Sonic the Hedgehog, the main character in a recently unveiled CGI trailer, has become a central point in Felix Kjellberg’s monologue in the latest issue of his Pew News, racking up 300,000 views in the first 10 minutes.
In the 14-minute clip, PewDiePie sits in his landmark orange and black animalistic-patterned armchair matching his “human” headphones, as one of the fans pointed out, pondering on the versions of the videogame character that the public has come up with, among otherwise largely YouTube-related topics. He brought into the spotlight the extraordinarily human-like features of Sonic the Hedgehog, thereby echoing the ubiquitous online criticism.
Earlier, the Swedish gamer and vlogger put a bid on Ebay offering his own vision of what the blue creature should look like, based merely on his memory about the character, and shared a link to his reimagined artwork of the cartoon character tweeting:
“It pains me to sell this that I’ve hold [sic] on to for so long, but money is tight”.
The drawing attracted an ostentatiously high bid equal to over US $13 million in the first 48 hours, with six more bidding days still ahead.
The Sega-released trailer for the Sonic movie, due to hit screens on 7 November, met a barrage of critical remarks on social media as soon as it saw the light of day. In response, director Jeff Fowler even took to Twitter to address the backlash, informing the public that he was fully aware of the critical remarks about the character design, in particular with regard to Sonic’s creepily human-like physique.
“The message is loud and clear’, Jeff tweeted. ‘You aren’t happy with the design & you want changes. It’s going to happen”, he further stated, adding:
“Everyone at Paramount & Sega are fully committed to making this character the BEST he can be… #sonicmovie #gottafixfast”.