Urkel to reprise the voice of Sonic in upcoming fan film.

[Radrappy]

I have been seriously wondering for the past year or so if it's even possible for Sonic to carry a 90 min film. His character is paper thin and what's there would get pretty obnoxious after the first 15 min. The OVA does a reasonably good job of characterizing the core cast and lasts a whopping 60 min so I do think a feature film is possible. The biggest problem is that Sonic himself, once isolated, is a pretty unlikable character(in fact, classic sonic proved that is 90% more likable as a mute). My instinct is to embrace this fact and make a story that revolves around the fact that he's kind of an ass (ala Iron Man or the Social Network) and needs to recognize it.

The fact is that like Mario, Sonic isn't designed for story telling. He's designed for gameplay. To try and wrangle a character arc out of him would be extremely difficult and I don't think adding more supporting characters is the answer.

[Rob-Bert]

I'm with you on the whole "Sonic needs to learn not to be a cocky ass" idea. You'd think Tails, being super-intelligent and all, would have to good sense to tell him how painful his quips sound half the time. One could probably make some legitimately funny situations out of this dynamic.

[Radrappy]

I'm with you on the whole "Sonic needs to learn not to be a cocky ass" idea. You'd think Tails, being super-intelligent and all, would have to good sense to tell him how painful his quips sound half the time. One could probably make some legitimately funny situations out of this dynamic.

I really liked the dynamic Tails and Sonic had in Colors in the sense that what had once been pure idolatry has somewhat transformed into dull irritation. Tails puts up with Sonic but is keenly aware that the guy is somewhat nuts and kind of a jerk. Kind of like a couple that's been together for a long time.

[G.Silver]

I kinda see it happening like the "Grimey" episode of The Simpsons, where Sonic is the Homer character, an obnoxious jerk that everyone loves for some reason, while Eggman slowly goes crazy trying to ruin him. Of course, Eggman actually is a villain, and unlike the Simpsons episode, Sonic could, I suppose, actually learn something from it all and have that "maybe I should be less of a jerk" character arc.

[Rob-Bert]

Why Eggman? He's never really with Sonic for that long and isn't really jealous of his popularity so much as he wants him out of the way so his evil plans will succeed.

I do wonder if introducing the SatAM characters in the games would give Sonic more to bounce off of. Sonic is supposed to be a rebellious teenager, so Uncle Chuck could be that authority figure to tell him how to behave. Princess Sally would the girl Sonic tries to get with on account of him thinking he's totally irresistible, but naturally she'd reject him. (And before you ask, no I wouldn't have them end up together in the end. I'd rather Sonic go with Amy. I actually kinda like what little moments together they had in SA1 and 2).

If you're wondering how they could possibly shoehorn the SatAM stuff in there, I figure it would basically just be Chuck and the Freedom Fighters and nothing else. You could use Sonic Spinball as the lynch pin. Sonic could just come by Knothole one day in a new game and be like "Hey, I haven't seen you guys since the ol' Veg-O-Fortress incident" or something like that.

[Radrappy]

Why Eggman? He's never really with Sonic for that long and isn't really jealous of his popularity so much as he wants him out of the way so his evil plans will succeed.

I do wonder if introducing the SatAM characters in the games would give Sonic more to bounce off of. Sonic is supposed to be a rebellious teenager, so Uncle Chuck could be that authority figure to tell him how to behave. Princess Sally would the girl Sonic tries to get with on account of him thinking he's totally irresistible, but naturally she'd reject him. (And before you ask, no I wouldn't have them end up together in the end. I'd rather Sonic go with Amy. I actually kinda like what little moments together they had in SA1 and 2).

If you're wondering how they could possibly shoehorn the SatAM stuff in there, I figure it would basically just be Chuck and the Freedom Fighters and nothing else. You could use Sonic Spinball as the lynch pin. Sonic could just come by Knothole one day in a new game and be like "Hey, I haven't seen you guys since the ol' Veg-O-Fortress incident" or something like that.

SatAM? Romance? My dear Rob-bert, you just went off the deep end.

[Rob-Bert]

The post was right above yours. You didn't have to quote the whole thing.

You also weren't paying attention. I wasn't suggesting they make the games exactly like SatAM nor was I suggesting they take the romance anywhere as far as it did in the comics. Does even the slightest hint of either of these things bug you that much?

[G.Silver]

Why Eggman? He's never really with Sonic for that long and isn't really jealous of his popularity so much as he wants him out of the way so his evil plans will succeed.

I'm going for pure Sonic 1 Japanese instruction manual canon here, where Eggman is described as considering Sonic his arch nemesis while Sonic doesn't appear to take him seriously, and its implied that they've been at it before on a smaller scale. It's silly but putting the two in this weird petty relationship while the world is possibly at stake (or others view it from different perspective) is interesting to me.

If we're going to do stuff like alter or add characters (ala SatAM) then I suggest going all-out. Recast Eggman entirely as a benign wheelchair-bound Santa Claus-like figure who is secretly an evil mastermind, and it's up to one funny-looking talking animal to expose the horrible truth. By questioning this beacon of benevolence, formerly "the world's most famous hedgehog," Sonic is basically shunned by society and lives like a homeless person, allowing for the "stop being a jerk" character arc, until of course Eggman shaves off his beard and makes a spectacular grab for power at which point Sonic is the only one who can save the day. Will he be a cocky ass for having been right all along or will he have learned a lesson?

Wait, I have more! Sonic and Robotnik are former partners involved in archeological digs--Sonic the scrappy underdog treasure hunter, and Eggman the well-financed scholar, and even a kind of father figure to Sonic's studies, but the two had some kind of falling out and are now at eachother's throats as they race through exotic locales to get the legendary Chaos Emeralds before the other, each for his own motives. Will Sonic abandon his friends to defeat his enemy, just as Eggman did to him, so long ago? "You see, my Dear Hedgehog? There is nothing you can possess that I cannot take away! Ho Ho Ho!"

[Rob-Bert]

This is starting to sound like that origin manga that Oshima wrote. The one with the prehistoric Eggman and Sonic and God coming down from heaven and turning them into stone.

[Opa-Opa]

I do wonder if introducing the SatAM characters

No.

The one with the prehistoric Eggman and Sonic and God coming down from heaven and turning them into stone.

What? Where?

[Rob-Bert]

I like how none of you guys are explaining why the SatAM cast (and not even the entire cast, just the Freedom Fighters and Uncle Chuck) is automatic poison. SatAM may not have been an exact imitation of the games, but it wasn't a bad show by any stretch of the imagination.

[Dr. BUGMAN]

No, no, no.

Tails is the affable misfit inventor.

Amy is the amorous unwanted love interest.

Eggman thinks Sonic will never amount to anything.

Sonic is the irascible, plucky little scrapper who has to hit 88 to travel through time.

And Knuckles hates manure.

[Locit]

Would it be that hard to take the Sonic personality from the current comics and plug it into a movie scenario? They seem to be pumping those things out pretty regularly, and at a reasonable level of quality. Plus they seem so far removed from the old SatAM setup at this point that it may as well be a new universe.

No, no, no.

Someone give this man a medal.

[Radrappy]

Would it be that hard to take the Sonic personality from the current comics and plug it into a movie scenario? They seem to be pumping those things out pretty regularly, and at a reasonable level of quality. Plus they seem so far removed from the old SatAM setup at this point that it may as well be a new universe.

What works for a 15 page serial comic is in no way guaranteed to work in a 90 minute feature film. I'm just not confident that Sonic's "way past cool" attitude would connect with modern movie goers at all. I maintain that this is impossible.

[Opa-Opa]

I like how none of you guys are explaining why the SatAM cast (and not even the entire cast, just the Freedom Fighters and Uncle Chuck) is automatic poison. SatAM may not have been an exact imitation of the games, but it wasn't a bad show by any stretch of the imagination.

I never got why the SatAM cast even exists, even as a little kid, reading the few issues that we had in Brazil I was like "Who are these people and why are they here?". Boomer (or Rotor or whatever he's called) is an inventor character much like Tails. Sally is a love interest much like Amy. Antoine and Bunnie are the "untolerant with the hero" and muscle much like Knuckles. And the rest I pretty much don't care about: Snively, elephant Vandal Savage, doctor Quack, Uncle Chuck, king Acorn whatever, guerrilla raccoon whatnot, Julie-su, then there's the whole Echidna tribe with their weird names (and that hideous art)... can't even remember all of them. I always thought the Sonic game universe had a pretty good amount of very different characters that could be used for exactely what the characters from SatAM could do. I think the only character there that could offer something new to the table is Uncle Chuck, but I don't think I like Sonic having an Uncle Ben-esque backstory.

I never liked the whole "fallen kingdom, hidden rebellion" theme either. The Sonic games never had princesses or kings or castles (until '06), so to me it never made any sense there being a princess for him to save. Even if some of the stories were good, the Archie comics became pretty much its own thing. It didn't even need to be called Sonic, but I guess that was pretty much why most people bought it.

I remember when a friend of mine brought me some "Sonic the Comic" issues from the UK and I thought how better they experimented with the original games there. Even if sometimes they went for made up villains, most of the characters were based off stuff from the games (except for that green zombie guy that helped Eggman, that was pretty stupid). He would go into the zones, save small animals, there was the Sonic CD plot, and it continued to the Chaotix stories (with the giant red Metal Sonic), whenever they needed new "animal hero" characters they used Pocky and Rocky from the first game.


Also, I'm pretty sure that the Sonic Archie comics don't reach nearly as many people as the Sonic games. I don't know how many countries have those comics distributed locally (we had it for a few issues here in Brazil but it was an utter failure) but I believe that the inclusion of those characters could alienate any non-US/Canada audience.

[Rob-Bert]

1st paragraph

-Tails being mechanically inclined wasn't exactly known to American audiences nor the writers of the show until Sonic Adventure. Maybe a little bit before that.
-Amy wasn't even created until Sonic CD, and so naturally the writers of SatAM didn't know she existed. Unless they somehow knew about the original Amy from the Sonic manga, who is for all intents and purposes a completely different character from the game version of Amy.
-Mammoth Mogul, Dr. Quack and all those echidnas are from the comics. Not SatAM. They weren't created until long after SatAM had ended.
-At the time SatAM was created, Sonic didn't have a very large cast. The Freedom Fighters are all based on the little animals that pop out of the Badniks so it's not like that they were created entirely from nothing.

2nd paragraph

-They probably added a princess because it made the whole thing feel more like Star Wars. Or maybe they were trying to copy Mario. I dunno.
-I dunno what the comics have to do with this. I thought we were talking about SatAM. Also a very large chunk of the comics are pretty terrible, but that could be attributed to Ken Penders. His run was definitely the worst.

3rd paragraph

-I dunno why you're bringing this up. I rather like Sonic the Comic myself, but at no point did I say I wanted the games to emulate SatAM's atmosphere or story points. I just thought it would be an OK idea to bring over Uncle Chuck and the Freedom Fighters. My reasoning for this is that they'd make pretty good NPCs. All of the 3D Sonics feature nothing but human NPCs and this always bugged me. You'd think there'd be other animals hanging around besides the main cast. Using excess characters from tertiary material like SatAM or Adventures or even StC would be good for filling out the background.

4th paragraph

-I already suggested how they could make the transition a little more accessible. And even then, introducing a completely new character was never a problem in the past. Why is including an extra set of characters from some other Sonic media suddenly suddenly a big deal? Also I'm pretty sure the European fans know of the American comics. They have the largest quantity of Sonic fans period. I'm also pretty sure what little Sonic fans exist in Japan know of the media produced outside Japan. Granted the most I've seen of it is unsavory fan art that's been linked to on this and other forums, but it's still evidence.

[Locit]

What works for a 15 page serial comic is in no way guaranteed to work in a 90 minute feature film. I'm just not confident that Sonic's "way past cool" attitude would connect with modern movie goers at all. I maintain that this is impossible.

I think you're vastly overestimating the character traits necessary for a compelling movie protagonist. Let's take the movie I literally just watched, Castle in the Sky. I don't actually think I can come up with a simpler, more basic main character than Pazu: he's a good guy who believes his father saw a floating island. That's. About. It. But decent writing, beautiful visuals, a fantastic setting and one massive douche of a villain do basically all the heavy lifting on his behalf--and it works! It's a damn fun movie. Tone down Sonic's badittude a bit and he basically falls within that same category of "a good guy who wants to help people", except he also runs fast. Even if we're relying solely on the Sega-sanctioned characters for a supporting cast, I can still envision being able to whip up a decent adventure flick so long as the people in charge of the project are given a bit of creative license.

[Frieza2000]

I think the core cast has enormous untapped potential for a story. They were the reason many of us stuck with the series through 10 years of bad games rather than moving on and looking for another speedy platformer. I never played Sonic Chronicles, but from what I've heard they did a pretty good job with the script. It can totally be done.

I also think the recent exposure to the old SatAM lingo in this film is clouding some peoples' idea of Sonic's personality. He was certainly a dick in the UK comics and a bit of one in the American cartoons, but I can't think of anything he's done in the games to make him unlikable. He's self confident and a little childish, but he's never been cocky in a repugnant way. He's reckless and irresponsible, but never insensitive or obnoxious. Even when Amy makes her unwanted advances he avoids hurting her feelings outright. Watch the scenes from the Adventure games with the Japanese voices and see how he's portrayed - he really isn't nuts. He jokes around and makes his witty little quips (that can range from embarrassing to amusing depending on the writer) when he's playing around, but when things get serious he actually does act sober (pre-Heroes, anyway).

Also, this film reenforces my theory that the series is cursed. Oshima must've sacrificed a Tails doll at one of those Mayan temples out of spite after leaving the team at the end of SA1.

[Rob-Bert]

Actually Sonic Chronicles was terrible, script and all.

[Dr. BUGMAN]

Y'know, seriously, I think anyone writing a Sonic story* should be required to read Watership Down. All the characters a pretty two-dimensional (they're rabbits, after all), but they're presented in such a compelling sympathetic manner that the story grips you. It's pretty lengthy at about four-and-a-halfish pages. Caveat in that there are some gruesome moments (e.g. Holly's harrowing late escape from Sandleford), but otherwise it's the best template out there, next to Winnie the Pooh.

Bigwig has the same exact character development as Knuckles and you can mentally replace him without missing a beat.

*or just read it for the hell of it.

[Wombatwarlord777]

I come from a pretty odd position where I was exposed to the Archie-verse before many of the characters in the games (like Amy or the Chaotix). But once I came to know about them, I liked them a lot better, both because their aesthetics match with Sonic a lot better and because they're a little more identifiable. Nowadays the only character or character-type I'd wish they'd import from Satam is Uncle Chuck (which we arguably got with Gamma and Beta).

No, no, no.

Tails is the affable misfit inventor.

Amy is the amorous unwanted love interest.

Eggman thinks Sonic will never amount to anything.

Sonic is the irascible, plucky little scrapper who has to hit 88 to travel through time.

And Knuckles hates manure.

And this is why I think the game's main cast could be great in a self-contained, 90-minute movie. Everybody's two-dimensional, but they also fit readily identifiable character archetypes (hero, sidekick, damsel-in-distress), so we can set up the story with a quick and sufficient introduction that everybody can understand regardless of their previous exposure to Sonic ("Eggman is a bad guy! Sonic and his friends fight him!") and spend the rest of the time telling a story without worrying too much about characterization. The Archie characters are much better developed and are admittedly good for a sprawling, monthly epic, but I'd hesitate to put them in a one-shot story.