Against all the odds, Sonic the Hedgehog turned out to be pretty good. It’s not a masterpiece by any means, but it’s worlds away from the disaster that seemed inevitable after that first trailer and its dreadful Sonic design. It’s gone on to respectable reviews, made a bunch of money and probably inspired a new generation of young fans who will one day grow up to produce nightmarish pornographic fan-fiction of their own.
But one element missing from the film was Sonic’s powered-up form, Super Sonic. First introduced in the 1992 Genesis game Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Super Sonic is a Super Saiyan-style transformation that happens when Sonic has all of the Chaos Emeralds. He turns a golden yellow, his spines stand on end, he’s invincible and becomes even faster. It’d have been great to see on screen, and apparently we very nearly did.
Director Jeff Fowler has spoken to ComicBook.com about why Super Sonic didn’t make the cut, saying the following:
“It didn’t make sense to obviously bring in the Super Sonic thing just yet. I mean, there were very early versions of the script and the outlines where… because we knew that’s something that’s very important in the fan mythology, or the mythology that fans love. And Chaos Emeralds are definitely a huge part, even going back to the first game in ’91, and it was definitely something that we were kind of trying to see. Like, “Does it make sense to include one of these?”
But again, just going back to what I said about the simplicity of it and just for the sake of just really starting from the simplest version and not trying to do too much, it just felt like, “Let’s just… let’s do the origins as Sonic and Robotnik and try to nail those characters before we potentially would open it up to some of these elements from the games that fans know and love.'”
I can’t help but agree. Keeping things simple in the first film was a smart move. However, now that the franchise has achieved lift-off, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (the movie) is inevitable. We got a glimpse of Tails at the very end and rumor has it we’ll also get to meet Knuckles, too. And here’s hoping that we get to see Super Sonic as well, as the moments where he’s fully powered up are usually the coolest of all the Sonic games.
Just imagine how neat it’d be to see Sonic 3 and Knuckles‘ Doomsday Zone playing out on the big screen.