December 20th will be see the release of the third movie in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. It’s still amazing that there even is a franchise for the long-running video game franchise considering it started with a very, very poorly received trailer. The first movie ended up being a surprise hit, becoming one of the once-few successful video game adaptations.
Naturally, for a franchise that’s been around since the 90’s, this wasn’t the first attempt to create a movie. Several attempts have been made, most getting shot down for one reason or another. Some concepts were scrapped because they we’re just bad, others because Sega decided to pursue other ventures.
The first attempt was back in 1994, which would have been a live action/CGI movie akin to Jurassic Park. This concept followed the character of Jimmy Hedgeman, a rebellious teen who goes looking for his missing father on an island in a South American lake. Along the way, he gets mutated, allowing him to shift into the form of Sonic the Hedgehog. The main villain of the film would have been Dr. Paul Elleson, an evil biologist whom Jimmy dubs “Robotnik” due to his cold, mechanical methodology. Knuckles would have also been present as a mutant named Kentar who received the nickname from Jimmy due to him dragging his long ape-like arms along the ground.
MGM, the studio who received this pitch, and Sega both reacted negatively to this treatment, mostly due to it’s very loose connection to the games. Almost all characters were in-name-only and not true to the game, and the idea of Sonic and Knuckles being mutants is a bit insulting. The idea of Sonic being an alter-ego to an original character wouldn’t have new, being similar to the character of Nicky from the Shogakukan Sonic the Hedgehog manga, though the character of Nicky was still a hedgehog and not a human mutant.
The next attempt was titled Sonic the Hedgehog: Wonders of the World. Like the above attempt, the movie would have followed an original character, this time a kid named Josh Pinski, son of an unemployed computer scientist who is researching a supercomputer called the XRI (eXtremely Radical Intelligence; can’t get more 90’s than that.) Josh tries to use the XRI to help him with a homework, but when that fails, he hooks it up to his Sega Saturn to play Sonic X-Treme. This causes Sonic and Dr. Robotnik to escape the confines of the game.
MGM apparently dropped out of the project before it could have been green-lit. Another problem was the fact that the Sonic X-Treme project was going through a very troubled development that would eventually result in the game’s cancellation in 1996. And honestly, the concept of the “Escape from TV Land” was a pretty overused concept.
These next couple concepts are perhaps a bit messy. In 2002, the late Ben Hurst proposed a pitch to Sega to continue the fan-favorite Sonic the Hedgehog (referred to as “SatAM” by fans) that had been canceled back in 1995. This would have picked up where the series left off; Sonic and his Freedom Fighter comrades are rebuilding after the defeat of Dr. Robotnik. However, Robotnik’s former lackey Snively is working against them, trying and potentially successfully to be as big of a threat as Robotnik. Robotnik isn’t dead either, being tortured by the evil Naugus in a dimension called the Void. On top of that, we would have learned the tragic backstory of Nicole, Princess Sally’s hyper-intelligent pocket computer.
Unfortunately for Hurst, Ken Penders, then-writer of Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog comics, found out about the project and contacted Hurst. Hurst offered to include Penders in on the project, though Penders had his own ideas, convincing Sega that Hurst intended to co-opt the franchise. He tjen pitched his own movie called Sonic Armageddon. Armageddon would have likely taken place in the universe of the comics… except Sonic’s home planet of Mobius would have been destroyed.
One of the biggest reasons Penders’ attempt was scrapped was because of Sega’s intention to pursue the Sonic X anime series. It probably wouldn’t have helped that Sega’s opinion of Ken Penders would sour in about a decade. As for Ben Hurst’s continuation, my opinion is that, while I really would have loved to see the series wrapped up, tying into a series that had been off-the-air for almost a decade at this point probably would have ended in a bomb. Fans have taken it upon themselves to create either a final season or movie themselves, though whether it reaches completion is up in the air.
Admittedly, I might be abridging the details about many of these pitches and likely missing a lot of the good bits. Most of these pitches were rather hit or miss, with most being pretty cliché or in-name-only. It’s interesting to see what kind of movies we could have received but also thankful about a number of concepts that were thankfully scrapped.
CaptObvious42 is otherwise the very definition of a nerd. He’s a fan of many things considered retro, with his biggest obsessions being science fiction series both known and obscure, detective shows mostly out of the 80’s and 90’s, video games mostly from the Genesis/SNES years, and dinosaurs.