One of the few success stories of this year has been the “Sonic the Hedgehog” live-action feature.
Expectations were low to begin with, and when the first trailer arrived it was met with a vocal and active backlash about the re-designed titular blue hedgehog who had been turned into something ‘more realistic’ and ultimately creepy.
Then the studio took the unprecedented response of stalling the film and completely redesigning the character to be more akin to the old games. The result? The film not only got good reviews but has become the most successful video game adaptation yet at the domestic box-office.
Out talking up the film’s home video release, Sonic’s voice actor Ben Schwartz recently spoke with CinemaBlend about the redesign controversy and explains how he saw it:
“The way that I saw it first I think was on the trailer. I had to do ADR for the actual trailer because up until then it was all very temp. But I believe the trailer had to be done very quickly or something like that. So the first time I saw it was then. And then when it came out and the reaction it got when it came out. First of all we didn’t know if anyone would care. We care because we like video games and movies it seems.
But the biggest thing we learned from that was that when it came out so many people were so vocal and it became a huge thing. It got passed around so much. It may have not been the most positive reason why it was getting passed around, but it got passed around so much and so people had such heartfelt passionate ideas for it. That the biggest thing we learned was ‘Oh, people care a lot. Let’s look at this and figure it out.’
The big thing they were trying to do was how do you bring Sonic into the real world? Because he’s a computer character, you can’t just bring him in. How will he look in a real life situation? So I think that’s what they were tackling. But I will say the new version… when I was doing my voice the whole time I was doing it the way the new version looks. In my head, that’s the way it looked. So when I saw the first one I was like ok, but when I saw the second one I was like ‘This is in my head what the little guy looks like.'”
Schwarz also says the production was very lucky to not only get Jim Carrey, but Carrey doing the style of comedy that he built his career on back in the 1990s with “Ace Ventura” and “The Mask”. In fact when they were testing the film, they asked kids if they knew who Jim Carrey is and quite a few didn’t and so they were in for a surprise.
“Sonic the Hedgehog” is now available on Digital HD and will be released on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD on May 19th.
