Everyone Hates the New Sonic so Much that the Studio Is Redesigning Him
Credit to Author: River Donaghey| Date: Fri, 03 May 2019 14:11:56 +0000
It looks like our collective uproar about Sonic and his awful Chiclet teeth in the new Sonic the Hedgehog trailer has actually paid off, everybody—because they’re apparently going to go back and redesign the character before the film hits theaters. On Thursday afternoon, Sonic director Jeff Fowler tweeted that he has heard our unhappiness “loud and clear” and that they’re going to make some changes:
“It’s going to happen,” Fowler wrote. As of Friday morning, the studio has not confirmed the decision to go back to the Sonic drawing board, but Fowler promised in his tweet that “everyone at Paramount & Sega are fully committed to making this character the BEST he can be.”
Let’s hope they can actually make that happen. We are currently in the midst of a strange cultural moment where Hollywood has decided that the best way to cash in on our collective nostalgia is to bring back our favourite childhood characters as bizarre, hyperreal monstrosities. That means that Timon and Pumbaa are terrifying beasts now, Pikachu has rat fur and an adult man’s voice, and Will Smith’s new genie is truly the stuff of nightmares. But all those examples pale in comparison to this unholy rendering of Sonic:
What is going on with his proportions? Did some shadowy studio executive somewhere insist that he look vaguely humanoid, or was it just easier to motion-cap? In any case, if your big-budget Sonic somehow looks worse than the one in a Progressive commercial, you’re doing something wrong.
As of now, it’s unclear what, exactly, the studio is going to change about the Sonic design, or how those poor, overworked VFX people are going to get the whole thing figured out before the November release, but at the very least, please, fix those teeth. And maybe recut the trailer with a slightly more appropriate song.
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This article originally appeared on VICE US.