LA Sonic 2019 Movie Design is Getting a Much Needed Fix

Art by Aaron Hammerstorm

On April 30th, the 2019 Sonic the Hedgehog LA movie trailer dropped. Reactions... were not pretty. Jokes fell flat, the plot looks like it deviates so heavily from the source material but the most glaring flaw about the trailer was the title character's design. Fans made it abundantly clear that they despised the look of LA Sonic with a seething passion. Much to our surprise, our complaints did not fall on deaf ears. Jeff Fowler, director of Sonic the Hedgehog made the following Tweet.

Thank you for the support . And the criticism. The message is loud and clear... you aren't happy with the design & you want changes. It's going to happen. Everyone at Paramount & Sega are fully committed to making this character the BEST he can be. #sonicmovie #gottafixfast

Huh. Now that is the kinda response to criticism you don't see in the movie or game industry every day. So many others would have rolled their eyes or went off on Twitter rants calling us "haters" and "not true fans of Sonic" but Mr. Fowler took what was said to heart and the team behind LA Sonic is making moves to fix him. I don't know anything about Jeff Fowler or any of the movies he has directed but this act alone has earned him my respect.

Just the other day, fans went to work on their own redesigns of LA Sonic, producing results that far outstripped the disaster we saw two days ago. I haven't the slightest idea how anyone could give the OK on LA Sonic's design. Even Sonic's original character designer, Naoto Oshima expressed his concerns on Sonic's design for this movie.

Sonic's design getting fixed is great news but the film is far from being out of the woods yet. We still don't know what kind of redesign LA Sonic is going to get but hopefully it will be more in line with Sonic's modern design that SEGA has used since 1998. The movie doesn't hit theaters until November, so Paramount has plenty of time to give Sonic a more favorable redesign. It is probably gonna suck for the CGI team to do even more work but if whoever is charge of LA Sonic's hideous design hadn't done what they did, we wouldn't be in such an uproar, now would we?

Even before news of LA Sonic's redesign hit, I was still looking forward to this movie. For all the wrong reasons, of course. I've seen some pretty horrific video game adaptations. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation being one of the worst along with Super Mario Bros. Then you've got Street Fighter, which is so hilariously bad that I can't help but love it. I don't think LA Sonic will be as bad as past video game adaptations (I could be wrong) but like I said a few days ago, I don't think it will be good either. I genuinely want to see how the movie plays out, for better or for worse. At the very least, we won't have to see that eyesore that we were originally going to see. (Pleasebeagoodredesignpleasebeagoodredesign!)