Don’t mess with anyone’s childhood.

It’s the first rule of making a live-action version of anything that evokes nostalgia.

The response to Will Smith’s Genie in the remake of Disney’s Aladdin is a pretty good example of what can go wrong when beloved, animated characters are reimagined.

People got over Genie, but it doesn’t look like they’ll be getting over the live action version of iconic game character Sonic the Hedgehog.

Here’s The Guardian:

The three-minute trailer, featuring star Jim Carrey as Dr Eggman alongside the CGI-animated hedgehog, debuted on Tuesday, and was greeted with considerable derision.

The Guardian’s Keith Stuart described it as “a 200mph slap in the face” and said the central character “resembles a cheap knock-off Sonic toy your child might win at a fairground stand and then be terrified of”. The character’s human-style teeth drew particular flak on social media.

The movie has been in development since 2013, which doesn’t explain how this happened:

The human teeth are pretty creepy, but that’s not all that’s wrong with what you just watched.

WhatCulture summarised the six worst things in the trailer:

1. The song is terrible. Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise makes zero sense. There are dozens of themes from the game that would have worked.
2. Everything in the trailer feels like it’s for a film made in the early 2000s. We’re better than that now.
3. Jim Carrey is back playing the same weird caricature that made him famous, then went away because the times changed. He just isn’t funny.
4. What is up with the effects? Seriously. What happened?
5. Sonic’s big money shot moment at the end of the trailer is just a much more poorly-executed version of the Quicksilver scenes from the latest batch of X-Men films.
6. Finally – and this is a big one – Sonic looks like a deformed cat-badger.

Director Jeff Fowler has announced that due to the backlash, “changes” will be made:

It’s not often that something is so poorly received that it has to be completely reworked.

As a fan of the game, though, I agree. I don’t know what that blue thing is, but it isn’t the Sonic I know and love.

[source:guardian&whatculture]