“Sigma-Alpha 2 heading due south over the city. We’re en route, everything’s a go.”

A military helicopter cuts across the sun, light flaring between the spinning blades. A bass guitar starts plucking.

“That’s a 10-4. Cargo secured on board and…what?? The hedgehog is gone, he’s taken out everyone aboard and…..what in the world?”

Sonic breaks off the door to the helicopter and grabs onto the missile launchers of the craft, framing his broken handcuffs for the camera. He looks down, scanning the distance to the stretching city below and jumps on top of the wing. “Talk about low budget flights. No food or movies? I’m outta here. I like running better.”

The opening of Sonic Adventure 2 sets an expectation that in this entry, the blue devil’s usual rival, Dr.Robotnik, isn’t the most present danger anymore. Sonic is an enemy of the state, on the run and no rules are going to stop him.

Sonic rips off a metal plate from the helicopter with ease and jumps to the city miles below yelling, “YEAAAAHHH!”.

For a period of time after SA2’s release, this was the tone that a Sonic title delivered. “Fuck the police, I am gonna wreck shit and hang with my buds.” Whether it came in the anime form of Sonic making a joke of the police in Sonic X or Shadow blasting through the mix of military forces in Shadow the Hedgehog (2005), the state was always made out to be a violent antagonist.

But somewhere along the passage of time, this aspect of Sonic changed. With the release of the film adaptation, Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), audiences saw Sonic hop in the truck with “Donut Lord”, a local sheriff of the rural town of Green Hills, for a road trip to ensure that the techno-disruptor Dr.Robotnik doesn’t affect the status quo of the nation and their safety.

How did Sonic change from anti-military to a policeman’s best bud 7 years later?

To understand this transformation of Sonic, it’s important to understand just what Sonic is. While Sonic is known by many as a video game series, it’s also been beloved by a large fanbase due to its long running line of comics, multiple animated cartoon series, plenty of merchandising deals, and the most recent film. The hedgehog has worn a wide variety of different gloves and shoes since he started out as a mascot for SEGA’s second console.

Each of these products has their fans, but a common division of Sonic media is the “eras” of Sonic games. There are fans that like the classic 2D games, fans who like the Adventure-era games, and fans that like many of the modern post-Adventure games. In many cases fans who grew up with a certain part of Sonic media seem to find that era of the most enjoyable.

For these many facets of Sonic fans, it’s hard to narrow Sonic down to a mascot or media device. However, in every form, Sonic is a figure produced from a capital, political, and social context. Therefore, each of these varying Sonic media are reproducing ideologies from those contexts. I look at Sonic as Giogrio Agambe defined apparatuses, “I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”. Considering this idea of the Sonic character apparatus, I believe that these three “Sonic eras” reveal how Sonic’s relationship to the police has developed over time.

The first era of Sonic begins with the character’s inception. Zolani Stewart wrote a wonderful analysis in 2014 that the character’s creation during the consumerist rebellion of the 90’s was made as an image to challenge the norm through various merchandise and video games. During this time Sonic had a pop-punk image that ran through colorful environments and repeatedly fought the evil Dr.Robotnik who trapped the animals of the world. This spawned multiple animation and comic series following Sonic’s involvement with a group of freedom fighters. It also created the perfect aesthetic for the character to be placed on any merchandise from mugs to popcorn vending machines.

With the Dreamcast’s debut of Sonic Adventure, the franchise started to venture into the second era. One of the biggest changes is certainly the transition from 2D to 3D. Characters who played out stories through silent gestures were now speaking and pushing forward plots. Sonic began to transition from an aesthetic into a lore as Amy was attempting to understand the emotional rights of AI and the rest of the cast was grappling with the history of Knuckles’ ancestors. Perhaps the most jarring change was that Sonic Adventure took place in a world that paralleled our own. Gone were the colorful zones of Green Hill and Angel Island, Now Sonic was running alongside humans.

With this new setting there was an implication that Sonic lived in the same systems humans did. Sonic would wait for train times to ride to mystic ruins, head to the casino to rack up rings, and go on a date at the amusement park. No longer was Sonic a freedom fighter, but instead just a guy who was hanging out with his pals around the city, making sure Eggman wasn’t up to any evil.

The police weren’t really a presence in this early period of the Adventure era, but everything about Sonic drastically changed with the introduction of GUN in Sonic Adventure 2.

From the get-go of SA2 it is clear that there is a new danger for Sonic. Eggman/Robotnik had classically been the villain in every mainline game prior, and even when he wasn’t, he was pulling the strings somehow. But for the first 10 minutes of the hero story, the player doesn’t even see anything related to Eggman. Instead, the world is filled with GUN military tech attacking Sonic and his friends. The classic story of hero vs villain had shifted to the heroes resisting the abusive violence of State organizations.

Over the series of 2D-era games, enemies in Sonic would always show up, chuckling when they believed they had him thwarted or banging on their machines when they were defeated. The characters were bad, but it was just goofy bad. This is largely in contrast to SA2 where there is no character built for GUN. GUN is an abstract entity that takes Sonic captive without asking whether or not he committed crimes. GUN is the logo that is slapped onto every machine that fires at the player character and posters on the walls boldly claiming “JUSTICE!”. Simply put, GUN is military-police violence as the enemy.

Throughout SA2, a cast of six playable characters are fighting, racing, reassessing, and ripping through the military-police which seem to be in every corner of the world. In Capital City, a faux-San Francisco in the fictional nation of the United Fedation, they are occupying every street corner. In Knuckles’ and Rouge’s levels around the world they are occupying areas that are unnecessarily guarded and even scare the wildlife in the area to ensure total control and dominance.

Because of the antagonistic design of GUN being absolutely everywhere, the player gets to absolutely wreck the government’s shit throughout the entire game. In the third stage of the game, “Prison Lane”, Tails infiltrates GUN’s secret prison facility called “Prison Island” (Yeah, SA2 had very generic naming) to break Sonic out. Immediately starting, Tails drops into a small room and three GUN drones turn around with shining red sensors locked on. Locking onto each of these with Tails’ laser and releasing missiles creates a confetti of machinery, a celebration of the breakage that the player has inflicted.

Eggman is also present in SA2, but as a revealing actor of the United Federation’s true power. Over the course of the “dark” storyline, Eggman infiltrates GUN facilities to find Shadow who teaches him about the space weapon, ARK, that GUN was developing years ago. In classic tradition for the character, Eggman doesn’t really seem so menacing in his intentions, as much as a one-sided villain that wants to rule the world without considering the consequences of his actions. Through these actions, Eggman uses the ARK to wreak havoc, and awakens GUN’s hidden weapon research projects. This is important because to note as he didn’t develop any of the technology he uses to do any of this. All of these weapons are GUN’s weapons that Eggman is using to threaten the United Federation.

And it’s apparent that the United Federation doesn’t care. Rouge, the jewel hunting bat, is playing a double agent for UF throughout the dark storyline and even when their prisons are destroyed, the moon is blown in half, and weapons of mass destruction are threatening the nation they never ask her to intervene in Eggman’s operations. They only care that the research for the “ultimate weapon” is returned to the hands of the government.

From this introduction of GUN and the United Federation into the Sonic universe, Sonic became a character-apparatus that was critical of military-police actions. Playing through the game recently, my mind immediately connected the design of GUN’s position to our own military in America. I think about the abusive violence inflicted by the placement of our military in other land and on land that has already been stolen when I see a Gun drone in the aquatic mines during an emerald hunt. When Eggman and Tails break through the prison facilities I think about the prison riots happening around the world when prisons should be mass releasing during this pandemic. And it’s from this provocation of the shift in enemies that I think SA2 accomplishes turning Sonic into an anti-military-police character apparatus.

But this anti-military era only lasted so long.

After SA2, Sonic and his friends would continue being opposite police in future games and media. Shadow the Hedgehog begins to characterize GUN by introducing the organization’s commander as a character that wants him dead for seemingly no reason. Sonic X immediately shows the police to be power-driven jokes that can’t seem to do anything correctly. However, after the release of Sonic The Hedgehog (effectively known as Sonic ‘06), the blue blur started to run in a new direction.

‘06 could be seen as a sort of the genesis of Sega searching for how to please its entire fanbase and still want more. Yuji Naka mentioned in an interview that the game was attempting to emulate the same success seen by comic book films of the time to broaden their audience while also going back to the roots of the franchise. This meant that the team would be moving away from multi-character gameplay, and giving it grit in contrast to the cartoon cities of the Adventure-era games. Characters were slightly adjusted to more closely resemble humans as they grinded around post-apocalyptic cities and witnessed multiple of the characters die for the first time (Sonic ‘06 Spoilers!).

However, Sonic ‘06 experienced a wealth of problems during development and as a result ended up with the disapproval it has today. Whether one likes or dislikes the game, its impact on Sega kickstarted a hyperfixation on fans and the nostalgia for the old.

For the next couple of years Sonic would build on the ideas that were generated from the development cycle of ‘06. Sonic and the Secret Rings was the consequence of Sega committing to releasing a Wii game only to later discover that it wasn’t powerful enough to port ‘06. Sonic Unleashed utilized the day and night cycle that was originally designed for ‘06 to show the team’s capabilities with the Havok engine. However, Sega was not satisfied with the performance of these games on Metacritic and decided to pull all Sonic games from the shelves, including the removal of all digital copies of Sonic ‘06, to focus on new quality titles. Sonic was being rebranded.

2010 marks the year when Sega started to market Sonic as a split product. One version of 3D Sonic would appeal to a Mario audience in the mainline 3D titles. Then another version of 2D Sonic would appeal to the retro games audience in episodic downloadable titles.

While either of these 2010 titles could be analyzed for their designs individually, it is their release together that indicates a shift in Sonic’s values as well as their individual titles. As Sega began to focus more on fan’s desire for a return to form, whether that be 2D or 3D, Sonic lost the criticality that was building over the course of the Adventure-era and replaced it with a “fun” perspective. This is not to say that fun does not express implicit ideas, but it is a drastic change from what came before.

Iizuka noted in an interview with SPOnG that he felt the problem with Sonic over the years was that he became too serious.

Takashi Iizuka: I actually feel the same way as you do, in terms of Sonic getting too serious. As for Sonic 2006 and Sonic Unleashed, I was still based in Sega’s American studios at the time and wasn’t directly involved in those titles. That was actually a good time for me, because it allowed me to see the Sonic games from a similar perspective as a fan’s point of view.

What I felt was the same as you – that the franchise had become too serious, the story had become very deep, whereas I see Sonic as more of a laid-back, enjoyable and fun experience. I kind of rediscovered that through Mario & Sonic in a way, because that game was very much a ‘pick up and play’ affair that everyone can jump in and enjoy. I think that’s a better direction for the Sonic brand, and that’s why Sonic Colours has a much more fun, enjoyable kind of setting.

This split “fun” strategy seemed to satisfy Sega as the same approach would be referenced in interviews about Sonic Generations, and can be seen by the dual release of Sonic Forces and Sonic Mania. with the reception of Sonic, and to this day the 2D/3D audience split seems to be the strategy that is still being used as displayed by Sonic Forces and Sonic Mania’s dual release.

This nostalgic, dual design of fun is what brings us to the present day Sonic the Hedgehog film. After an almost 15 year gap between any police rhetoric in Sonic media (outside of the comics), a film that takes heavy inspiration from the Adventure era games would seemingly call Sonic back to anti-police form. However, Sonic changed over the course of the decade. He wasn’t running through a faux-Earth world, and instead became a character who only sees the limited view of keeping his friends protected, rather than taking direct action to resist and change structural problems.

There are three big factors that build Sonic’s film apparatus, the first being a fear of power instilled by his guardian owl Longclaw. At the beginning of the film Sonic is set up as someone who has to depend on himself alone as he watches his “Obi Wan Kenobi” figure shot down by echidnas. As Longclaw opens up a portal to Earth for Sonic she says, “Listen carefully Sonic, you have a power unlike anyone I have ever seen and that means someone will always want it. That means you need to always stay hidden.” From this , Sonic learns that he doesn’t have the capacity to resist danger with this power. All he can do is run.

The second, much larger influence on Sonic throughout the film is the second protagonist in the film, Tom, the Green Hills sheriff.

The first time we see Tom in the film he is wearing aviator glasses with a short, clean haircut, performing the masculine police fantasy while he is playing with his speed scanner gun, pretending to catch a vehicle speeding down the highway. “Not ONE car?”, he asks himself in disappointment.

The major plot point for Tom is that he is tired of being in a small rural town where no “real action” takes place, so he is moving to San Francisco to become a street cop and “save lives”. As the film progresses, Tom’s character reveals to have a warped sense of what a policeman really is. Over the radio, him and Wade joke about “gang shootouts” as if they would be an entertaining opportunity rather than a moment to help someone in need. Every movie night Tom and his wife, Maddie, watch a series of masculine police fantasy films ranging from action movies like Speed to comedies like The Naked Gun.

For Tom, being a policeman doesn’t mean helping others, but being in moments to perform interpersonal moments of masculine violence. This is most revealing when he believes raccoons are breaking into the garbage and he unboxes a tranquilizer gun that his wife says, “is meant for bears and too high a dose for raccoons”. But Tom doesn’t care, he gets to perform the act of wielding the gun as he kicks down the door of the garage yelling, “SFPD, PAWS IN THE AIR!”.

It’s important to note here that Tom does not even want to help Sonic in the film. In a moment after they have escaped from Dr.Robotnik, Sonic tells Tom that he needs to get a bag of rings to escape to safety on the mushroom planet. To this point Tom pulls over and says, “Look, this is the worst possible time for me to get myself into trouble okay,” and asks Sonic to leave. Tom doesn’t want to actually participate in any conflict that would force him to recognize that the government is a large part in causing that danger. The only reason he decides to help Sonic is because he feels guilty. “I guess it is my fault this happened to you.”

The third point of interest in the film is the main villain Dr.Robotnik. At the beginning of the film, Robotnik is introduced as a government agent that everyone hates. The commanders in the government briefing room all groan when he is suggested to be put on the mission, and when he meets the military commander in charge of the Sonic search operation he makes a joke of him. Dr. Robotnik isn’t liked by the military, and he doesn’t like them either. During this meeting, he reveals part of his character that wants to forego humanity for computer technology. “Ya know what I love about drones? They do as they are told. They don’t need time off to get DRUUUNK and put the boat in the water.”

This position of Robotnik making fun of the Army commander is an introduction that frames him not as anti-military but as an evil techno-disruptor that discards any value in humanity. From this foundation, Robotnik is built up as not a threat coming from the government, but a threat to the government and to the protagonists. This is what Robotnik proclaims as “evolution”.

As a result of Eggman being a threat to the state and Sonic specifically, there is rarely any critical lens that the United States government is viewed through. As many know Sonic as a witty rodent, none of his jokes ever focus on the military-police branches. Instead they are focused on how people look and how drones are going to deliver our mail.

Sonic as a character-apparatus once had a period where its critical focus looked to the constructed hierarchical powers of the nation. By putting Sonic into a familiar location and showing that the structures we are familiar with are more evil than the traditional villains themselves an era of criticality arose. But with a decade of games that focus on nostalgic pop-aesthetics and the recent film neglecting to be critical of the military in any way it seems that those days are gone.

Characters like Sonic will never save the world from these issues merely by representing them within their apparatus’ design. However, by considering real world issues for the characters we play to exist through, we make connections. Those connections can be critical realizations in our own head, or they can be communal ones with others that recognize shared values. Both are invaluable and powerful tools to help people recognize that they have power to resist the pain inflicted on them by the powers in place. But maybe Sonic won’t be a part of that help.

(All SA2 and Sonic film screenshots were captured by Waverly)

Waverly is a conceptual game designer and freelance writer. She is exploring alternative game frameworks at https://hotelbones.com/ and you can find her at @hotelbones.

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