Hello Internet. Welcome to Film Theory, the show that's really excited
to show you my new Sonic O.C. Get out of there. Come on, come on. Get out
of there. Get out of there. You trash pandas. You know loyal theorists, It's been
a minute since I've gotten to talk about my favorite blue, weirdly humanoid hedgehog. Oh, you want me to go fast? Ugly Sonic goes slow. No. Nope, nope. Not that one. Some
things are best left forgotten forever. Nope. I'm talking about the other Sonic. The cute Sonic. The Sonic that's one part
meme, one part recycled jokes. But I am not watching Snow Dogs
again. That movie is the wooorst. Thank you so much for hiring Mona Lisa, that means so much to me. Even
though, honestly, she's the woooorst. Seee, it's not copying your old material if the
kids watching never saw the original stuff. John Ralphio is having himself some big brain time
right there. Anyway, with Sonic Frontier is getting itself some positive reviews and a
new Sonic TV show coming out this December. Really? A TV show? you?
Yeah. Is that so difficult to believe? Now seemed like the perfect time to revisit
the old blue blur. Suck on that Game Theory, Sonic is ours now. And whether it's
in games, movies, comics or TV shows, one core part of Sonic's lore is
his insatiable love of chili dogs. In fact, it comes up a lot with Sonic. More than you'd think really.
Like, a lot. A lot. That's character development, right, guys? That's
how you make a well-rounded character? You give them a quirky trait, and then you just repeat
it a whole bunch of times over and over again? That's what I think.
*SLURPS DIET COKE* Let's roll out Music Man! Anyway, the dude is always eating,
but when you think about it, it makes sense. Any character that's gotta
go fast is going to need a constant influx of calories to keep his body moving. That's
just the trope of super powerful characters across all media types. Goku's always eating
everything that's put in front of him. The Flash is always munching on something, going so
far as to call himself a black hole of snacks. Exercise requires energy. Otherwise, you know
you're going to be getting hangry after leg day. And if there's one thing that Sonic doesn't
do, it's skip leg day. Don't be fooled by the noodle knees. To move the miles he's running those
licorice legs have got to be a mountain of muscle. So today I want to know how many chili dogs
does it take to power a Sonic the Hedgehog? What absurd number of chili coated cheese
slathered pork sausage not-sandwiches would our favorite anthropomorphic blue hedgehog
have to consume to run the insane distances and speeds we see him going in the new sonic
movies? That's right, loyal Theorists, today is a classic old school science episode.
Fire up the grills because Sanic’s hungry. So before we begin to imagine the small countries'
worth of very unhappy pigs we’ll be needing to feed Mr. The Hedgehog. Let's actually
identify what we need to know here. First, we need to know how fast Sonk is moving in these
films. Using this, we can then figure out how many calories he's burning when he's running.
Then we find out how many calories are in the sorts of chili dogs that Sonk eats. And finally,
with some simple math, we calculate how many of those dogs he needs to consume. To kick things
off, we're going to actually use this clip from the beginning of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, where
Sonic thwarts the robbery of an armored truck. We chose this one specifically because it gives
us a look at both Sonic snacking on a chili dog, as well as a prolonged sequence
where he's running. To summarize, he's able to head down to the street from the
top of a building and then run what looks to be three city blocks to catch up with an
armored truck, all in exactly 9 seconds. So how fast is Sonic moving here? Well, there
are plenty of ways to figure this out. First, let's try to pinpoint exactly where Sonic is to
get an idea of how much ground he's covering. Thankfully, the movie makes it super easy for
us. Seattle. It doesn't get more obvious than that. According to theurbanist.org, Seattle city blocks
are roughly 240 feet long, or about 73.2 meters. So by running three city blocks, Sonic has covered
a total distance of 720 feet or 220 meters. It is worth noting that he zigzags a
bit to weave in and out of traffic, which would add a couple of extra feet here and
there. But for simplicity's sake (and because it's not going to affect our final conclusion)
we're just going to use that 720 foot figure. So simple math here, Rate equals distance divided
by time. If Sonic ran 720 feet in 9 seconds, that translates to a speed of about 54.5 miles per hour or 87.8 kilometers per hour. Next
up, we're going to need Sonic's weight. Now, the weight of fictional characters
is always a bit tricky on these channels, but fortunately Sega has historically been very
public with this information. Back in 2005, Sega of Japan released the Sonic Channel, an official website dedicated to updates
about the characters, games, comics, TV shows… You can download wallpapers. There are even some
simple browser games mixed in there. Basically, this thing was a fan wiki before fan wikis
existed, and on that old Sonic Channel website, Sega listed Sonic's canonical
weight as 77 pounds or 35 kilograms. Done and done, right? Wrong! It is never
that easy when you work out these channels. never
You see, across the series there are many
different versions of Sonic, all with different heights and weights. The
game Sonic Generations explicitly shows us that just because we're always dealing with the
same character, Sonic is not always the same. "I can't believe there's two of me!" Sometimes they talk, sometimes
not, sometimes they're tall, sometimes not. The stats on the Sonic
Channel website appear to be referring specifically to the Sonic from the Adventure
Games and spinoffs. So if we want to be as accurate as possible, we should aim for
data from the movie Sonic specifically. Thankfully, we can find the exact data
we need thanks to capitalism. You see, in the lead up to the Sonic
the Hedgehog 2 movie release, Sonic did a press tour where he was
interviewed by the kids YouTube channel: CKN Hi, I'm Kevin from CKN News. Today we're going to have an exclusive interview with Sonic. Eat Your Heart Out, Phil DeFranco. I don't
see you landing those guests. Anyway, near the end of the video,
Sonic drops this truth bomb. I weight 62 pounds, and it is very rude of you to ask. I didn't ask you that question, Sonic. But I did. Thank you, Sonic. I know it
might be rude to ask for someone's weight, but being slightly rude is
worth it for the science. So that's about as accurate as you can possibly
get coming directly from the sorces mouth, which means that we can take all of this
information and plug it into our calorie burning calculator. 62 pounds running 720 feet
in 9 seconds. Drum roll, please. In this scene, Sonic has burned himself a whopping
two calories. Hold on. What? t…two? two, two calories.
I basically burn the same amount sitting on the couch waiting for a Sonic 2006
loading screen. Considering an average chili cheese dog has roughly 412 calories,
that means that this bite that sonic takes right here would be more than enough
to cover his sprint down the street. That's no good. Now. While the result might initially be
surprising. When you actually think about what we just calculated. It makes a lot of
sense. Sonic weighs 60 pounds, not very heavy, and we only calculated the amount of calories
he's burning in 9 seconds of intense exercise. Sure, he was sprinting real hard in those
9 seconds, but it was only 9 seconds for the lightweight 60 pound hedgehog. As a result,
the caloric burn for sonic is ridiculously low here. So, Is that it then? Is the big twist
here that Sonic only needs like eight chili dogs to power all his antics throughout the
entirety of the film franchise? Absolutely not. This is a combination Film Game and Food
theory all wrapped up into one. You can't just leave it at that. We need a scene where he's
running faster and running longer. I mean, if we go back and watch this whole Seattle
street scene again, it's clear that Sonic isn't running as fast as he can. This is fun for
him. It's not urgent. We've seen what happens when Sonic loses control and uses more of his
power. By running full speed he likely would have shut down Seattle's power grid with the
electromagnetic pulses he's able to generate. So I went back to pick a better moment from the
movies. Honestly, there are a ton of different scenes here that we could choose from to
make these sorts of calculations. I mean, in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Sonic basically
crosses an ocean's worth of water. And at the end of Sonic the Hedgehog 1, he
moves so fast that from his perspective, bullets and missiles are basically frozen
in midair. That said, getting hard numbers from those scenes is difficult. We don't get
an idea of how far Sonic is moving out into the water. Or a true sense of his speed since
everything has slowed to a crawl. But there are scenes that give us all the information
we need on a silver platter. In fact, in a previous Film Theory, we took a look at
this scene from the first Sonic the Hedgehog, where Sonic runs 550 miles or 885
kilometers to the Pacific Ocean and back. He was able to do this in just 4 seconds, meaning that his speed is 275 miles per second
or 442 kilometers per second. Just to emphasize how fast this is in numbers that
will probably have more meaning to you. That's an astronomical 990,000 miles per hour or
1.593 million kilometers per hour. So going back to our handy dandy online calculator here,
we plug these numbers in. And with that, we find that Sonic has burned a grand
total of, second drum roll, please. Oh? Apparently, during this
incredible feat of strength, speed and stamina, Sonic would
have burned just one calorie. aaaaahhh Nope. That definitely can't be
right. What I think might be happening is that Sonic is moving at such insane
speeds and traveling such impressive distances that the website is calculating that
he's essentially running a zero minute mile. It is literally rounding to zero and therefore
giving us that one calorie number. It’s kind of like when you divide by zero on your TI-83
and it breaks the universe. So all righty boys and girls, roll up their sleeves
because we're doing this the hard way. To manually calculate how many calories Sonic
is burning in this scene we're going to have to figure out his metabolic equivalent of task;
or his MET. So to understand what this is, let's first talk about metabolisms. Your
metabolism is a set of life sustaining chemical reactions that convert food
into energy usable by your body. Basically, it takes the chili dogs that
you're stuffing in your face and rips the calories out to charge up your cells.
Different people have different metabolisms, meaning that they burn calories at different
rates. Now, this is a massive oversimplification of some really complex biology, but some
bodies are really good at taking those calories from chili dogs and burning them
while you exercise, meaning that they can more easily keep weight off. While others
tend to hold on to those calories longer, meaning that it's easier for them to gain weight
and hold onto it. As such, one way to manually calculate how many calories a body burns is to
figure out the metabolic equivalent of task: 1 MET is equal to one calorie burned per
kilogram of body weight per hour of exercise. Now, there are tons of ways to calculate one
MET, as you see on the screen before you. You know what? I'm just going to let it sit up on
screen instead of saying all that out loud. That’s a lot of numbers and letters that you
don't care about. So, while this looks like a super long or complex formula, we actually
have everything we need to plug in numbers to get our answer here. Specifically for
that last part of the formula. For this, 1.162 times the watts over kilograms, we
already have Sonic's weight in kilograms. Since he weighs 62 pounds, that's the equivalent
of 28.1 kilograms. And figuring out the wattage he generates with the speed runs is really easy.
The formula for this is this gobbledygook. Watts equals 115.007, plus the quantity
-15.8397 times speed plus another quantity; 1.15006 times speed, times speed. I
don't know how people figured this out, but there it is. It's got a lot of
numbers. I assume they're correct. So plugging in that 990,000 miles per hour
or 1.593 million kilometers per hour figure, we find out that Sonic's run to the Pacific
produces 1,127,158,124,812.01 watts of power. Over a trillion watts! Okay…wow.
All right, let's take this absurd number and plug it into our MET formula, shall we?
Giving us 1.162 times these 1.127 trillion watts, all divided by 28.1 kilograms.
It's not going to do anything. Running this through our magic number machine,
otherwise known as a basic calculator app, that tells us that one MET for Sonic in the
movie is 40,112,338,783.3. And remember that's talking about how many calories sonic burns per
kilogram of his body weight per hour of exercise. How are you not dead? I have no idea! According to Smithsonian Magazine, an average
human body contains just 125,822 calories. That means in a single hour of exercise,
Sonic would be burning through over 318,000 human beings worth of calories.
That is one heck of a pilates class. But even with those crazy insane
numbers, we're not done with all the mathy calculations yet. Now we can
use this information to figure out how many calories Sonic burned during the 4
second run to the Pacific Ocean and back. If Sonic burns those 40 billion calories per one
kilogram of body weight per one hour of exercise, we first need to multiply those calories
by Sonic's 28.1 kilogram weight, getting us one trillion, one hundred twenty-seven billion, one hundred fifty-eight million, one hundred thousand calories burned per
hour. Now, we can take this number divided by 60 to get calories burned per minute,
divided by 60 again to get calories burned per second and then multiply by 4,
which gets us, one final drum roll, please. I promise you. 1,252,397,888.8.9
calories burned in 4 seconds in order to run to the Pacific Ocean and back. With this,
finally, we can work out exactly how many chili dogs Sonic would need to eat to power
even just 4 seconds of him running. Again, we know an average chili cheese dog has 412
calories, meaning that Sonic would need to eat 2,989,016.4. You know what? Let's just
go ahead and round that one. Up to 2,989,017 chili cheese dogs because, you know, we know
Sonic wouldn't dare waste food with leftovers. So, what were you expecting? A dirty little hedgehog eating berries and struggling to survive? Well, not exactly Sonic, but dang, I was not
expecting almost 3 million chili dogs for just 4 seconds of running. On the whole, every American
combined eats like 20 billion hot dogs in a year, and Sonic would need to eat that many chili dogs
if he was expecting to run for like, one 8-hour work day. You know what? Maybe all the government
agents and scientists in these movies are right. Sonic is dangerous to our supply of Oscar Mayer
wieners. Don't even ask how much this would cost. Chili dogs!? Forget it! Do you know how much chili dogs cost? Money don't grow on trees you know! But hey! We actually, you talk about Sonic
a lot over here on Film Theory. I mean, he's basically a movie character now anyway.
So if you want more content this minute, you can check out our video talking about how
ugly Sonic was actually the best sonic. Or if you want something a bit different, you
can check out our video explaining why the Sonic Movie's road trip is just a big old
waste of our time. It doesn't matter that it was good. The science don't care about
your quality. And as always, my friends, until the next time, remember, it's all
just a theory, A FILM THEORY! aaaaaand cut.
