorphs. Sometimes the frustration is warranted, though often the anger stems from the irrational feeling that one's nostalgic recollections have been unduly violated. In the case of Sonic, though, there might actually be something there.
Fans are likely so irritated at the Sonic movie design because the character is just coming off Sonic Mania (2017), a game that finally did the thing many Sonic adherents have been urging Sega to do for ages: Just bring Sonic back to his roots. And that's exactly what Sonic Mania did by remixing old levels with new twists, then using those preexisting templates to create wholly new, oftentimes bonkers levels from scratch, all with a slavish attention to detail when it comes to the look, feel and pacing of those old Sonic games. The result? Sonic Mania is the best and most critically acclaimed Sonic game since the original, 2D quartet of speed-based platformers.
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So, with that in mind, it's not unreasonable for fans to ask why Sonic needs to be reinvented yet again after such a positive showing. It's a question that would only come off as narrow-minded and resistant to change if there weren’t already a multi-decade history of Sonic reinventions going horribly awry. If the original formula proved to be appealing to so many, and so recently, then why not stick with that and build off a stable base instead of trying to reinvent the hedgehog again? After all, it's been proven that time and time again that venturing too far from Sonic's roots results in strange, forbidden ideas, like werehogs, superfluous character additions and makeout scenes with a human woman.
Had the Sonic movie's marketing team kicked things off before the release of Sonic Mania, well, there's a decent chance that we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Sonic would still be a joke character with little more to his name than a string of bad-to-middling games and an incessantly irreverent Twitter account. If nothing else, a reboot might have even been welcomed. But that's not what happened. Instead, the Sonic brand enjoyed a brief flicker of relevance free from the Fourth Wall-shattering non sequiturs that define the character's modern persona. This game (breath of fresh air as it is) delivered to Sonic fans perhaps the most dangerous thing any long-suffering fandom can get their hands on -- hope.
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If anything, the outrage surrounding Sonic's redesign can be attributed to a rejuvenated fanbase fighting for the soul of a character who just recently started showing signs of life again. Let's not forget, after all, that Sonic Mania is squarely the product of the character's fan community, as the game's lead developer, Christian "Taxman" Whitehead, spent years creating Sonic fan games before being hired on at Sega to lead development on Sonic Mania. So, essentially, it took a fan to make Sonic good again after years and years of attempts by Sega.
Now, just when it seemed like Sonic was back on track, we get a live-action CGI hybrid movie with Jim Carrey as Doctor Robotnik and, yes, those damnable swole blue legs. There's a world in which a Sonic the Hedgehog movie gets the same lavish, colorful, animated treatment as Ralph Breaks the Internet or Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but with each teaser that's released it becomes more and more apparent that Paramount is hedging its bets on the modern surrealist interpretation of Sonic. That might make for some chuckleworthy .gifs down the road, but it's also a reading of the character that's got to go (fast) if there's to be any future for Sonic the Hedgehog beyond low-hanging meme fodder.