Hello Internet. Welcome to Film Theory,
the show that's really excited to show you my new Sonic O.C.
Get out of there. Come on, come on. Get out of there. Get out of there. You trash pandas.
You know loyal theorists, It's been a minute since I've gotten to talk
about my favorite blue, weirdly humanoid hedgehog.
Oh, you want me to go fast? Ugly Sonic goes slow.
No. Nope, nope. Not that one. Some things are best left forgotten forever.
Nope. I'm talking about the other Sonic. The cute
Sonic. The Sonic that's one part meme, one part recycled jokes.
But I am not watching Snow Dogs again. That movie is the wooorst.
Thank you so much for hiring Mona Lisa,
that means so much to me. Even though, honestly, she's the woooorst.
Seee, it's not copying your old material if the kids watching never saw the original stuff. John
Ralphio is having himself some big brain time right there. Anyway, with Sonic Frontier is
getting itself some positive reviews and a new Sonic TV show coming out this December.
Really? A TV show? you? Yeah. Is that so difficult to believe?
Now seemed like the perfect time to revisit the old blue blur. Suck on that Game Theory,
Sonic is ours now. And whether it's in games, movies, comics or TV shows,
one core part of Sonic's lore is his insatiable love of chili dogs.
In fact, it comes up a lot with Sonic.
More than you'd think really. Like, a lot. A lot.
That's character development, right, guys? That's how you make a well-rounded character? You give
them a quirky trait, and then you just repeat it a whole bunch of times over and over again?
That's what I think. *SLURPS DIET COKE*
Let's roll out Music Man!
Anyway, the dude is always eating, but when you think about it,
it makes sense. Any character that's gotta go fast is going to need a constant influx
of calories to keep his body moving. That's just the trope of super powerful characters
across all media types. Goku's always eating everything that's put in front of him. The
Flash is always munching on something, going so far as to call himself a black hole of snacks.
Exercise requires energy. Otherwise, you know you're going to be getting hangry after leg
day. And if there's one thing that Sonic doesn't do, it's skip leg day. Don't be fooled by the
noodle knees. To move the miles he's running those licorice legs have got to be a mountain of muscle.
So today I want to know how many chili dogs does it take to power a Sonic the Hedgehog?
What absurd number of chili coated cheese slathered pork sausage not-sandwiches would
our favorite anthropomorphic blue hedgehog have to consume to run the insane distances
and speeds we see him going in the new sonic movies? That's right, loyal Theorists, today
is a classic old school science episode. Fire up the grills because Sanic’s hungry.
So before we begin to imagine the small countries' worth of very unhappy pigs we’ll be needing
to feed Mr. The Hedgehog. Let's actually identify what we need to know here. First,
we need to know how fast Sonk is moving in these films. Using this, we can then figure out how
many calories he's burning when he's running. Then we find out how many calories are in the
sorts of chili dogs that Sonk eats. And finally, with some simple math, we calculate how many of
those dogs he needs to consume. To kick things off, we're going to actually use this clip from
the beginning of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, where Sonic thwarts the robbery of an armored truck.
We chose this one specifically because it gives us a look at both Sonic snacking on a chili dog,
as well as a prolonged sequence where he's running. To summarize,
he's able to head down to the street from the top of a building and then run what looks to
be three city blocks to catch up with an armored truck, all in exactly 9 seconds.
So how fast is Sonic moving here? Well, there are plenty of ways to figure this out. First,
let's try to pinpoint exactly where Sonic is to get an idea of how much ground he's covering.
Thankfully, the movie makes it super easy for us. Seattle. It doesn't get more obvious than that.
According to theurbanist.org, Seattle city blocks are roughly 240 feet long, or about 73.2 meters.
So by running three city blocks, Sonic has covered a total distance of 720 feet or 220 meters.
It is worth noting that he zigzags a bit to weave in and out of traffic,
which would add a couple of extra feet here and there. But for simplicity's sake (and because
it's not going to affect our final conclusion) we're just going to use that 720 foot figure.
So simple math here, Rate equals distance divided by time. If Sonic ran 720 feet in 9 seconds,
that translates to a speed of about 54.5 miles per
hour or 87.8 kilometers per hour. Next up, we're going to need Sonic's weight.
Now, the weight of fictional characters is always a bit tricky on these channels,
but fortunately Sega has historically been very public with this information. Back in 2005,
Sega of Japan released the Sonic Channel,
an official website dedicated to updates about the characters, games, comics, TV shows…
You can download wallpapers. There are even some simple browser games mixed in there. Basically,
this thing was a fan wiki before fan wikis existed, and on that old Sonic Channel website,
Sega listed Sonic's canonical weight as 77 pounds or 35 kilograms.
Done and done, right? Wrong! It is never that easy when you work out these channels.
never You see,
across the series there are many different versions of Sonic,
all with different heights and weights. The game Sonic Generations explicitly shows us
that just because we're always dealing with the same character, Sonic is not always the same.
"I can't believe there's two of me!"
Sometimes they talk, sometimes not, sometimes they're tall,
sometimes not. The stats on the Sonic Channel website appear to be referring
specifically to the Sonic from the Adventure Games and spinoffs. So if we want to be as
accurate as possible, we should aim for data from the movie Sonic specifically.
Thankfully, we can find the exact data we need thanks to capitalism. You see,
in the lead up to the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 movie release,
Sonic did a press tour where he was interviewed by the kids YouTube channel: CKN
Hi, I'm Kevin from CKN News.
Today we're going to have an exclusive interview with Sonic.
Eat Your Heart Out, Phil DeFranco. I don't see you landing those guests. Anyway,
near the end of the video, Sonic drops this truth bomb.
I weight 62 pounds, and it is very rude of you to ask.
I didn't ask you that question, Sonic.
But I did. Thank you, Sonic. I know it might be rude to ask for someone's weight,
but being slightly rude is worth it for the science.
So that's about as accurate as you can possibly get coming directly from the sorces mouth,
which means that we can take all of this information and plug it into our calorie
burning calculator. 62 pounds running 720 feet in 9 seconds. Drum roll, please. In this scene,
Sonic has burned himself a whopping two calories.
Hold on. What? t…two? two, two calories. I basically burn the same amount sitting
on the couch waiting for a Sonic 2006 loading screen. Considering an average
chili cheese dog has roughly 412 calories, that means that this bite that sonic takes
right here would be more than enough to cover his sprint down the street.
That's no good.
Now. While the result might initially be surprising. When you actually think about
what we just calculated. It makes a lot of sense. Sonic weighs 60 pounds, not very heavy,
and we only calculated the amount of calories he's burning in 9 seconds of intense exercise.
Sure, he was sprinting real hard in those 9 seconds, but it was only 9 seconds for
the lightweight 60 pound hedgehog. As a result, the caloric burn for sonic is ridiculously low
here. So, Is that it then? Is the big twist here that Sonic only needs like eight chili
dogs to power all his antics throughout the entirety of the film franchise? Absolutely
not. This is a combination Film Game and Food theory all wrapped up into one. You can't just
leave it at that. We need a scene where he's running faster and running longer. I mean,
if we go back and watch this whole Seattle street scene again, it's clear that Sonic
isn't running as fast as he can. This is fun for him. It's not urgent. We've seen what happens
when Sonic loses control and uses more of his power. By running full speed he likely would
have shut down Seattle's power grid with the electromagnetic pulses he's able to generate.
So I went back to pick a better moment from the movies. Honestly, there are a ton of different
scenes here that we could choose from to make these sorts of calculations. I mean,
in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Sonic basically crosses an ocean's worth of water.
And at the end of Sonic the Hedgehog 1, he moves so fast that from his perspective,
bullets and missiles are basically frozen in midair. That said, getting hard numbers
from those scenes is difficult. We don't get an idea of how far Sonic is moving out into
the water. Or a true sense of his speed since everything has slowed to a crawl. But there are
scenes that give us all the information we need on a silver platter. In fact,
in a previous Film Theory, we took a look at this scene from the first Sonic the Hedgehog,
where Sonic runs 550 miles or 885 kilometers to the Pacific Ocean and back.
He was able to do this in just 4 seconds, meaning
that his speed is 275 miles per second or 442 kilometers per second. Just to
emphasize how fast this is in numbers that will probably have more meaning to you.
That's an astronomical 990,000 miles per hour or 1.593 million kilometers per hour. So going back
to our handy dandy online calculator here, we plug these numbers in. And with that,
we find that Sonic has burned a grand total of, second drum roll, please.
Oh? Apparently, during this incredible feat of strength,
speed and stamina, Sonic would have burned just one calorie.
aaaaahhh Nope. That definitely can't be right. What I think might be happening
is that Sonic is moving at such insane speeds and traveling such impressive
distances that the website is calculating that he's essentially running a zero minute mile.
It is literally rounding to zero and therefore giving us that one calorie number. It’s kind of
like when you divide by zero on your TI-83 and it breaks the universe. So all righty
boys and girls, roll up their sleeves because we're doing this the hard way.
To manually calculate how many calories Sonic is burning in this scene we're going to have to
figure out his metabolic equivalent of task; or his MET. So to understand what this is,
let's first talk about metabolisms. Your metabolism is a set of life sustaining
chemical reactions that convert food into energy usable by your body.
Basically, it takes the chili dogs that you're stuffing in your face and rips
the calories out to charge up your cells. Different people have different metabolisms,
meaning that they burn calories at different rates. Now, this is a massive oversimplification
of some really complex biology, but some bodies are really good at taking those
calories from chili dogs and burning them while you exercise, meaning that they can
more easily keep weight off. While others tend to hold on to those calories longer,
meaning that it's easier for them to gain weight and hold onto it. As such, one way to manually
calculate how many calories a body burns is to figure out the metabolic equivalent of task:
1 MET is equal to one calorie burned per kilogram of body weight per hour of exercise.
Now, there are tons of ways to calculate one MET, as you see on the screen before you. You
know what? I'm just going to let it sit up on screen instead of saying all that out loud.
That’s a lot of numbers and letters that you don't care about. So, while this looks like a
super long or complex formula, we actually have everything we need to plug in numbers
to get our answer here. Specifically for that last part of the formula. For this,
1.162 times the watts over kilograms, we already have Sonic's weight in kilograms.
Since he weighs 62 pounds, that's the equivalent of 28.1 kilograms. And figuring out the wattage he
generates with the speed runs is really easy. The formula for this is this gobbledygook.
Watts equals 115.007, plus the quantity -15.8397 times speed plus another quantity;
1.15006 times speed, times speed. I don't know how people figured this out,
but there it is. It's got a lot of numbers. I assume they're correct.
So plugging in that 990,000 miles per hour or 1.593 million kilometers per hour figure,
we find out that Sonic's run to the Pacific produces 1,127,158,124,812.01 watts of power.
Over a trillion watts! Okay…wow. All right, let's take this absurd
number and plug it into our MET formula, shall we? Giving us 1.162 times these 1.127 trillion watts,
all divided by 28.1 kilograms. It's not going to do anything.
Running this through our magic number machine, otherwise known as a basic calculator app,
that tells us that one MET for Sonic in the movie is 40,112,338,783.3. And remember that's
talking about how many calories sonic burns per kilogram of his body weight per hour of exercise.
How are you not dead?
I have no idea!
According to Smithsonian Magazine, an average human body contains just 125,822 calories.
That means in a single hour of exercise, Sonic would be burning through over 318,000
human beings worth of calories. That is one heck of a pilates class.
But even with those crazy insane numbers, we're not done with all
the mathy calculations yet. Now we can use this information to figure out how
many calories Sonic burned during the 4 second run to the Pacific Ocean and back.
If Sonic burns those 40 billion calories per one kilogram of body weight per one hour of exercise,
we first need to multiply those calories by Sonic's 28.1 kilogram weight, getting us
one trillion, one hundred twenty-seven billion, one hundred fifty-eight million, one hundred thousand
calories burned per hour. Now, we can take this number divided
by 60 to get calories burned per minute, divided by 60 again to get calories burned
per second and then multiply by 4, which gets us, one final drum roll,
please. I promise you. 1,252,397,888.8.9 calories burned in 4 seconds in order to run
to the Pacific Ocean and back. With this, finally, we can work out exactly how many
chili dogs Sonic would need to eat to power even just 4 seconds of him running. Again,
we know an average chili cheese dog has 412 calories, meaning that Sonic would need to
eat 2,989,016.4. You know what? Let's just go ahead and round that one. Up to 2,989,017
chili cheese dogs because, you know, we know Sonic wouldn't dare waste food with leftovers.
So, what were you expecting? A dirty little hedgehog eating berries and struggling to survive?
Well, not exactly Sonic, but dang, I was not expecting almost 3 million chili dogs for just
4 seconds of running. On the whole, every American combined eats like 20 billion hot dogs in a year,
and Sonic would need to eat that many chili dogs if he was expecting to run for like, one 8-hour
work day. You know what? Maybe all the government agents and scientists in these movies are right.
Sonic is dangerous to our supply of Oscar Mayer wieners. Don't even ask how much this would cost.
Chili dogs!? Forget it!
Do you know how much chili dogs cost? Money don't grow on trees you know!
But hey! We actually, you talk about Sonic a lot over here on Film Theory. I mean,
he's basically a movie character now anyway. So if you want more content this minute,
you can check out our video talking about how ugly Sonic was actually the best sonic. Or
if you want something a bit different, you can check out our video explaining why the
Sonic Movie's road trip is just a big old waste of our time. It doesn't matter that
it was good. The science don't care about your quality. And as always, my friends,
until the next time, remember, it's all just a theory, A FILM THEORY! aaaaaand cut.