“Does the Internet really need another “Sonic the Hedgehog” website?” I ask myself now. Over the course of nearly twenty years, over fifty games, and myriad of multi-media merchandise, crossovers, and spin-offs, the “Sonic the Hedgehog” franchise has inspired a lot of inane internet babble. So, is more necessary? You could fill several very large, spelling error riddled tomes with all the message board chatter concerning the little blue hedgehog. Is the internet really big enough for two twenty something man-children obsessed with Sonic? Isn’t it enough that I all ready have one blog I ignore?
Yes. Yes, it is. While many have gone where I am about to go before, few have done it well. That’s the mission statement here at “Hedgehogs Can’t Swim.” To be nerdy about Sonic in a way that’s at least halfway coherent, occasionally intelligent, and maybe clever or insightful every once in a while. Inspired by William Tsutsui’s “Godzilla on My Mind” and Rob Kelly’s “Aquaman Shrine,” both literate, thoughtful, sincere fan boy homages to two other, perhaps equally maligned pop culture icons, I set out to blaze my own path in the world of nerd brain housekeeping.
But let’s go back to the beginning, shall we?
I am a “Sonic the Hedgehog” nerd. Obviously. I’ve been since I was three years old and, like a cartoon hedgehog racing towards a goal post, I’ve never stopped. Despite what you may have heard, it was never cool and it was certainly never "way past cool." I was there before the internet subcultures adopted the franchise to their own seedy uses. I was there before the games became awful, before the fan base became unpleasable, before video gaming itself became a massive pillar of pop culture. Before all of that, I was a “Sonic the Hedgehog” nerd.
Honestly, my fandom for the furry blue one goes back so far, I don’t even remember how it started. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t a Sonic fan. My first vivid memory of him involves catching the 1993 ABC Saturday Morning Preview the Friday night it premiered.
I remember the kids from “Step By Step” sitting down to watch an episode of SatAM and being glued to my seat. It’s tempting to say my mania for everything Sonic started with SatAM. It certainly intensified my growing fandom, but it wasn’t the beginning. Why would I be so excited for a “Sonic” cartoon unless I was all ready a fan? When I asked my mother about this, about why, when, and how I first became a fan, she simply said, “You just always liked that fast, little blue, cool guy.” That may be true, but it’s not exactly insightful.
It wasn’t the games that hooked me first. I grew up in a part of the country that has been in an economic freefall for the last fifty years. As a child, my mother worked very hard to make sure my sister and I never went without anything we needed. But money was tight, at least in the beginning, and we often went without things we wanted. Video gaming consoles were, and still are, an expensive hobby that we simply couldn’t afford. I didn’t get a Sega Genesis and my first Sonic game until 1996, when that generation of console gaming was well on its way out. Yes, I played the games and experienced the Blast Processing first hand at friend’s houses, but, to tell the truth, I wasn’t, nor have I ever been, particularly good at video games. I fail pretty hard in that department.
So the How and When of my fandom’s genesis (Har.) remains a mystery, lost in the hazy mist of childhood days long since past. But what about the why? Why Sonic? Why not Mario, an even bigger video game icon whose current games are certainly better and arguably always have been? We had a Nintendo Entertainment System and a copy of “Super Mario Bros. 3” long before I ever got my sweaty little hands on a Genesis controller. Why not Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Ranges, Spider-Man, comic books, anime, Universal Monster movies, action figures, Ghostbusters, Highlander, Transformers, Star Trek, or any number of other things I enjoy as a child? Why does Sonic get the blog and everything else I’ve loved get left to other people to chronicle and obsess over?
Was it the contempt for authority and ecological subtext that appealed to me? The bright colors, fast graphics, and intentionally simple character designs? Did I enjoy being a part of a quickly growing, now sprawling, fictional universe? Was it just me getting swept up in the kid friendly zeitgeist of the moment? Probably all of those things. But why am I still a fan? Why do I still play the games, read the comics, and spend way more time then any adult male should ever spend thinking about these things? Am I just being nostalgic for simpler childhood days? Does my lack of legitimate life experiences force me to go over again and again the pop culture debris I’ve consumed over the course of twenty-two years? Am I just a really massive Aspie nerd who relates to a cartoon animal way more then he does to other people?
Yes, yes, and probably, a little bit, yes. However I got here, I’m here to stay, at least for a while.
My name is Zack, this is “Hedgehogs Can’t Swim,” and I’m here to talk about goddamn Sonic the Hedgehog.