And with that, the Sonic fanbase – nay, audiences across the globe – breathed a sigh of relief. For the Blue Blur is back.
Gone is the nightmarish experiment of old and in its place was a super-slick (and video game accurate) rendition of Sonic the Hedgehog, one made possible by the dedicated team at MPC Film. That’s the VFX studio responsible for the visual effects in Paramount and SEGA’s live-action adaptation of the legendary speedster, and according to an MPC artist, the Powers That Be essentially reverted to the “original design” that was proposed.
The now-deleted tweet (h/t Screen Rant) was in response to a fan querying about the film’s redesign, to which Stu Whitten admitted that the team “pretty much just went back to the original design.” Assuming this is true (and we’re inclined to believe it is), it confirms what many already feared: an accurate and indeed adorable version of Sonic existed before Paramount opted for the abomination that we first glimpsed back in May.
Thank the heavens, then, that the team at MPC Film were able to course-correct Sonic the Hedgehog before the Blue Blur ran off course.
Mad props to our character lab and the Vancouver team @MPC_Film https://t.co/5VhXONXFKV
— sᴛᴜ ᴡʜɪᴛᴛᴇɴ (@Stu_FX) November 12, 2019
Who knows what happened behind closed doors, but in reading between the lines, it seems pretty clear that studio meddling was to blame for Sonic the Hedgehog‘s faux pas. Below is another tweet that was later retweeted by Whitten, which again fuels the fire that Sonic’s strangely human teeth were the result of a corporate team with little-to-no knowledge about what makes the SEGA speedster so special. So it’s a credit to MPC Film and Paramount, then, that they were able to turn things around so quickly.
MPC deserves a huge credit for fixing a total disaster made by other people in the film business. Will they actually get any recognition at all? I hope so.
— Xuan Prada (@xuanprada) November 12, 2019
The new-look Sonic the Hedgehog makes a beeline for theaters on February 14th, 2020.
