Sonic the Hedgehog: Everything You Didn't Know

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret history a little known, fascinating facts behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. We're two guys with too much free time in our hands. My name is Jordan run Tug and I'm Alex Heigel. And Jordan, you're gonna have to run that at about one point five speed. We're talking about Sonic the Hedgehog. You should have We should have slammed espressos for this show. We are going to be running through so many facts. We're going to crouch down into little tiny balls and spin around really fast, and then I'm gonna fall into hitter spikes. Because it's the can baby, because it's because it's a Sunday Fun Day. Baby. Sonic turn thirty years old last year. You could say that Time was the only thing that could catch him. He couldn't outrun Father Time. Yes, we love Sonic, although you know, I have to admit I was more of a PlayStation guy. I had a game gear, and I distinctly remember I learned about my emotional issues as a child playing Sonic. Holy did that game infuriate. I remember throwing my game gear across the room at one point and then being like, oh my god, did I break that? Like my dad's gonna kill me. I desperately wanted it in sixty four as a kid, and a very well meeting relative didn't know the difference between sixty four and PlayStation, and I got a PlayStation, so I had to make do with crash bandicoot um or they did it on purpose because they saw that I was a sadist whenever I played Goldmine with the remote minds and the facility, and they probably just didn't want him encourage that and decided to get me a slightly less violent gaming system. But let's move away from our sonistic child in Tendencies now and back to Sonic. And again, Sonic was not a huge part of my life, but when he turned thirty, I talked about him as if he was real. When Sonic the character turned thirty last summer, just this outpouring of affection from all over the globe. Really maybe reconsider him the game and it's anyhow, you know, even after all this time, after now a second big budget action movie, I still feel like he's seeing us the like flashy underdog, which I mean, I guess he's definitely cooler than Mario, who is a portly Italian plumber. But still you keep Mario's name. O mouth hear me run talk. Well, you know you're right. We are going to talk about everything from Sonics early days as a head shot aimed at Mario's mustachioed head, to Michael Jackson's involvement in the franchise, and and Bill Clinton's involvement, Bill Clinton's involvement in Yeah Wow, pseudo involvement. Here's everything you didn't know about Sonic the Hedgehog. So you mentioned Mario Brothers first of all, how dare you? But second of all, flashback to the late eighties early nineties. A nation turns its hopeful eyes to a portly Italian plumber, portly Italian man. The ne S the Nintendo Entertainment system is what you have, the all those early canonical Mario Brothers games on and Super Mario Brothers three the third installment is like a record breaking world conquering success. And so Sega the Genesis is twice as powerful as the ne S sixteen bit processing cartridges versus eight bit, and they took aim at Nintendo early on with their slogan Genesis does what Nintendo Don't, which is a great bit of marketing. I love that. But up until this pup until the Sonic era, their main strategy had been just to port their arcade games over to the Genesis. And you know, we're not gonna get two into the weeds with lingo. But porting means you take an existing game and move it from one platform to the other. So in this case, the big arcade cabinets onto a home system, and they had previous currently residing in the where Are They Now files. Alex Kid h was the initial Sega choice, the internal Sega choice for a mascot. Um. I don't remember anything about these. Yeah, I'm so glad you said that. I was not familiar with him at all. Um. There were four of these games released from one, two, three, four, six, from six to ninety, and I guess if they're Alex Kidd stands out there, we'll hear from him. But he was discarded. He was thrown away like yesterday's garbage because he looked too much like Mario um and Sega president Hio naka Yama wanted a flagship character to compete with Mario. So he held an internal contest through the company specifically aimed at American audiences, which is, now we're getting into one of my favorite things, which is how Japanese people perceive and understand American culture. So Sonic as a character is a mix of Michael Jackson he licks the cat, Mickey Mouse, and as you alluded to earlier, Bill Clinton. Obviously is it you hear that? Now it's obvious that those are the things that went in the song. So as part of this contest, an animator name now to Oshima and programmer named Yugi Naka proposed a game based on a fast moving character rocketing through a tube. Because Naka had recently worked out a programming technique to get a sprite, which is a small animated character or not animated small character made up of you know, individual pixels. Pixels, Yeah, to get a sprite moving at very high speeds along curved environments, which was a big This is like a big breakthrough because you think of early video games, it's all very squared off. Mario's all the blocks and stuff, Whereas I mean, that's true, I didn't even think of that until right now. If you play Sonic it's all rings, it's all loop de loops, it's all very rounded. And so this proposal was accepted and a designer name Judo Kazu Yasohoo was added to the dev team. And originally they wanted a rabbit. Why did they want a rabbit, Jordan's so glad you asked. They wanted a rabbit because he would have prehensile ears to grasp and manipulate objects. This proved to be too complicated, perhaps obviously in hindsight, it was like, if you're just crossing the bridge of getting curved things in your video game, the idea that you want a character to have prehensile ears to move things in the environment might have seemed like a bridge too far from the jump anyway, Yeah, exactly. So instead they focused on this idea of a character rolling into a ball because they had this circular sprite thing going and they wanted to do an armadillo before settling on a hedgehog. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Armadillo would probably seem pretty American because the whole like in Texas, American Southwest thing. Um. They were originally going to call this rabbit character feel the rabbit, which is as you wrote, it's it's slots so neatly into the Elmer Fudd the right of the valkyriez that kill the web, kill the web. It so feel the rabbit anyway, But because they knew a great ideal, they had it and wanted to hang onto it, they recycled this very game called Restar. A few years later, um and Oshima was talking to Polygon Gaming tech outlet, a writer for them named Michael mcquarter, and he said, I planned a trip to New York while this discussion was going on. Internally, Sega said, we definitely want to see something like an old guy with a mustache. Sure, who would go on to become the game's bad guy. I wonder if they were trying to demonize Mario with that. Oh yeah, the dr robot in the character I think came about as like an unflattering parody of Mario. You've got the big you know, they got the overalls, I think, and then you've got the big mustache. Yeah, it was that definitely a shot at Mario cutthroat world of nineties video games. They're vicious, the anti Italian American discrimination and here is outrageous. Uh. We also want to see something spiky and we also want to see a dog like chacter. So this this, this is taking form. Then there is this great story, maybe apocryphal, that Oshima and other designers went out to Central Park to do a little like real world market testing, and they stopped people who are out for a stroll and asked them opinions on different character designs that they had, and this blue hedgehog character was a clear favorite, and according to Sega, it was because that it transcends race and gender, which sure, okay, I'll go with that. Um. They also wanted a character that children could easily draw, and Sonic definitely fit that bill. And apparently the hedgehog was chosen for practical reasons to you can even say evolutionary reasons. Hedgehogs can curl into a ball and roll away as a defensive tactic, which inspired Sonic Spin Dash attack. I curl into a ball for defensive reasons. Speaking didn't see if you're getting character named after me. It's fetal position man minor minor professional setbacks. Send him into his and did fetal position where he rolls away and sits in the shower for thirty minutes, reflecting on his life choices. Uh Oshima says that he just stuck Felix the cats head onto the body of Mickey Mouse to create Sonic, which sounds a bit reductive, but um they then died in blue to match. So the Sega logo, which Sega initially sonic, was a darker blue, but it turns out he blended too well in with the ocean backgrounds, and so they lightened him. And this is my favorite bit about this. We talked earlier about where Bill Clinton fits into this, and Oshima, I guess, in attempting to make Sonics identity uniquely American, he drew inspiration from Bill Clinton, who and these are quotes whose proactive attitude was supposedly reflected in Sonics Can Do attitude. The game is also has an environmental theme that was also a reflection on the then hot button topic of conservation and global warming in the nineties. And now that we move into the sartorial aspect of the design, the buckled red shoes are an homage to Michael Jackson on the cover of seven Bad Bad Record and The Bad Record, and they were made red and white partially because of Santa Claus, who Oshiba had pegged as the most famous character in the world, and also apparently so they could be seen at the high speeds in the game, they showed up better against the blue background. But Michael Jackson may have also provided more than just style in Spoke. There are conflicting reports as the weather. Michael Jackson, who was apparently a huge Sonic fan, contributed to the series uh specifically the music for the series third installment, and Oshima said that Michael Jackson's work was scrubbed after the allegations of sexual abuse against him, although there are others who worked on the game who said that some of his music remains in the game. But there's actually another version of the story. There's also a version that says that Michael Jackson walked away from the project himself because he was frustrated with the limitations of the Sanga Genesis sound chip, and he has to be uncredited in the final game. And it's interesting fans of notice similarities between the end credits and Sonic three and Michael Jackson's song Stranger in Moscow. And there's a great, really really long read Huffington Post article from two thousand and sixteen about this, written by Todd Van Lewing, and it's it delves into all the my new show about whether or not Michael Jackson actually did contribute music to the third Sonic game. Well, I think the thing were missing over here is that there was a Michael Jackson video game called Moonwalker. On what uh Sega had released it? Yeah? Um so Moonwalker um was developed into an arcade game by Sego with Jackson's input. They're based on the Smooth Criminal clip. I would have thought the bad video. I guess he's not fighting anybody in that, is he? I guess he's breaking up the fight. Oh. Hold on. The stages are based on his different music videos as he rescues children from a drug dealer named Mr. Big Uh. Making contact with Bubbles, Michael's chimp turns him into a robot warrior, which replaces his melee dance attacks with missiles and laser beams. In the console version of the games, if you rescued a certain child first, a comet would fall from the sky that would turn Michael into a robot And um, this just has it in quotes, dance magic is apparently a big part of this, this game Moodwalker. So yeah, I guess Michael was already a known quantity at sega um. That's so interesting. Wow, I did not know that. And now it's time for another segment of the podcast we like to call Jordan throws Alex a bone about John Carpenter. John Carpenter, my favorite director of all time, loves video games. He loves people adapting his films now so that he can get a check and continue to get high and play video games. And he loves Sonic. He even in one interview says, I even like the one where he turns into a werewolf, which is a late era Sonic game called Sonic Unleashed and a universally panned entry in the series. But never you fear Sega. John Carpenter's got your back. But while we're talking about the music to Sonic, who actually did the music? Jordan's Masada Nakamura, who is a member of the j pop band Dreams Come True. And interesting thing about Dreams Come True is that the band provided the music for Sleepless in Seattle with Tom Hanks and Meg Bryan. Because we can't do a show without mentioning Tom Hanks. Oh man, that's our first Hanks. Did we get to three in this episode? I I don't know. Maybe we'll try that. Yeah, alright, so this is wild too. I did this earlier. Maybe you couldn't tell. Maybe my voice was just too beautiful. But the saga that SoundBite took up an eighth of the space on the cartridge. That four second jingle needed more storage space than entire levels of the game, So they cut stuff from the game gameplay to make the jingle, to make the it's not even a jingle, it's a it's a it's a phrase. Whatever. Great, great decisions made at every level. Um Sadly, one of these scenes that was lost to the ruthless cutting blade of Sega's dev team was an end credit sequence where Sonic plays with a rock band made up of fellow animals, including a monkey on base and an alligator on keys. And on the Master System version of this game, you can actually see some cutting room floor footage of it where Sonic is seen singing into a microphone. But that is not the extent of sonics musical career. Jordan's tell us about it. Yes, at one point, Sonic was pitched as a rock star with a girlfriend named Madonna. In an early version of this game, Sonic had a girlfriend named Madonna who was like a human woman, not a hedgehog, and from the sketches I've seen, she very strongly resembles Jessica Rabbit with blonde hair, or perhaps the real Madonna could have gone with the real Madonna there In an early incarnation of the game, Sonic was supposed to rescue her as opposed to rescuing woodland creatures, and there have been a few explanations as to why she was written out the final game, in addition to needing to free up space so they could have this beloved jingle. Uh, one is that the content had to be quote softened for children in foreign countries, or the whole damsel in distress thing was too similar to Mario Brothers. Weird because an early sketch of Sonic he had these like really terrifying fangs, Like he looked like, you know, Sonic as we know him and love him, is a kind of a cuddly Mickey Mouse type creature, but this early version he looks very threatening, so I can see dropping the fangs. That's kind of softened up his image. But yeah, I don't know. Interesting when the current Sonic movies run their course and we get greedy remake the greedy reboot of like Tortured Dark Sonic. He's gonna have huge fangs and like a hot Jessica Rabbit girlfriend. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. You also touched on this earlier. I'm not reading any of this anti Italian American discrimination, okay, Um, yeah, I mentioned this earlier. The The Road Tones body of Sonics nemesis Dr robot Nick was developed back when Sega was trying to come up with a Mario competitor, and this egg shaped man was drafted basically as an unflattering Mario parody with a little bit of Teddy Roosevelt thrown in. I think um and the early version he was just as fat man in pajamas with a huge mustache. And they decided to go with in a different direction for their main character, the hero. But they decided to keep this this rotun gentleman as the villain because I mean, it seems fitting for Saga to have a Mario analog as their villain, right. Um. He's known in Japan as Eggman, but that name didn't really translate in the States, supposedly because the name Eggman was already in the popular lexicon thanks to the Beatles song I Am the Walrus. And while we're on the topic of names, yeah uh, there's a persistent rumor that Sonic was originally going to be called Mr. Needle Mouse, which sounds like a Faulty Towers character more than anything, or like one of these British towns where they would have sent the Rolling Stones Mobile studio to record, like uh, Glenn John's and the Rolling Stone Mobile Studio showed up on the town of Stratford upon Needle Mouse. Um. Eug Naka explained years ago that this was just a translation air. They just called the character Mr head jug and the Japanese word for Hedgehog is hubbins in numi, which literally translates to needle and mouse, which makes sense hedgehog is a mouse with needles. Uh. And according to a former head writer of the series, a guy by the name of Ken Pender's, another early name was Ogilvy Maurice Hedgehog, so kind of a wash Ovvie Maurice needle mouse, though, that's kind of certain something to it that sounds like the birth name of some Robert plant. Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say Michael Caine. But yeah, speaking of lore and backstories, and there's a lot of that. In fact, there's so much of that. There is a massive Sonic Bible that was created internally at Sega to basically create a bedrock to create all the levels and the stories of the game. And yeah, this internal document was dubbed the Sonic Bible, and it outlines Sonics origin in extreme detail, and it was intended to be a reference for developers making future versions of the game, and some of it was actually used as fodder for the Sonic comic book series two uh and the Sonic Bible, it was god was never meant for publication, but a former Sonic employee actually talked about it in a Sonic Retro web form in two thousand nine and fans went nuts and asked him to scan it in which he did, and he apparently sold copies of it on eBay, which I'm kind of blown away that the Sega legal team didn't sue him into oblivion for that, But there's copies PDFs of it floating around online pages. It's over thirty pages, which is single space, so and that's quite impressive. And this Bible, it was revised many times, So like most religions, there are many different interpretations and versions of what is considered sonic cannon and UM. There's a guy by the name of Brian David Gilbert who was on the Polygon YouTube channel, and he's a very interesting video about the on Bible and it's different variations. Um. Early interior feedback for this was not good. There's a guy who worked for Atari and he founded the Sega Technical Institute, which is sort of their thing tank. His name is Mark Sarney. He incidentally had a hand developing the PS four. He said in two thousand and six that the early feedback from higher ups in the company included that the characters were unsalvageable. That is a quote that this thing was quote a disaster, and my personal favorite quote, procedures would be put in place to make sure that this sort of thing would never happen again, which is something I say to Jordan whenever we're done taping when these um, yeah, yeah, I had heard that the higher ups were actually mostly concerned that the general public, at least overseas, wouldn't know what a hedgehog was, because apparently there are no hedgehogs in the United States, Porcupine, Yes, Hedgehog No, that true. Yeah, I didn't know that either. Weird all right, maybe some foresight on the part of Sega. But then again, they made the Dreamcast. So that's the only bit of video game insider. I just know that the Dreamcast was a flop. That's that's all I got for you. Uh. Incidentally, moving on, there's a guy from Mattel named Tom Kolinsky who comes in to replace the CEO of Sega America. And Kolinsky was brought in as part of the company's attempts to reverse their fortunes and beating Nintendo. Yeah exactly. That's like sort of the log line of Sega at this point is beating Nintendo at all costs. Um. Kolinsky makes this decision to package Sonic as the pack in game. That's what when you buy a console, you get a game with it. It's usually a crappy game because usually one they don't mind giving away. So this guy is suggesting to make Sonic their new Markey character. The packing game was extremely controversial, to put it mildly, when he pitched this idea to the Japanese VP of Sega. This VP supposedly stood up from his chair screamed, are you crazy? We make money selling software, and now you want to give away our best title. That he stood up, kicked his chair and started to walk to the tour and then he turned around inside. If you think that will help us beat Nintendo, do it. So they gave away Sonic to fifteen million households, and this gamble ultimately worked the knock Nintendo off the top spot and gave Sega the market majority of six. This really was like a David and Goliath story in the video game world because for every dollar that Sega had in its marketing budget, Nintendo had fifteen dollars, so they really had to rely on guerrilla marketing tactics. And they staged events that shopping malls where they had two identical three two inch TV's side by side, one with the first sixteen bit super A ne s Mario Games, and the other was Sonic on Sega Genesis, and they let the kids play and make up their own mind. It's like the It's the video game version of the taste test. It's really weird that after all the research and development, all the time and money that went into this Sonics first appearance was not in Sonic One, but had sort of a soft opening in an arcade game. Yeah, so a few months before the game even comes out for home consoles, they teased they it was like the mid credit scene in a Marvel movie. Um, there's a coin operated arcade game called rad Mobile, which the first person racing game, and you can actually see Sonic dangling from the review mirror as like an air freshener or toy uh. And that came out in arcades in January almost um, sixty months before Sonic came out. And this game may be most known to viewers of a certain generation as the game that Brendan Frasier plays in Encino Man. We mentioned earlier that Sonic has its roots in the then novel notion of this sprite moving around these loop de loops. But this is wild Man. This whole game was designed from the jump to be super fast and super frustrating. Jordan's Yeah, I mean from the beginning. Speed was the mantra for the developers working on Sonic, and the creator usually Naka, apparently became fixated on this while playing Mario because in the early days of video games, you couldn't save your progress, so you found yourself playing the first level or two over and over and over again, and he just wanted to speed through it to get back to where he was, and that gave him the drive to create a game that you could just plow through in an insane rate. And at the time of Sonics released, he was the fastest moving video game character ever created, and it was even registered in the Guinness Book of World Records. And amazingly, there was an earlier version of Sonic that had him moving even faster, but the game gave usually knock a motion sickness, so they toned it down. That was the upper threshold. They were like, well, it's finally making him physics clear. It's like the clockwork orangs they're having, like his eyes are strapped open. He's like faster, faster. They're like, that's it. Shut it down. We found the upper threshold. And in the world of the game, he can move fast, if not faster, than the speed of sounds ends his name Sonic, and that is seven sixty eight miles an hour. But according to the lower of the game, the thing that keeps him moving fast are his shoes. This is my favorite. Thank you Jordan for not turning this over to me. I'm just gonna take this because it fits in with me disposition a lee. Um. Sonic doesn't like left being alone with his thoughts, as so many of us uh do don't. And um if you ever sat the controller down and didn't pause and just kind of left the game idle, he literally just jumps off the screen and saying, I'm out of here and you have to start the game over. I wonder if they're any big uh Camu fans whether or not. Yeah, wow, this is getting dark, quick moving one. Speaking of ways of Sonic offs himself, Sonic can't swim. He can run across the surface of the water. Um. One of the many ways he's like Jesus, Yes, like the Christ uh. And that is because Eugenaka is under the mistaken impression that hedgehogs cannot swim. They actually can. They're actually quite agile in the water. And it's one of the challenges that's become baked into the franchises that Sonic does not like water. So, speaking of things that make the game difficult other than Sonics death drive and water, um, it's the speed of the thing, man. But you got to get the ringing noise whenever I swear, are you highlighting the phrase? The hard is what makes it great? Sure? A monster? Uh? Like baseball? The hard is what makes Sonic great. Uh there's a I guess a video game critic, I don't know that's a thing. Writing in The Guardian, Keith Stewart noted that at the time, Sonic was a major departure from game design, calling it both a masterpiece and incorrect, which I love. An incorrect masterpiece. The pace of this game forced players to learn through repetition rather than observation, as the levels aren't designed to be seen or even understood in one playthrough. Yeah, you, you don't actually get a chance to sit with this stuff. It's actually designed to force you to do this as many times as possible into Yeah, exactly, get it into your muscle memory, because the second you slow down, Sonic kills himself. Um. But yeah, I mean the game was obviously when it comes out as a smash despite this difficulty level, and as with any video game, you start seeing record high scores, you start seeing these speed runs that are happening. One of the speed run is there's a player named Foson who apparently beat the game in just under fifteen minutes fourteen fifty nine. That is insane high scores. Though, while we're talking about high scores, the best verifiable one that Jordan found for US was Michael Strocca of the United States, who broke the record not that long ago actually um eight hundred, twelve thousand, one huty points, but not without controversy. Yes, record may, yes, this record mayor sorry, yes, Marv Albert over here. Yes, there's an unconfirmed report out there that Stroka's record was broken in March of by Ruise Susa SUSA with a score of one million, five thousand, one eight points. Suspect that's doubling nearest record breaker. Yeah, I I I question that. Well, it's like did you ever see The King of Kong? No? Oh man, that's a that's one of the best little slice of life documentaries about these guys who try and beat the Donkey Kong Kind's score or like the pac Man high score, And it gets into a whole thing where they um, if you're not playing on standard eyes, like if you're not playing on the same board, like the actual program board of the console, your win is invalidated. So I do wonder if if there's a way of standardizing that. I mean, here's a question that I pre pre internet, when you were playing a video game Cabinet in an arcade and they would have the high scores. Were those high scores just for that cab that I would assume so? Or were they linked in some kind of I'm so glad you asked, um. Twin Galaxies is the name of this. So this is a this is just a great move a movie. And we don't have time to get into everything about this movie because basically follows these two guys, Steve Weeby and Billy Mitchell, who are both battling for the all time record in the arcade version of Donkey Kong and the tertiary character in this is an organization called Twin Galaxies that is basically the Ripley's the not I guess Ripley is bad. They're more of the Guinness that they are dedicated to tracking and standardizing high scores in video games, mostly focused on the Golden console age. Right when would this have been? Like? What era were they or are they still? The documentary came out in two thousand seven, these are still this is a still doing this. But the thing is is that this organization twin galaxies. They send guys out to actually pull your machine apart and look at the circuit board on it to see if it's standard if it's similar to the guy you're competing against. And I think in this one, um they actually find out that the one has been tampered, so that invalidates the scores and this whole thing. Incidentally. Watched it first of all, watch this documentary. It's a great, wonderful little slice of life movie. The drama has continued and I am not up on it, but I believe it is still going. So I would wonder about these high scores, how they're verified, If it's done on an emulator, on like a home computer, if it's done in a genesis, what generation of cartridges, what generation of console it is, how it's standardized. There's a whole world involved in this stuff, so it's very interesting. Eat your heart out. So, I mean, it sounds like in the early days in the pre Internet, when there were scores on video game cabinet's that you know, your your mal arcade or whatever, those were unique to that cabinet. But then there'd be an organization that would actually go tally them all and have somewhere. Uh wow, that is very interesting. Yeah, it's wild, and I don't have a good segue for that. Speaking of a different kind of high score, the high score of Filthy Lucra Sonic was integral to Saga taking the majority of the home video game market share. They took it from Nintendo for the first time since huge win for Sega. Genesis has out sold s n s IS two to one during season, and the original Sonic is still the platform's best selling title Nintendo. Because you can't fight City Hall, Nintendo took back the record eventually, very sad for those of us who love the underdog. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. This is hilarious. I love all this drama between exacts and the way that these guys are just different, Like this cowboy attitude these guys had towards each other. At the Winter Consumer Electronics Show, there's a Nintendo executive named Peter Maine who is there at the Nintendo booth and he he was playing with their their super Scope, which was that like shoulder mounted light gun that you could use on the and he pointed it at Sega's booth, and he said this, this is rather perfect for hedgehog hunting, like a Viceroy fox hunting and like John Pursy. Yeah. Sega's Alan Nelson at one point would claim that Sonic was more recognizable among six to eleven year olds than Mickey Mouse. Um, which is funny. It's just one of those like bits of marketing hyperbole because he's cited data from a company called Marketing Evaluations Incorporated, who would later decline to verify that. So take that with a grain of salt. But um, regardless, there have been seventy million Sonic related games sold across the world based on seventy different Sonic related titles. So even if you're doing that extremely like Math for Dummies breakdown, that's a million copies of every Sonic game it is. Obviously doesn't break down that way. But man, good for Sonic. I love an underdog. But despite all this success, Naka and Yashahira were both disappointed by their treatment from Sega. Uh The corporation avoided crediting its game dev teams, partly out of fear that they depoached by their companies and usually not a quit. Eventually, joining uh the Sega Technical Institute, which, as you mentioned earlier, is basically like a think tank for Japanese and American developers, and uh Yeshiara also defected there too, but before they left, out of revenge, Naka secretly added a list of all the names responsible for Sonic and put them on a black intro screen for the game, and the text was also in black, so you couldn't see it unless you had the cheat code, so that nerds could basically recognize other nerds. And I think that's beautiful, milk a toast form over and I love that. But yeah, this was you said. This is more common than people with might think. Yeah, this is sort of a fairly standard practice for early Easter eggs. The first ever video game Easter egg was for the nineteen nine game Adventure for the Atari, when a disgruntled employee added his own name to a secret room. So I guess there are quite a few like covert signatures on these old retro games over the years. That was like a pretty standard way of like, you know, marking your territory, even when the bosses didn't want to actually give you real credit on like the box of the home screen, I love that. It's like if a mixing or mastering engineer was like, oh I did this, It's just like slips into the mix of your like your drum mix DJ Kali effect. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah exactly. It's like if Tom Dowald is recording all of this Ray Charles sides and like you get to like this like the emotional peak of a Ray Charles ballad, and then just offen the drum mic. You here, Tom Dowald recorded this, What a granular bit we're doing now, um Sonics animated spinoff? That was good. That was good. He spent you gotta put the Sonic suicide noise in there here. Uh. The animated spinoff actually has quite a pedigree. We mentioned Tom Kilinsky earlier, who, much like every other executive in the history of the world, his whole job was replicating success he had had at other jobs by doing the same thing over again. He had been a Mattel the animated he Man series had juiced sales of the he Man toy line, and so naturally, when he was at Sega, he pitched ABC an animated series based around Sonic. Sixty five episodes of this were produced overseen by Ren and stimpy director Kent Butterworth, and Sonic was voiced by Jalil White, otherwise and indelibly known as Rkele on family Matters and moving into a considerably more three dimensional medium that of rubber. Yes, grander honors were still to come for Sonic. In November, Sonic the Hedgehog became the first video game character to have a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, paving the way for the likes of Pikachu and Red from Angry Birds, but not Mario eat that Nintendo Oh, Italian Americans taken so many owls. Well, Mario might have dodged the bullet here because unfortunately, the year that the Sonic balloon was unveiled, it was blown into a lamp post and the thing popped and it deflated and crashed to the ground like the footage of the Hindenburg and resulting in two injuries but thankfully no deaths. Al Rokers on the TV the dodgy over straight places the background. It gets worse. Okay, this is this was This was Thanksgiving three when it when it had its catastrophic debut. It was repaired and flown again the following year in when the same thing happened. It was smooth sailing for a few more years, but then it hit yet another lamp post the third time, after which the balloon was retired. But there was a new balloon that was flown in for the characters twentieth anniversary, and as far as I'm aware, that one didn't maim anybody. Um and just slowly deflating Sonic knocking over lamp posts and marching bands that have flown in from Indianapolis single tier, some baton twirl or some fleeing for cover. Oh good lord, Oh we're bad people, all right. The cast of Mama Mia run from out front of Macy's, but from death to life. Because there's a gene that has been named after Sonic, called, unimaginatively, the sonic the hedgehog gene, which encodes a protein called, similarly unimaginedively sonic hedgehog. The function of this gene is to regulate organ no genesis, organo genesis. Right, take that we have it. Who's our own staff, don't? Yeah? It controls the growth of limbs, digits, and the organization of the brain. Now this is really nerdy. I don't I don't know about genes Jordan's but I know that, but I know what I like. Um genes can be inhibited right that stops them from working. The inhibitor to the hedgehog gene signaling pathway is called robot nick Nin because he's the bad guy, right anybody bueler uh. It was named by a scientist called Robert Riddle, who was inspired when his wife brought home a video game magazine in the early nineties with the sega ad in the back, and scientists referred to this by the slightly more professional sounding acronym s h H. But is believed to be able to repair damaged hair cells, which in theory means that Sonic the Hedgehog and his gene could be the cure for baldness, which would be his ultimate win over robot nick A famously Wow, Yeah, see how I brought that one back? Tied it back? That was good. This game has given us so much, but it could also be blamed for some truly terrible things, namely the nineties run on animals with attitude games, despite the fact that Sonic wasn't particularly attitudinal, if that's a word. In the original game, his success spurred a gold rush of imitators capitalizing on the quote Radical Animal Blueprint, including bubs E, The Bobcat, GEX, the Get Go Dinosaur, Radical Rex, Bug, The Bug, and Rocky Rodent. That one sounds fake, Rocky Raccoon. I guess it has a precedent. Oh yeah. The Crash Bandicoot dev team Naughty Dog consistently referenced Sonic is an influence, even referring to it as quote Sonics asked game in early stages, owing to the fact that the game sort of camera followed Bandicoot from behind. I guess that was a thing that really differentiated it from a lot of those other video games was that you did see it in a three sixty view as opposed to me Mario being the initial example of it just being flat and the Sonic. I guess it's also two D, but for some reason, maybe it's better. Yeah, that's what they call a side scroller. I don't know enough about video games to know which. What had it been Mario? Maybe it was one of the first three D ones. Folks. If you'd like to correct any of our video game knowledge or miss numer's in here, please, tweeted us, using the hashtag Sonics ass game. But you know what game respects game. Mario's creator Shieru Miyamoto said, I think Sega succeeded in making a good, strong character. There are lots of games that try to imitate Mario, but Sega did especially well with Sonic. Despite his resemblance to Mario, there are some special points that make him different. The energy, for example. I don't know what that means. Make of that what you will, but he continued, Among Mario's imitations, Sonic is a good one, and they finally came together in a crossover Nintendo we game tied to the two th eight Beijing Olympics with the slightly on original title Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games. And if that is not a happy ending, what is? Isn't he also in? I think he's in Smash Brothers? I think, well, yeah, I think after that they made a Smash Brothers game too. Yes, yes, that's true. So we're not gonna get too much into the movies here because we're talking about the video game. But we'd be were missing our duties if we didn't talk about teeth Gate. Uh. When the Sonic the Hedgehog big budget live action adaptation dropped, in uh what was this? Fans were in an uproar, mostly because of his teeth. However, they redesigned, reimagine the character for the movie. He fell flat a number of ways. The first one was that his teeth were too big and looked too human, and there was this enormous outcry. Vulture has a great timeline of this that goes all the way back to June, which I am not going to get into. But they put out a poster for this as a teaser in December and it immediately meets with fury. People are just not happy with it. Moving into April, a month later, the trailer comes out and everyone is upset because Sonic has human teeth, distressingly human teeth. I don't know, man, do you remember being online for this? People flipped out and it took them about let's see, this came out? What did I just say? This came out in yeah, a November they release a new trailer, bigger eyes, smaller teeth. Here's my question. That seems like a really quick turnaround time to completely redesign a character for an animated film. I know, maybe in computer animation it's something that can be done. You know, it's not like a regular animation, traditional animation where you're going through fixing individual you know, cells, But that seems quick. I almost wonder if, like, you know, there's that conspiracy theory about New Coke. Have you heard this, Oh yeah, that they did it? Well, go ahead, yeah, I think, I mean, stop me if I'm getting those wrong. That New Coke they knew it was gonna bomb, but they were gonna stop using sugar and start using corn syrup instead in their classic formula. And so the whole we're gonna make a new flavor, they knew it was going to meet without cry. And then when they said, all right, we're gonna give you back your old flavor, it was gonna be in everyone's mind like, no, this is the classic flavor, this is the original one, but it was slightly different. It was used with cheaper ingredients that did taste slightly different. That's why you get like Mexican Coke now is used with original sugar, and that's why that's like, you know, seen as this kind of premium product. And this this whole conspiracy theory that they knew New Coke was gonna bomb and was just to like get people excited for the slightly crappier version of the product that they've known forever. Is that my roughly solving that story? Right? Ah, you're telling the story crack. I don't know that this was necessarily how the Sonic team did it. Maybe they were like, oh my god, we've got to give people like get people passionate about this by like screwing it up. So the producer of both of the movies, because they just put out a second, one guy named Neil maurits Uh. He gave an interview to a podcast called The Town with Matthew Bologney, and he basically said that we had an all hands on deck meeting the next morning at Paramount. It took them a day to be like, we fed up, but I mean, do that ring noise there. I took them one day and he said, we're going to take this character back to what is loved, and we need X amount of dollars to do this, and we need to delay the movie. And he says, and I have to say Sega and Paramount said, okay, you're right, which is I don't know how many angry tweets they had to show Sega and Paramount, but God love him. They took away his creepy human teeth, and let's see how well. Let's see, Sonic the Hedgehog original flavor has Tomato mater nine three audience score domestic A hundred forty six million, three hundred and fifty five million worldwide. Wow, So, folks, Sonic still has teeth, creepy or not, there's money to be squeezed out of that Hedgehogs still. Uh well, this conversation has been idle for a while, so I'm out of here. That's right, It is game over for us. Thank you so much for listening to our wildly digressive conversation about Sonic the Hedgehog. My name is Jordan Brown Tog and I'm Alex Tagele. Thank you for listening, folks. We've no I didn't have anything, and I'm Alec Tagle. Folks, thank you so much for listening. This has been too much information. We'll talk to you next time, will we. You'll hear us next time? Why am I sucking at this right now? I am very much enjoying it. You're enjoying it? Alright? Alright you say this, you just gotta fade it out on DAI for straight with me fumbling for a caker. Folks, this has been too much information. Thank you for listening. We will catch you on the flippity flop swinging swinging around the old oak tree, this tied yellow ribbon around the cellar door, and we'll see you at the Teddy Bears Picnic. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows