You Won't Believe What The Live Action Movie Sonic Looks Like...
Furries might just love the new-look of SEGA's mascot.
It's not even had a first trailer yet, but like the Aladdin movie's first look at the genie, the upcoming Sonic live action movie has already suffered from some pretty unfortunate negative press. For that to have happened from a silhouette and a motion poster so far is actually pretty impressive.
The studio could have been forgiven for making light of the previous criticisms that Sonic's muscular legs were just plain wrong, which is precisely why they co-opted the negativity into their marketing campaign by actually responding to it. That scored them some positive points, but now there's been something of a... set-back.
For the first time, the full look at Sonic has been revealed courtesy of an artwork leak and the response has not been great.
Quite what anyone was expecting an animated blue hedgehog to look like is anyone's guess, but it wouldn't be entirely unfair to say that they've made the SEGA mascot look an awful lot like an enthusiastic furry. Hey, if it brings that crowd into the cinemas for a bit of a box office boost then more power to them. It worked for the My Little Pony film and the die-hard brony community.
And let's be honest, it could have been a LOT worse. They could have made him sexy. Or they could have gone the way the Super Mario Bros movie went, which we can probably all agree was a smart swerve.
The reveal comes courtesy of the Hamagami/Carroll Inc. website (via Kotaku who managed to get screen shots before the entire page was taken down hastily). Somewhat brilliantly (well, with a MASSIVE slice of cringe, anyway), the promotional material also includes descriptions as the spiky speedster as "chill and likable," which is both a perfect distillation of that Steve Buscemi fellow kids meme and also definitely the bio of Poochie from The Simpsons.
The problem here seems to stem from Paramount's decision to go with a slightly more realistic image of a hedgehog. Well, as realistic as a hedgehog wearing sneakers could be. That's lead to him looking a lot more furry than the spiked, simpler version from the video games. And the combination of a more human shaped body - a longer torso and smaller eyes chiefly - has led to him looking an awful lot like a person dressed up as an animal. Which is entirely acceptable if you like that sort of thing. No kink-shaming here at all.
Also, why is he not wearing gloves? Why does he literally now just have white furry hands in the shape of gloves? What is going on here?
Now that the images have been removed, we can probably expect an official first-look reveal soon from Paramount. Or maybe a jokey response to the images again... Who knows.