Well, he’s finally done it.
Ugly Sonic has finally made his way into an official, finished movie.
The original version of movie Sonic gets a hilarious and surprisingly long scene within
Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers, which is now streaming on Disney+.
Without going into spoilers, there’s a good minute of Ugly Sonic, and it is well worth
watching if you’re a Sonic fan, or just a fan of ugly animation.
So the big question is: how on Earth did Disney get permission to put Ugly Sonic in this film?
The Sonic film rights are tied up with Paramount, and while Sega has allowed Sonic to appear
in Disney films before, they are normally very protective of how he’s portrayed.
For example, while Sega allowed Sonic to appear in Wreck-it-Ralph, the company monitored his
cameo very closely.
Director Rich Moore said: “The games companies were very specific…We
had a scene where we wanted the rings to come out of Sonic, and SEGA said the only way that
happens is if he falls over, and we didn’t have him fall over in the scene, so we actually
went back and re-animated it.”
So given that Sega is so careful with Sonic’s movie appearance…how did they allow an extended
cameo that actually mocks the hugely unpopular Ugly Sonic design?
When asked about the Sonic cameo in the movie, Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers director said:
“It certainly was a great moment for me, yes!”
Without wanting to spoil cameos from the film, he explained in another interview:
“From the get go, I kept talking in the meetings with Disney people, about how important
it was to me to have third party IP.
I remember with Roger Rabbit, which is obviously the gold standard for this kind of movie,
how amazing that was to all of us, to see those different characters from different
animation worlds together finally – Daffy and Donald and everything.
And if this was going to be a love letter to animation, a celebration of animation,
within our modest budget compared to, say, Disney animated movies or Pixar movies, within
that, then it has to be all animation, it can’t just be Disney animation.
“And so, with that as our goal, I would give my speeches to the legal team as well,
trying to sell them on it, and to be fair, they embraced the challenge, and honestly,
the Disney legal team is owed a huge amount of gratitude from me, when it wasn’t easy.”
From the sounds of it, getting approval for many of these cameos was not an easy process.
The rights for a lot of characters, such as Sonic, are often split between multiple different
companies, and everybody has to sign off to approve the use of the character in the film.
Schaffer said: “Either they get me back on to pitch to
those people and promise we’re not making fun of it, showing them the context and what
the movie is, but it’s a big process to lock some of that stuff down.
There were a lot of letters being written by me directly to creators of certain things
to try and talk them into it.”
Apparently, some studios simply refused to let their characters be used if they were
afraid that the film would make fun of their character.
Schaffer has not outright confirmed that he wanted Jar Jar Binks in the film, but he has
hinted that an infamous animated Star Wars character could not be included because Lucasfilm
would not give permission for their inclusion.
Nevertheless, Schaffer says that he appreciated the challenge of sometimes picking more obscure
characters when the first choice wasn’t approved, likening it to making the movie
Jaws by filming creatively around an imperfect working environment.
Plus, he said, he really wanted to embrace hybrid live-action/CGI filmmaking.
He said: “It was part of the exciting thing about
doing the movie.
Doing the live-action hybrid is really cool, but not necessarily new.
Roger Rabbit is the gold standard and then before that you had Mary Poppins and, even
now, there’s Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu.
Even beyond that, every Avengers and Marvel movie is an example of that.”
More details on the Ugly Sonic deal will no doubt be revealed in time, but for now, we
do know one thing.
Some studios made things very easy for Disney in putting this film together, and were happy
to let the creators poke plenty of fun at them.
Said Schaffer: “There were a lot of people, and lawyers
and whoever, where we would ask for something like My Little Pony, and it just came back
to me through the lawyers and they were like, ‘Yeah, they’re down, it’s cool’, and
it was that easy (for me)!”
Certainly both Paramount and Sega have shown a lot of grace in allowing such a cheeky cameo,
and the result is that everyone’s favourite ugly video game character has finally achieved
his dream of appearing in a feature film.
The moral of the story?
Everyone deserves a chance to shine.