Troubling news today, as the first poster for the upcoming Sonic The Hedgehog movie debuted online—and friends, your old pal Sonic looks weird as shit. Paramount revealed a teeny teaser/motion poster, which comes to us “from the producer of The Fast And The Furious” and boasts the bizarre tagline “A whole new speed of hero.”
Let’s address the furry blue elephant in the room: Sonic’s legs, which have the exquisite musculature of a seasoned runner. SEGA’s iconic protagonist is known for nothing if not his speed, so it seems only logical that he might be packing some thick thighs. But the anthropomorphism of this blue cartoon hedgehog suggests things that only the darkest reaches of Tumblr might consider, like “Does Sonic also have…junk?”
This question is not addressed in IGN’s interview with director Tim Miller, who explains how this Sonic—voiced in the film by Ben Schwartz—was designed with “what a real animal would be like” in mind. Miller was mostly preoccupied with Sonic’s fur, which is “part of what integrates him into the real world and makes him a real creature.” Sonic The Hedgehog finds the eponymous hero in our present-day live-action world, where he befriends a human named Tom Wachowski (James Marsden) and battles his arch-nemesis Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey, of course).
Miller, who previously directed Deadpool, went on to address Sonic’s eyeballs, which are not shown in the first poster—maybe because the brains of mere mortals are not capable of processing such intense beauty. “I don’t think SEGA was entirely happy with the eye decision,” Miller explained to IGN, which also pointed out that the filmmakers “struggled” with this part of Sonic’s anatomy.
We anxiously await the unveiling of the maybe-possibly-most likely wonky eyeballs of Sonic, whose new film hits theaters next November.