The first trailer for the live-action/CGI hybrid Sonic The Hedgehog movie dropped this morning, and, boy, is it ever fucking wild. There are untold entry points to this singular creation—the Coolio soundtrack; Sonic getting caught rummaging around James Marsden’s garage like ET in a raccoon suit—but in order to make sense of its complexity, let’s narrow things down to one simple fact: that cartoon hedgehog’s got himself a set of human teeth.
To be fair, there are a lot of things going on with this version of Sonic that beg to be questioned—his strange, lean blue body and Tour De France-sculpted leg muscles for starters—but it’s the ‘hog’s humanoid teeth that are capturing imaginations across the world.
Some who have managed to collect themselves well enough to reckon with the beast’s horrific face have tried to imagine a better world where Sonic’s mouth is filled with needle-y little hedgehog fangs instead.
This vampiric rodent gob isn’t much better, but, as a selection of horrifying comparisons make clear, everyone is just trying to rationalize their terror with whatever small comforts they can think up. Look below and consider that, yeah, the sharp option imagined above might be an improvement.
At the end of the day, despite what we may wish, it’s important to remember that there’s really no bargaining with what we’ve all been given. The filmmakers who provided our first, glowing hedgehog semen-laden image of the video game mascot have decided that their version of Sonic is what it is, and nobody should stand in the way of their vision. If an entire generation of children will know Sonic not as an irascible, amphetamine-fueled cutey zooming across Genesis levels but a muscley blue toddler with a freakish maw filled by human teeth and Jean-Ralphio’s voice, so be it. Time changes us all; even our most famous hedgehogs.
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