This seems designed to fail.
Over the last few months, we’ve seen trailers for Detective Pikachu, a live-action take on the Pokemon universe starring Ryan Reynolds, as well as a live-action adaptation of Dora the Explorer, featuring Danny Trejo as “Boots” the monkey.
In this dystopian pop culture hellscape, in which aging properties are mined for every last scrap of remaining nostalgia, one reboot has managed to distinguish itself as uniquely terrible, in a crowded landscape of soulless photorealism.
I’m talking, of course, about Sonic the Hedgehog.
This trailer is a masterpiece in misguided intentions, featuring an incredibly unsettling rendering of Sonic, so poorly designed that it almost seems that derision was the intention. What else explains the wildly out of place “Gangsta’s Paradise” track, the prolonged Jim Carrey scene that feels lifted from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective?
Perhaps this is the next innovation in nostalgia-mining, to emulate the tasteless tone of 90’s Jim Carrey comedies. And strangely enough, it feels completely appropriate for Sonic to have reemerged in this misshapen form, desperately trying to recreate that Quicksilver scene from X-Men: Days of Future Past that impressed everyone five years ago.
Because Sonic has always been a bit cringy, even when he was cool. His sole defining trait was Bart Simpson-esque edge, bristling with attitude, like a breakfast cereal mascot with a backward-facing baseball cap. Totally radical, man.
My favorite thing about this trailer is that it depicts Jim Carrey slowly “becoming” Dr. Robotnik, like a superhero origin story. It indicates that this film is already gearing up for a sequel, a Sonic cinematic universe full of hideous anthropomorphic beasts wearing sneakers.
