Review: Hedgehog For Hire “Sonic Mania”

When there is no more room in Heaven, Sonic will walk the Earth!

OVERVIEW

Sonic the Hedgehog (not the one you’re thinking of, Sega Legal Division!), the once great video game mascot, turned has-been, turned mob boss, turned movie star, turned space cadet, turned universe destroyer, turned universe rebuilder, turned GOD has become bored with his position as lord of all creation and decides to become mortal once again…for the sole purpose of reclaiming his lost fame by murdering his and Tails’ replacements in the new game, Sonic Mania.

OUR TAKE

“Sonic for Hire” was a flash-animated comedy made by the now passed Machinima Inc. that originally ran from February 2011 to December 2013, but somehow had seven seasons and 90+ episodes in that time. It followed a then-unemployed Sonic the Hedgehog as he jumped from classic game to classic game in hopes of making rent while giving his friends (mostly from his own series but some from other games) a lot of shit. It was the kind of humor that fit right in with gaming culture at the time, where all you needed was to bring in a beloved video game character or setting and have them start swearing and throwing out sex jokes and you had an audience for life. A little company in Austin did this exact thing in 2003 and now it’s on its 17th season.

And clearly this series, despite the name change to “Hedgehog for Hire” for obvious legal reasons, gained a sizable enough fanbase if there was this much demand for a follow up over half a decade after the series first ended. Luckily, with Rooster Teeth acquiring the rights to many of the now defunct studio’s former properties, the entirety of the first seven seasons are easily accessible through their site. Plus, while watching seven full seasons to catch up might seem daunting, it actually might only take you about the length of a couple full length feature films, because virtually every episode of Sonic for Hire is only about three minutes long each. This is mainly due to the fact that the majority of the plots equate to “Sonic and friends enter a different video game from the 8 or 16-bit era, wreck everything, and then leave.”

Yet despite this, there was actually a very serialized story that formed over the course of the first run of the series. As I touched on in the Overview, this Sonic ends up pretty much all over the place in terms of occupations, including becoming a father to a child of his and Mother Brain from Metroid, taking over ruling the mob from Mario, almost starring in a movie with Tails, jacking Star Fox’s ship and then fighting him over it, time travelling until he and his friends break the universe, and then spending the last season not knowing what the hell there is left to do, so they go in search of God, who Sonic then becomes after killing the physical manifestation of a poster he’s had in his room for the whole show. Currently, Game Grumps is playing through “Sonic Adventure 2” and doing a reading of some fanfiction about Sonic screwing his way through the Smash Bros female roster and THAT seems only slightly more bonkers than this.

So, after ALL of that, after ALL the fan demand to bring it back, and after ALL the Sonic related jokes and gaffes and memes they’ve gained since 2013, where would be the best place to start in order to show this series was worth resurrecting, even after Machinima folded? Well, how about mocking Sonic Mania, the one game out of the several that have released in the past few years that everyone actually liked? The series is nothing if not ambitious, I suppose. And you’d think that, since we’re only working with 8 episodes here as opposed to their usual 13, that they’d up the runtime a bit. But no, it’s still just three minutes long. Which means that the entire season, like the previous seven, will amount to the average length of one standard episode of television. And I have no idea what the plot is based on just this episode. But there are seven more, so join me in figuring that out, won’t you?