The Bizarre Modern Reality of Sonic the Hedgehog

[Music] [Music] on May 30th 2019 Paramount Pictures unveils their first look at the new Sonic the Hedgehog live action movie and the internet exploded now people were horrified at the iconic blue hedgehogs grotesque new design Twitter overflowing with images decrying its disturbingly elongated limbs it's uncanny eerie face and its human teeth before paramount eventually took the trailer down delaying the film's release by several months and costing the studio five million dollars for some this was unprecedented the first time a major film distributor had buckled under the weight of fan pressure but for others this was just another chapter in the bizarre modern reality of Sonic the Hedgehog something I really love about the Internet is that once a piece of media or a character goes online you can never be sure how people will interpret it take the Twitter account of tony the tiger for example once a fairly safe sport loving cereal mascot online he was transformed into an anthropomorphic thirst magnet to the point that Kellogg's so confounded with how to deal with the new identity that had been imposed on their mascot chose to delete the account this is what's happened Sonic the Hedgehog over three decades Sega's iconic character has gone from the king of the video game industry to a fallen icon so distorted and corrupted by the Internet that just googling Sonic can lead to a bizarre world insanity and it's this world I want to talk about but to do that I think it's important to understand why sonic was such a big deal to begin with and so the year is 1991 like the radical dude you are you skateboard to your local park excited to tell your best friend Jake about finally beating super mario world's but when you do Jake his Pantera pins glistening in the Sun exclaims dude forget Mario you got to see what's going down at the mall man and when you get there you're met with a giant crowded kiosk containing two massive screens on one is the safe inviting world of Super Mario but on the other is something else something different a spiky blue hedgehog blazes across and lush green world's obliterating robotic enemies and freeing animals from their mechanized prison there's a style and an energy to this game that you've never seen before and you stand there transfixed and Jake his breath smelling faintly of coffee and cigarettes whispers dude his name's Sonic I know a lot of you weren't alive in 1991 and that frightens me in a way I don't quite understand but this was a scene that was common in malls across America and part of a massive marketing campaign by Sega designed to break Nintendo and Mario's near decade-long stranglehold over the console market this is a time when Nintendo didn't so much rule the console industry as much as they were the console industry but Sonic was the perfect counter to that well his 90s attitude fuelled persona might seem a little played out today at the time Sonic was a legitimate anti-establishment icon in the same way both Pepsi and Apple marketed themselves as the radical new alternative to the established norm Sonic was marketed as the faster cooler better version of Mario and you could feel that wild energy in the pounding pace of his games which introduced the world's to a new kind of high speed momentum based platforming which if you got good enough I would let you obliterate levels with a blistering energy and style like nothing else did and it was mesmerizing sonic was wild and cool and adding to that feeling was the unique way the game characterized him set your controller down in Sonic 1 and whereas his competitors would stand there obediently waiting for your command Sonic would stare at you impatiently tapping his foot and it was such a subtle touch but it was also a piece of fourth-wall breaking character building brilliance Sonic wasn't just an avatar for you to control he was a character with his own thoughts and feelings and that was important because I'd argued that what people loved about the early days of Mario were his games what people loved about the early days of Sonic was Sonic Sega building on that appeal with two separate comic-book and animated series all of which existed in their own universe with their own distinct take on what Sonic was buts the one that always stayed with me it was the 1993 Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon I can remember watching this show as a kid and feeling slightly creeped out but intrigued by it's weird sinister edge this was a version of Mobius Robotnik had already taken over Sonic and his group of freedom fighter friends forced to live in this dark mechanized hellscape with Robotnik presented as this genuine force of evil sacrificing all life in the name of his horrific technological ambition and what made it feel real was that Sonic didn't always win there were scenes or he'd fail scenes where he couldn't save someone one slightly traumatic scene seeing Sonic forced to watch as his girlfriend Sally is transformed into a horrific mechanical version so seems like this both in this show and in the Archie comics mattered because as a kid it let you see the more human side of Sonic's character while also providing a more well realized world for you to get lost in one that felt arguably a little more real and scary than the princess saving escapades of other video games the world constantly on the brink of falling into this hole if ik technological dystopia but there was always this cool last little Hedgehog who fight to keep that from happening and say what you will about this Sonic series in general that's still a fun fantasy to believe in it was the power of that fantasy combined with the quality of his games that lets say get do the impossible and steal market share away from Nintendo taking Sonic to the very peak of the industry now an icon beloved by millions and so in the early days of the internet it was only natural that Sonic communities started to form and some of the earliest ways you could see this were in these sonic sprite comics which involved fans ripping sprites out of the different Sonic games and pasting them into their own paneled stories but where this concept really started to take off which when people began to bring these sprites into flash and animate them with sites like newgrounds.com at letting users upload their creations and share them with a wider audience keep in mind this was years before YouTube would reach mainstream popularity so stumbling across new grounds and finding an entire community of people all making animations about the same stuff you loved it was kind of a revelation like discovering this hidden sub world of video games that belonged entirely to fans and outside the control of corporations and over time the quality of these animations began to skyrocket titles like Sonic Final Fantasy doing weird experimental things like splicing really well done sprite animations with interactive turn-based battles however the king of the sprite animations from this era came in 2006 in the form of Super Mario Bros II like a lot of sprite animations Mario Bros II pulled in different assets from different games but what made this different was the level of skill and creativity its creator of earthworm manipulated these sprites with animating them with a real sense of waste and impact even breaking them to the point of cheating at three-dimensional camera moves giving Mario Brothers II a genuinely cinematic feel these are all sprites you are familiar with but now they are clashing and exploding with all these spectacle and excitements of the best Dragon Ball Z showdowns today it's impressive but back then it was mind-blowing the idea that one person that a fan could create something so ambitious telling a story which despite the name focused heavily on Sonic travelling back to the Mushroom Kingdom after Mobius and all his friends were wiped out by mecha sonic mecha sonic was originally a fairly standard sprite ripped from Sonic & Knuckles but here he was transformed into this world and dig nightmare a genuinely terrifying villain whose appearance in any scene spells death and destruction giving new life to what had originally been a very tiny part of the Sonic universe over time people even started making their own Sonic fan games with creators like Christian taxman Whitehead building his own sonic engine and other users using that engine to make sonic games that could easily pass for an official title but the developers even breaking open the concept of what Sonic is completely and transplanting him into entirely new genres like sonic Smackdown a fighting game made by indie developer arc forged which is so astoundingly polished it's kind of shocking it's not an official release there was actually an official sonic fighting game and it's free and I think it's here where you can really see the beauty of fan creations the ability to take characters and concepts from a fictional universe and give them a life that they never had before one of my favorite examples of this being the webcomic hanging starring two minor characters from the Sonic universe Amy Rose from Sonic CD and Metal Sonic from Sonic 3 neither of which featured that largely in these games but here were shown a world set years after the events of Sonic 3 story in which a reformed Metal Sonic attempts to reintegrate into society and in the process forming an endearing relationship with Amy Rose and it's really cute and kind of sad a lot of the charm coming from just seeing these characters usually spend time together in a way that would never really be possible in an official video game and presenting it all in this really cute fun art style a lot of the appeal of these fan works coming from watching artists reinterpret these characters in their own visual language like take Evan Stanley author of ghosts of the future a webcomic that ran for ten years over the course of which you can watch Stan Lee go from an amateur comic book artist to a genuinely amazing illustrator with more recent fan comics like Sonic's skyline by drawl / la la' being one of the most genuinely beautiful visual treatments I've ever seen Sonic get official or not when you look at all this stuff together it becomes pretty clear that Sonic has inspired a universe that fan creators really want to be a part of and while there is a level of infamy that's come with that which we will get to I think it'd be pretty shitty to ignore all the genuinely amazing works people have made out of pure passion for Sonic and his universe however where that more infamous site of Sonic would begin to emerge would be at the dawn of the new millennium which would bring with it dark times for Sonic the year is 2000 one you've just finished watching Jake's DVD copy of osmosis jones when the sound of your Nokia 3210 s message alert breaks the night silence it's Jake likely giving you the latest on his parents messy divorce but then you see it dude Sega canceled the Dreamcast and your mind reels that's impossible four years now it's been you and Jake defending Sega defending Sonic against all your PlayStation owning friends the sonic adventure games were good people just didn't understand them how could this happen and what would it mean for Sonic what would it mean for you and Jake and for the first time in your young life the future begins to feel uncertain the turn of the millennium was a difficult time for Sonic Sonic Xtreme was meant to be Sega's flagship Sonic title for the Sega Saturn but a disastrous development run proceeded its cancellation Sega going an entire generation without their iconic blue hedgehog with the sonic adventure games releasing a generation later for the Dreamcast which had the unenviable task of adopting Sonic's high-speed momentum based gameplay into 3d and people have Ward for years over whether that's something these games did successfully or not but for our purposes what's important is that these games split the sonic fanbase between an audience who longed for the old classic 2d days of Sonic and a newer audience that accepted the 3d with infighting between the two groups being a common sight in gaming message boards however there was also another deeper problem for me and that was what exactly was Sonic in the year 2000 the same rebellious attitude that made him feel so fresh 10 years ago nelle felt tired in part because Sonic had been so successful he had spawned a tidal wave of 90s attitude field animal mascot imitators rocky rodent arrow robot Bobbsey mr. nuts Punk skunk awesome possum radical rex wild woody jazz jackrabbit high seas havoc gex the lizard Shawn Michaels each one diluting Sonic's persona to the point that by the end of the 90s the Moscow with attitude had become a parody of a parody of a parody diminishing Sonic's appeal as a marketing tool and his core identity sonic was starting to feel lost not only appearing on the consul's of his former enemies but even struggling to find a way to stay relevance leading to a disastrous run of Sonic titles each one struggling to reinvent the character indifference on successful ways Sonic and the Black Knights saw Sonic transported back to a medieval fantasy world engaging in motion controlled sword fights to the sound of early 2000 walk Shadow the Hedgehog starred Sonic's edgy rival shadow in which he had a gun and shot people and Sonic Unleashed turn the Sega icon into a stretchy around I'm sorry it's just with someone like but the low point of the entire franchise came in Sonic oh 6 a disastrous game so rampant with poor design choices and game breaking glitches it became a laughing stock plummeting Sonic's Metacritic to the lowest in it ever bean sonic had never felt further from his royal mario who at the time was releasing some of his most critically acclaimed games ever this period giving rise to the term sonic cycle describing the pattern of excitements that would run through the fanbase at the announcement of a new Sonic game only for that hope to be dashed at the inevitable disappointment of its release to Sonic fans this was a crushing period of disillusionment sports to everyone else Sonic had become a joke a fallen icon who had once ruled over the gaming industry Nev starring in low-quality trash and you could feel a frustration mounting in the Sonic fan community with videos of irate Sonic fans furious over the state of Sonic and his fanbase the most infamous of these being the now legendary 13-minute rants from sammy classic sonic I should say that Sammy and others were likely playing up characters for the sake of these videos as was pretty common back then but they were still viewed by millions and millions of people who did not know that creating a strange to store the perception of Sonic and the people who played his games that's not to say there hasn't always been something - ever so slightly cursed about the sonic franchise whether it's the sonic Macy's Day Parade Float getting caught on a pole and bursting ken Pender's bizarre sonic comic storylines culminating in him suing Archie and Sega for the rights to his characters and winning due to archie failing to establish a proper contracts or at that time the sonic made out with a human lady Sonic's always been strange but now the fall of the Sonic games combined with an angry frustrated fanbase began to mutate the kind of fan content people were creating now you were beginning to see strange surreal depictions of Sonic eerie uncanny works that distorted the very idea of what Sonic even was and at the epicenter of this shift was a webcomic by artist Tyson Hess called Sonic's big fat adventure but rather being a loving interpretation of Sonic's world this was a surreal satirical take that satirized every part of Sonic from its characters to its gameplay to even its own fans and it blew pop it's difficult to state how big this comic was in the late 2000s as the originals been taken down but an animated version of it on youtube has amassed nearly 10 million views the reason I think this comic as well as the new wave of distorted sonic art resonated with people is because it captured something real sonic really was starting to feel like a corrupted broken image of himself and this art spoke to that people are creating fan media to reflect the distorted broken image and what's really interesting about a lot of this stuff is does this kind of weird uncanny nough stew it it's hard to tell what's a genuine loving piece of fanfiction what's parody and what's outright mockery of Sonic and his fans and possibly the strangest and most bizarre instance of this is the story of tails gets trolled on February 18 2012 a post appeared on the something awful forums titled Sonic and Friends get trolled the post linked to a deviantART comic where a misshapen tails the Fox was harassed by internet trolls before later returning with shadow and violently murdering them and there was something so strange and angry about this comic it had distorted misshapen artwork its character spoke in rambling streams of slurs and expletives riddled with spelling and grammatical errors some panels were so bizarrely hilarious that they became memes in their own right and something awful posters were merciless descending on the comic and tearing it apart criticizing everything from the artwork to these strange way the characters spoke some even showing concern over the mental state of its author laser bots but then slowly something really weird started to happen tails gets trolls started to get good like really really good there was character development there were plot twists there was a genuine narrative with themes forming and what's crazy is you can see the tone of the forms begin to change as the story goes on as people in disbelief begin to earnestly enjoy the story the conflicts between tales and the trolls expanding gradually it words into a massive war drawing in fictional characters from several different universes all with their own motives philosophies factions relationships and backstories that were so weirdly well developed there was even shown and esque bottle mechanics the bottles themselves despite the artwork being genuinely tense and exciting to the point that people began to wonder if tales gets trolled was itself a massive troll one page could see the genuinely devastating dissolution of Sonic and Amy's relationship the next would see knuckles getting stoned in a jacuzzi with Spyro the Dragon it's insane but the more I looked into it the more I started to feel like there was a genuine earnestness to this story take a look at laser bots deviantART gallery and you'll see he's not a stranger to online harassment and I think the heart of this story comes from how he uses that experience there's even points in the comic when he addresses people's criticisms of him directly and at one point his deviantART account was even hacked and he wrote that into the storyline as well making tales gets trolled this weird fascinating meta narrative of what it is to be hated by strangers and what is the best way to combat that haste what I think makes tales gets trolled work is it someone exploring their own personal issues through the universe of Sonic the Hedgehog and that's actually pretty common in fan media but especially in Sonic just look at the sheer abundance of Sonic original characters or o'seas Sonic o'seas have their roots way back in even the Spry rip days when people would modify existing sprites to create their own characters or redraw frames of the Sonic X TV show to do the same thing Sonic fan characters became so rampant online it even became a popular meme on message boards and later Twitter to Google your name the Hedgehog and post the results the reason this mean took off is because it gave people a glimpse at the sheer shocking volume and depth of the Sonic fandom there were thousands of these characters and I have a theory as to why that might be a lot of these fan characters come with in-depth BIOS listing even small details like their favorite bands and movies but these BIOS would lead me to believe that most of these characters are made by young teenagers people who maybe fell in love with the Sonic universe at an early age but as they got older could feel themselves aging out of it Sonic is a property primarily aimed at kids and so they create their own characters that in their eyes are edgy ER and more mature in order to fit in with their own perceptions of themselves as young adults while still enjoying these safe escapism of the Sonic universe they loved as children like tails gets trolled I think these farm characters are people trying to understand their own identity and like everything on the Internet including myself became the subject of vicious ridicule but as the your name the hedgehog meme spread people began to notice other stranger sub communities in the Sonic fandom weirdly patriotic Sonic Kristian Sonic but the one that really shocked people was the strange world of Sonic the Hedgehog pornography oh hold on there a minute past John and it turns out that YouTube does not like it when you talk about Sonic the Hedgehog porn who knew so I'm gonna edit that part out at least for the minute the general idea was that yes there is a lot of adult orientated Sonic fan material out there but here's the thing there is a dolt orientated fine material of every fictional property you can think of and I think what it boils down to is just fans getting older and trying to figure out what they're into through the fictional universes they love try to better understand them selves and really I don't think there's anything wrong with that but that said it did become a pretty infamous sticking point online let's go back to the original video oh and no one's in the comments on how I look like [ __ ] in this video I've been quarantine for five weeks and I had to press the reason sonic porn became so infamous when so much other erotic fan made media goes on disgust is because people were looking for it Sonic and his fanbase already had a bizarre perception online and the discovery of an erotic subculture only added to that narrative people now creating media in response to that new more perverse identity but it was no longer just about Sonic it was now about the people who loved him which brings us to Sonic Dreams collection sonic Dreams collection is a free downloadable game from arcane kids presented as a lost Sonic title it's a collection of 4 minigames each of which comments on the sonic fanbase in its own way a strange broken character crater in which you design your own Sonic OC a bizarre first-person moviemaker following your OC throughout their life as the scenarios grow increasingly bizarre and fetishistic this game is a nightmare but the high points if that's what you want to call it comes in the form of my roommate sonic where the player from first person is instructed through a mobile phone to carry out an increasingly intimate set of actions in order to seduce Sonic culminating in the player looking deep into his eyes only for the pupils to converge a black hole in which the player is absorbed into an alternate reality where they now become a grotesque version of Sonic Sonic Dreams collection takes saved a horrifyingly in it's disturbing dissection of the sonic fanbase but it was that disturbing quality that made it a popular title of streamers which exposed the game to millions and millions of people further distorting and corrupting the image of Sonic and his fans online it now felt like be once lovable hedgehog have been replaced by something darker and more insidious and by the mid 2010 to a lot of people the idea of just being a Sonic fan carried with it some uncomfortable implications the year is 2015 you leaned against the wall of a crowded train cars as a muffled version of Adele's hello creeps between its passengers when suddenly you notice next to you my god it's it's Jake sure his hair is shorter now and it's strange to see him in a suit but it's him Jake you cry your eyes meeting for the first time in nine years yeah things had gotten a little complicated between you two the last time you'd met but it's still so good to see him and as your mind took was back through your memories together searching for something anything to say you stammer out the words have have you played Sonic Generations it's pretty good and an emotion flashes across his face you don't quite recognize and as the train slows to a stop he glances down at his briefcase pausing before mumbling no I don't play those games anymore and he steps off the train and out of your life forever and in that moment amidst the crowded carriage you've never felt more alone by this point the different layers of what Sonic had become on the internet had compounded the fallen quality of his games the strange distorted fine works the o'seas the porn it all combined into this twisted amalgamation which gave rise to Sonic Sonic was inspired by a meme in which different artists through distorted versions of Sonic running and from that primordial soup of misshapen hedgehogs Sonic emerged a perfect twisted encapsulation of what the Internet had done to Sonic people even taking sonic media and replacing a sonic with Sonic in lurid parodies of how far the iconic hedgehog had fallen this one video from this period called sonic vs sonic a recording of a fan game where Sonic is chased and haunted Sonic as a gargled nightmarish version of the green hill zone theme plays whenever he draws closer the video has nearly 10 million views and I think that's partially due to how nightmarishly comical it is but I think it also really reflects the plight of modern Sonic a character struggling against a twisted parody of itself there's a short film from this period called the Hedgehog and I love this movie it's about growing up it's become the things that seemed so strange and evil as a child but I think it also really captures the tragedy of Sonic as a young boy dressed as the iconic Hedgehog wanders a lonely desolate world Sonic had become lost his identity forgotten nowhere left for him to go and so when the sonic movie trailer emerged and unveiled the grotesque new design it felt like a kind of nightmarish poetry even for Sega itself Sonic now resembled a twisted uncanny version of what he had once been his relevance slipping into a sad strange obscurity you or so it seemed but then on November 12th 2019 it was announced that the redesign of the sonic character was being led by Tyson Hess the little memeing shitlord of Sonic's big fat adventure was now the series Savior the new design not being met with disgust but elation people were overjoyed with Sonic's new appearance and not only that has had actually gotten the job from animation work he'd done on Sonic mania a game directed by Kristian taxman Whitehead and other members of the Sonic fan game community that went on to be Sonic's best regarded title in nearly two decades and Evan Stanley author of the ghosts of the Future fan comic went on to illustrate for the official IDW sonic comic which is actually pretty [ __ ] great the reason all this is so important is because for all the missteps sega made with Sonic over the years it's their willingness to embrace their own fan culture that's arguably resurrected Sonic as a mainstream pop culture juggernaut the Sonic the Hedgehog movie going on to make a hundred million dollars at the box office surpassing even Nintendo's detective Pikachu I think fandoms reflect the very best and very worst of what a piece of media is and Sonic is now a character that existed those in different forms over countless different videos and yeah well sometimes they can be strange and disturbing these are the people who loved Sonic and are now drawing his comics programming his games and designing his movies bringing life back to the once fallen character and I think that's a [ __ ] awesome I think that is the bizarre modern reality of Sonic the Hedgehog [Music] friends thank you so much for watching this video and especially to those of you who have watched it again if you'd like to see the original version you can find it in the description below where you can also find a link to my patreon which is really the sole reason I can do big dumb videos like this and so if you support me thank you and if you would like to head on over to patreon comm afford slash super eyepatch wolf where you could also personally be thanked like these fine folk arrow pointing left Matt oh seven seven one Karen Lindquist butt face McGee I like trains Erin Prokopenko and Bo dog oh you can find me as ever overrun d let's fight a boss video game podcast or on twitter at Apache will friends take care of yourselves and I'll see you next time the year is 2020 hey it's Jake I saw the sonic movie I miss you

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 684,804

Rating: 4.9357176 out of 5

Keywords: Sonic, Sonic The Hedgehog, Memes, Sanic, Sonic OC, Sonic Ocs, Tails Gets Trolled, Rouge the Bat, Shadow the Hedgehog, Knuckles, Super Mario Bros Z

Id: JR9F2Z7zSbA

Length: 34min 1sec (2041 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/EnergeticCrab]

This is actually a really good takedown of the evolution is Sonic games and the infamous fandom. Great share (despite the tiny Vinny clip).