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The New Sonic the Hedgehog Movie Trailer is a Giant Relief (theguardian.com) 75

Posted by msmash from the here-we-go-again dept.
You can almost hear the sigh of relief from the global Sega fan community. The new Sonic the Hedgehog movie trailer, which Paramount released this morning, is a giant improvement. From a report: Our spiky hero no longer looks like a nightmarish experiment in avant garde taxidermy. The human teeth have been extracted. He has big doe eyes, not the sinister mini-peepers of the original trailer. The new design genuinely captures a lot of what original character designer Naoto Ohshima set out to achieve -- a cool but cuddly mascot, infusing Japanese kawaii sensibilities with American attitude. His fur is bright, mimicking the famed Sega blue of the company's classic arcade games. He is no longer absolutely terrifying, an important achievement for a family film.
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The New Sonic the Hedgehog Movie Trailer is a Giant Relief More

The New Sonic the Hedgehog Movie Trailer is a Giant Relief

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  • there are plenty of genuinely good movies from the past on the cheap.

    • there are plenty of genuinely good movies from the past on the cheap.

      Well, that's true, but lets be positive for a change and look on the shitty side of this.

      Oscars will soon be awarded for movies that are almost as bad as the political grandstanding spewing from the professional liars (read: actors) starring in them.

      • Wait are they giving Sean Hannity the lifetime achievement award for âoemost transparent political mouthpiece on a mainstream Tv news networkâ ?

        • Nah. They've already given one to Michael Moore for being the most transparent political mouthpiece in Hollywood, though (Bowling for Columbine, but let's be honest, he got the Oscar for being Michael Moore). They won't give awards to people like Hannity. He'll have to get one from Trump.

    • there are plenty of genuinely good movies from the past on the cheap.

      But if you only see one high-speed spinning ring-collecting cartoon hedgehog movie this year, it's going to have to be this one.

      • I'm pretty sure my spinning hedgehog movie count for 2019 will be the same as all previous years: zero. Maybe if I was 6 -and- mentally deficient this would be a good film. Actually, no, or even then. My first thought on this headline and only reason I opened it was to say this isn't real news and who gives a fuck? but others already covered that so I'll just pile on to the theme. With all the awesome, interesting, horrifying, amazing, and otherwise non-fucking-stupid-not-at-all-important-like-some-stu

  • How to move a deadline by six months (Score:3)

    by Dirk Becher ( 1061828 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @03:54PM (#59407906)

    and getting worshipped for it.

  • I don't see it (Score:3)

    by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @03:54PM (#59407908) Homepage Journal
    This doesn't seem like a huge difference to me. I just watched two different youtube reviews of the changes and I don't think they're that huge. His teeth are a little shorter, his brow line was raised, and his belly fur now matches his facial fur. His eyes are a little bit bigger (and more puppy-like).

    I don't see those as being huge changes. I really doubt that kids - the target audience - would have thought them to be either.

    • Re:I don't see it (Score:5, Informative)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @04:17PM (#59407978)
      The problem is what you are measuring. Your measurement is based on the degree of differences between the two. For fans, the differences (while some are small) make Sonic look much more like the video game and the cartoon versions. For example, the original movie version’s body looked like it was a human in a costume. The new version has proportions that signify that it isn’t a human: the body is too small and the hands and feet are proportionately larger.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It's not so much looking like the game as looking like some kind of hedgehog/human hybrid abomination. The original design was like taxidermy gone wrong.

        • I and others didn’t expect the movie to be 100% the same as the video game but it looks closer now. The original version was Generic Blue Fox costume. For me the changes make it so that you don’t have to tell someone it’s Sonic. There are enough clues that it is recognizable as Sonic.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mattyj ( 18900 )

      If you think the target audience is kids (kids in 2019), no wonder.

    • Bunch of "It's so much better now" paid reviews, a pile of "2019 bad - 2020 good" bought in bulk comments from Indian accounts, some paid articles...
      Then the useful idiots will pick up the slack, tripping over themselves to show their "intelligence", "skills" and "expertise" - comparing trailers for views.

      Invest a bit in "review" marketing, then ride the wave of free publicity.

      It's still a piece of shit no one asked for.

      • Re:It's marketing. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @05:09PM (#59408124)
        Er what? It’s not marketing to say Sonic looks closer to the version people already know. As far as how good or bad the movie will be, people didn’t complain about that as much as visually, Sonic looked terrible in the trailers. You can go on YouTube and see many, many people complain about how Sonic looked six months ago. I would bet many of them now say he looks much better. But somehow all those people were paid reviews according to you.

      • Bunch of "It's so much better now" paid reviews

        Huh? Why would anyone need to pay reviewers? I mean the original hit the internet for a frigging huge backlash and this change here is basically what everyone was asking for, a character that looked like Sonic.

        No need to pay anyone. Although the conspiracy theory in me believes the infinitely more likely scenario that the original trailer was a dud on purpose to drum up viral marketing.

        It's still a piece of shit no one asked for.

        Indeed. But you know what, some people like watching pieces of shit. I thought the same thing about Pikachu. To be clear I

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Calydor ( 739835 )

          Posting a dud trailer is a VERY risky marketing move.

          • Many marketing moves are.

            • Sure, but dud trailers have a pretty long history of reducing a movie's chances for success. It's one of those things where they'd look brilliant if by some wild chance it actually succeeds, but the reality is they weren't brilliant, it was a dud, and it was going to hurt the movie's chances.

      • Bunch of "It's so much better now" paid reviews, a pile of "2019 bad - 2020 good" bought in bulk comments from Indian accounts, some paid articles...

        I mean, sure, there could be paid publicity. It's a thing that happens. But most of those sighs of relief were genuine. No one needed to tell them to write that, they were happy to do it. I think you're greatly inflating the amount of paid publicity happening here because you can't imagine anyone being excited about the movie.

        It's still a piece of shit no one asked for.

        Sure, you don't like it, but plenty of people want their adaptations. Not your taste, not mine, but plenty of people have fond memories of Sonic and were interested in a fun adaptation

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pz ( 113803 )

      There are many changes that you're missing.

      - lack of human lips
      - lack of fur on lower face
      - reduced chin
      - smaller, more button-like nose
      - larger ... um ... hair
      - eyes closer together, in addition to being substantially larger (not sure how you can call that "little bit bigger")
      - larger face
      - ears brought forward, larger

      In short, the new Sonic looks much less like a rodent/human hybrid and a whole heapload more like a blue Mickey Mouse.

      Anyone think that's a coincidence?

      • It isn't coincidence. It's more visually pleasing and uses the same design cues that you find all over the place in animation. If you went to anywhere on the planet and did an A-B testing with the two designs, even among people who'd never heard of Sonic before, the newer one would perform better. The first design is so awful I can only conclude it was created by a massive Nintendo fanboy that wanted to troll the fuck out of Sonic fans. It was universally hated for a reason.

        We're still getting a shitty v

      • It still has fur on the lower face, it is just smoother, maybe shorter.

        The difference there is just the shape of the lighter color fur is more like a human face now. The old shape made his blue fur look like Wolverine-cut sideburns.

    • They aren't huge changes. But they are the differences between uncanny valley nightmare which makes you wonder if an animator has ever played any of the Sonic games, and an instantly recognisable and potentially lovable character.

      For all 3D animation the devil is in the details. If we made your eyes even a slight bit bigger (not 3x the size as they are in this film), and your mouth double the size, we'd all be understandably freaked out and probably not able to stand the sight of you for 2 hours straight, d

      • They aren't huge changes. But they are the differences between uncanny valley nightmare....

        As someone who has no dog in this fight (Played Sonic once on my nephew's console back when it first came out, have no intention of seeing this movie in any event) this is exactly it.

        The first one just looks ... creepy. Makes the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

        The second one looks like your basic cartoon/video game character. Which is, I suppose, what is required for the cartoon characters for the audience they're aiming for.

        (Still can't help but think "Don't hedgehogs have spines? And they aren't exa

    • Did you ever play the game?

    • Everyone (even your average depraved Sonic fan) knows this movie is going to be absolute garbage. I can't understand how anyone (sex crazed furry pedophile or not) could, even for a second, harbor the slightest of a hope that this film will be anything other than the worst kind of tone deaf, pandering Hollywood trash.

      The fact that people are actually contemplating spending money to see this abomination fills me with a childlike wonder at the absolute fucking state of Humanity.

      • I wonder if you've seen something more about this than I have. I've seen only the two trailers - the original one and the new one - and I certainly don't think it's Oscar worthy (maybe Razzie worthy) but I don't see reason to hold such great animosity towards it. I expect this to be a movie targeted towards children - after all it's a cartoon / video game character at the center - so I'm not expecting great achievements in cinema with this flick.

        That said, my own children haven't asked to see it, so I

  • They could not possibly have not known this.

    They obviously created a fake trailer to get he reaction and "change" it to what they planned all along.

    It's modern marketing.

    • Re:As planned. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NaiveBayes ( 2008210 ) on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @04:00PM (#59407928)
      So they "planned" to delay the movie by several months and "planned" to get rid of the movie billboards they had advertising the original design and "planned" to hire Tyson Hesse to redesign the character right after the first trailer got such a bad reception? Why do so many people assume it's all some sort of crazy marketing ploy rather than the simple explanation that Hollywood got it wrong, as it so often does, only this time they actually tried to fix their mistake. Maybe they think a convoluted marketing ploy is more believable than a Hollywood production expressing humility.

      • So they "planned" to delay the movie by several months and "planned" to get rid of the movie billboards they had advertising the original design and "planned" to hire Tyson Hesse to redesign the character right after the first trailer got such a bad reception? Why do so many people assume it's all some sort of crazy marketing ploy rather than the simple explanation that Hollywood got it wrong, as it so often does, only this time they actually tried to fix their mistake. Maybe they think a convoluted marketing ploy is more believable than a Hollywood production expressing humility.

        They did not try and fix their mistake here.

        How do I know this? Simple. They're still going to make this shitty movie.

        • And why not? Just look at all the rubes lining up to watch this... movie.

          They need to offer complementary sterilization along with a ticket to this film.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Calydor ( 739835 )

          I am a little out of the loop and haven't even seen either the first trailer nor this. Nor do I know what the plot is and so on. I know they are making a Sonic the Hedgehog movie; period, full stop.

          What about it is so objectively shitty? Is it gonna be worse than the Super Mario Bros movie?

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Personally I would like to know who behind the scenes authorized the first version. Someone (or many people) at the studios saw that Sonic didn’t look like Sonic but said okay anyways.
  • I've been looking forward to the new 'Sonic The Hedghog' movie for years. I pray it is a cinematic masterpiece!
  • Honestly, the Sonic the Hedgehog movie is not nearly important enough to me to cause me a "giant relief". Not even a "tiny relief"
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Clearly, the right answer was to murder this idea when came up in a meeting. How it got through a zillion approvals, funded, filmed, money wasted/spent on advertising and actually on the way to theatres soon is an unanswerable question. A whole lot of people thought this was a good idea.
    • Let’s be honest, no one originally attached to this film gave two fucks about Sonic in any way shape or form. If they did it wouldn’t have been the original abortion that it was. The only reason this got changed is that there was so much backlash against the movie from what would probably be a huge chunk of the target audience and changing the CGI didn’t necessitate any other changes or require reshoots so it was leave it and have a flop or spend a little extra to hope it doesn’t tur

    • 2. so many jump cuts and editing mixers in the trailer suggest there isnt a lot of substance to the writing for this film at all.

      That's am embarrassing jump to make.

      What happens someday when you see a clip of what the video game looked like and understand the joke?

  • As it happens, I am reading "Console Wars" right now. It is a look at the early years of the video game industry.

    What I see in this article is in conflict with the original Sonic character designer Naoto Ohshima set out to achieve. The original Sonic had fangs, carried an electric guitar and had a female sidekick with a bust size that belonged in Japanese adult anime. All of that got toned down by the US division of Sega, as they knew that it would not communicate well. These changes were opposed by Sega

    • This doesn't seem to be true as stated. What you call "original" was a game concept that was never made. And the female character Madonna that was never made wasn't intended as a sidekick, but the love interest sonic would have been rescuing.

      Whenever a company is looking over the fence at another company's success and trying to find something to compete, you'll find this sort of story of trying out different concepts before deciding on one. The work product of that process is not actually the original thing

  • This movie is as backwards as another Mario movie would be. Shoot, it's even worse than a Mario movie because at least people still play Mario games. Sonic is not the icon he was a quarter century ago

    • Is it a good idea to judge how a movie is going to be merely on a trailer?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skam240 ( 789197 )

        Well the qualities of the trailer aren't what my post was about at all but in regards to what you just brought up, a trailer is typically prime moments in a film edited down into a short montage. I think there's something to be said for the fact that if a trailer makes a movie look bad that's not a good sign for the movie. Add onto that Hollywood's record of dredging up long dead intellectual properties to base movies around only to churn out mediocre films at best and I don't have high hopes for this movie

  • Sonic's arms are not blue!
  • Should've released it around the time of Sonic & Knuckles.
    That was the last good game before they all went downhill.
  • I'm so happy they decided to redo Sonic now it looks way better than in the last movie.

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