Sonic Movie 1: The Gear Review Preface

 If movies (well on dvd at least) count as items, what took the SonicGear review so long for Sonic Movie 1? 

The easy answer is I hated it and resisted watching it at all up until this point.
But, finally netflixed the thing and....it's kinda as bad as I had anticipated. However, in order to do it, I pretended it was "Baby Gremlin vs. Evil Jim Carrey" and then, if you don't view it as Sonic, it's a....very bog standard 80s like movie that is serviceable enough. How this thing managed to appear after 2010 when it belonged in the 1980s, that I do not know, however because it exists it gets looked at. Skip to "review area" in the next post to get right to it or...read the preface:

First off: Was it better than the first Sonic movie that the ancient plot leaked for in the 90s? Yes. (That's on SonicGear, as it is very obscure, if you're curious about what it was) But watching somebody else play the games poorly would have been better than that, so-low bar.

Set up:
The setup for the movie's release was pretty darn good. It was the literal last movie out before the pandemic really hit the world. There weren't any other kids' movies out at the time either, so competition was low. They were able to throw it on streaming and clean up more cash that way too, so it wasn't a persecuted release in any way. The studio was pretty happy with it.

It made 319 million dollars.
Mario 1 made 1.34 BILLION dollars.
Numbers don't lie. I guess "setting the movie in the characters' world" really would have been such a big mistake...................hmmm. Lesson...not learned. Clearly nobody wanted to see Mario in Mario World. Oh the poor thing.../s

To start with, it has "mark of the grownups" all over it who, when getting some "babies franchise" always put in stupid things that they think little kids want to see instead of focusing on making a good movie that appeals to anyone. They also love to repeat tropes because they're easy shortcuts so that they can slack off. They clearly had no grasp on what Sonic is supposed to be about and had no idea or didn't even read a single word about who the character is. They looked at a picture and said "Funny blue animal" and left it at that. Nothing deeper. And gee, it sure is a shame that in the Sonic franchise there are only 2 characters: Sonic & Eggman and there are literally no other characters than that to work with. Such a shame......hmmmmmm.

Aside:
Everyone's idea of Sonic is a little different. As many fans of him that there are, there are as many different perceptions of him. This is natural and normal for someone really popular like that. The fandom is really finding that out with Sonic Prime, as he's characterized differently there than he is the games, the movie, Sonic X, and etc. Each 'version' of him where he appears is slightly different too, and that also feeds into the wide variety of different headcannons everybody has for him.
Example:
Person A really likes the 'cool but attitude' aspect and there he's a more fiery personality
Person B really likes the 'friend of nature and helping animals' aspect, and there he's more level-headed

However, the movie makers didn't have anyone's (any fan, developer or etc) idea of what Sonic was other than "funny blue animal get money". That was obvious rrrright away with the hideous demon-thing that the entire planet wailed on so hard the producers spent squillions of dollars changing the CG to get rid of it. (NO the 'conspiracy' wasn't that they made him awful on purpose to garner free media attention--that was proven false by the toys=toys are made many months in advance because production takes huge amounts of time, and striking molds takes large amounts of money, and demon toys had to be scrapped after thousands were made/molds were struck etc. somebody was out WAY more money with this than 'possible free media attention' would EVER have made up for. The bad design was never 'on purpose for attention')

So with that, right away, you KNOW that they had no idea who Sonic is, no idea what he was about, and they weren't going to respect ANYthing with regards to him if they thought demon was ok. THAT is why I refused to see it or support it for so long. You could know that the respect wasn't there. That they changed the look of him in the end after backlash doesn't matter (to their idea) because the plot and characterization was already in place and was never changed.
This was also obvious because they weren't telling a Sonic story in his world, they were telling a Human story on Earth because they didn't know what to do with him due to all their lack of care or attention. The going-in theory was that "Sonic is not popular enough to have a real theatrical movie about him, nobody would go to see that, we need humans to get people to go see it, after all, Transformers movies barely have transformers in them, most of it is about the human drama, and those are great!" To bring in adults AND their kids, we need plenty of humans and Earth setting with a funny animal. 

End of the preface- Next post will be the actual review now that this is out of the way / the groundwork for understanding how/why the movie goes etc.

Totally Topical Post: Several Topics

 A bunch of random stuff for this blog post so let's get started with the topics:

What happened to Wow Pods?
The short answer seems to be 'they were not quality'. The longer one is still unknown. You'll remember the WOWpods from Amazon (most notably) they were like a hexagon shaped mini shadowbox 'shelf' with a figure pre-installed and they lit up and they could fit together.
As with many decor companies or etc. that do this sort of thing, they had lots of franchises including classic and modern Sonic to work with. So you could mix n' match characters from multiple games by stacking/fitting the hexagons and have a cool wall piece. But then they vanished from sales.
Importantly- they vanished in a hail of terrible reviews because apparently the lighting feature would randomly quit and even more importantly they'd been shipping the pods out WITHOUT the figure! The whole point was the Sonic (or whoever else) display figure in there and having a stupid hexagon arrive with nothing in it, or a broken thing like waaaay too often seems to have ended these. 

Sonic n' Friends
Or whatever the new cute mini whatever style is going to spin off. What's interesting about this is it was created by whoever worked on those Sonic Boom Emoji plushes. Those things were the first 'look' merchandise that was that way. Of course Boom was a big fail, but that 'n-friends' style or emoji or whatever they're going to call it did stick around, it's in use today for 'chibi plush' that are on shelves now (But that are not Boom) and now Sega CG'd it into this thing then announced it on Twitter. (It's always going to be called twitter because the letter x is too vague) 
Good idea?
Unknown. The designs are cute and Sonic-like enough, it seems like it might be a simple thing for babies or something? The cutie emoji plush seemed to have an ok reception as long as they weren't boomstyle. If this ends up having merch (likely) it'll probably get corralled off into its own part of Gear. And on that note...

Prime Gear is coming-
The title card is made, and it's going to end up like Movie & Boom. The style and characters are all different enough that it too needs cordoning off from the rest of everything. The likely categories it'll start with are the 5 inch and 3 inch toys. It depends on how much merch comes of it how many categories it'll end up with.
Prime controversy- It's greatest asset/idea is also what's causing fights: that it's a bunch of different dimensions where anything's possible (excellent idea) but declaring "everything is cannon now" was....probably not the best idea. The asset was to be able to 'dismiss' things that didn't go well about the show (fan flops, scrappy doos, dead end ideas) because "that was just that other dimension" and then simply never go back there or refer to it. It allowed easy mistake erasure, and easy to bring back cool stuff/things that are a hit without creating plot holes or problems. But the "its all cannon" damps that down so people are fighting.

Hint of Heroes:
Their new twitter posting seemed to suggest they might remake Sonic Heroes, which would probably be pretty cool so long as it didn't take the place of something new. 

What is a rash?
These so called "rash guards"...what the heck rash are they guarding against? Is the word sunburn now somehow taboo or doesn't sell products? This I super do not get, but every company just keeps bringing up the word 'rash' with their swimwear. The only thing that's rash is not wearing sunblock. It's the sun. The sun is the problem people! It burns you!

Pop Shadows-
They're clearly putting good thought (glow gimmick) and effort (stands/different poses) it's just too bad the design of those blank eyed little goblins is so....not.

Item(s) of the week-
Phenom sports stuff. Isn't this an interesting bunch! The same design is essentially applied to everything, but it's a good and tidy one. The S&K theme looks good on all their items, and everything seems to be quality. The 'put the gloves together to reveal' is also a clever idea. It appears some of the stuff has already sold out.

Good to see more out of PowerA again because they sell to EU and US and their stuff is generally pretty nicely designed. 

SDCC-
Yes the popup cafe will get covered soon, the photos are in, but since there was lots it got pushed back. It seems the best showing there was apparently Lego because they had like maximum Sonic stuff. Their sets must be doing really well.
Hopefully figpin and moose will decide to re-release (with alteration like glitter or something so the people who bought there don't feel bad) their pin & goo figure to the regular buyers because you know nobody's giving up that Eggman pin they got there so like...pin collectors won't be able to complete their figpin Sonic pins if that doesn't happen.

Next week:
It'll be an update with more stuff than usual (again) to help catch it up. For reasons unknown Walmart seems to really be turning up the Sonic stuff recently. First Target, then them--nobody's complaining, more to go around!