Around the World in 80 Seconds

Around the World in 80 Seconds

Original Release Date: March 31st, 2020

This may come as no surprise to most of you but I am, in addition to everything else I collect, a big fan of physical media for movies and television. Part of this is probably simply inertia. I grew up during a time when owning a film on VHS and, a little later, DVD was the only guaranteed way to watch something whenever you wanted to. Similarly, I love the idea of having a library of books, comics, movies, and albums that I can share with people whenever I want. Makes me feel like an archivist of obscure knowledge or some shit. Truthfully, I have always regarded the rise of streaming services with some skepticism. At least as a replacement for a personal collection or a video store. The idea that something can disappear from a service at any time seems like a bad deal to me. As does the Amazon Prime model of being charged a rental price every time you want to see something. I guess my dad being a paranoid anti-goverment nut job type ingrained in me a healthy distrust of corporations. The idea of Netflix CEOs or whatever deciding what I need to watch for me, limiting my choices to whatever they currently have the rights to, makes me uncomfortable. I thought this was America, where I could watch a weird Crispin Glover movie made in Utah in the early nineties whenever I wanted, whether it's on Prime or not! You can have my DVD of Lucio Fulci's "Perversion Story" when you pry it from my cold, dead hands! 

The decline of the physical media industry – pushed almost exclusively by Silicon Valley capitalist douche-bros favoring streaming and not by actual customer demand – means we are loosing parts of our history. Not only movies and shows that have slipped through the streaming cracks. One of the benefits of DVD over VHS was the ability to pack it full of all sorts of extra content. Commentaries from filmmakers and actors, behind-the-scenes documentaries, retrospective interviews, galleries of production artwork or posters, collection of trailers and TV spots: All of these features added context to the film, making it more of a piece of art that exists in a specific time and place, giving insight into how and why it was made the way it was, and not merely a capitalistic product to be consumed and discarded. DVDs and Blu-Rays being forced into extinction means we are losing out on knowledge about why motion pictures matter as an art form. 

Am I rambling? I'm rambling, aren't I? My point is... I really miss when DVDs were a film school lesson in a box and not simply a physical record of the movie. I'll always be glad to have something on disc, over it existing on a nebulous server some where, but bonus content and special features were really, really fun. Artistically designed menus and hidden clips showed that someone enjoyed themselves assembling this package for you. That a human being left their fingerprint on this, that it was a gift from one soul to another. During the peak of the DVD boom, studios would slip exclusive content onto disc as an extra incentive to buy it. This usually took the form of behind-the-scenes media but, occasionally, it meant something like a clip from a related program, a short film made previously by the director, or a whole ass extra movie sometimes. Disney and Pixar pushed the idea of an animated short film, made strictly for the home video release, as a standard bonus for big budget cartoons. That's been one of the harder special feature traditions to kill off, I suppose because even numbers-obsessed Wall Street types recognize such extensions as a way to keep a "brand" alive in consumers' brains. 

The bonus, exclusive short film was such a popular idea for Disney that many other animation studios followed their lead. DreamWorks started to do it too. Now, it's not uncommon to see any notable animated family film including a similar bonus on its physical release. Which brings us to the topic of today's meandering review: When 2020's "Sonic the Hedgehog" movie was released in disc, it came packaged with a short, fully animated film entitled "Around the World in 80 Seconds." (Sometimes listed as "Sonic the Hedgehog – Around the World in 80 Secs," I guess to remove any confusion about what this is.) The two minute long short is presented as an entry from Movie-Verse Sonic's personal diary, discussing his trip around the world and sightseeing at various globally recognizable attractions, all within the span of a commercial break. On account of being done like marker doodles in the margins of a notebook, "Around the World in 80 Seconds" is also the sole traditionally animated entry into the Sonic Cinematic Universe, at least as of this writing. 

On a narrative level, "Around the World in 80 Seconds" does not present us with much to talk about. In the typically quippy manner that we've come to expect from Ben Schwartz' Sonic, he narrates traveling across the globe and stopping at a handful of notable sights. He breezes through L.A., New York, London, Paris, and Sydney. (Without stopping to sing a song, I'm afraid to say.) He zips around the Arches National Park, Chichén Itzá, the Great Pyramids, and gives momentary shout-outs to whole countries like India and Japan. What this short does provide us with, however, is a little more insight into this version of Sonic's mind. Schwartz' Sonic is obsessed with pop culture, having grown up an orphan on Earth and absorbed knowledge of the wider world through movies, TV, and comics. This is why he visits parts of the globe that are highly publicized in the media. He considers Broadway a much bigger attraction than the Louvre or the rain forest of Cameroon because lots more movies have been made about stage plays than museums or jungles. When running around Egypt, he references the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian," another indicator of how pop culture has shaped this Sonic's vision of the world much more than actual history. 

And as a nerd fixated on this kind of shit, I can relate to that. I'll be lying if, when I travelled to Manhattan, "King Kong" wasn't one of the main reasons I went to see the Empire State Building. Honestly, we are lucky that Sonic visits Japan in this short without referencing "Godzilla" or his favorite anime. (Which begs the question... What is this version of Sonic's favorite anime? He has to have one!) Instead, we simply get a silly joke about cherry blossoms and a slip second homage to some of the classic Sega game art. As someone who enjoys Schwartz' take on Sonic, as a lonely kid who fills the hole in his heart with nonsense, I did enjoy these little insights into his psyche. Most of them are merely excuses for simple bits of world play but Schwartz delivers each one with a proper amount of enthusiasm. He's a pro and his performances as Sonic, even in tossed-off pieces of supplementary material such as this, is always worthwhile. 

As I mentioned earlier – at least until Paramount gets a good idea and realizes what fans really want – this two minute short remains the only fully animated piece of media connected to the live action movies. In order to replicate the look of doodles made in a composition notebook, the animation is pretty limited. It's strictly black and white, with a simple, sketchy quality to the artwork. What's funny about this approach is it gives us a Movie-Verse Sonic who looks a lot like Classic Sega Sonic. This provides the short with some real novelty, especially when it results in Sonic interacting with landmarks like Randy's Donuts or Delicate Arch. Obviously, locations like this were chosen because they mirror the sort of level designs from the Genesis era games. This is presumably why Sonic spindashes over the Great Pyramids and races around the Arc d'Triumphant. It's cute to look at, is what I'm saying. 

Being so brief, there's not much else to say about "Around the World in 80 Seconds." Schwartz gets some mildly amusing zingers in. The animation is cute, if simple. Perhaps it will educate some children about other corners of the world, which is nice. At least one Letterboxd review complains that this contradicts the canon of the movie, since it seems to imply that Sonic never left Green Hills. I'm all for nerdy pedantry but you might be expecting too much from a tiny short included as a bonus in the DVD if that's your main takeaway here. Can we not assume that this is a little comic Sonic drew himself in order to amuse himself, imagining what a trip around the world might be like? Let's use our imagination, shall we? Anyway, this is cute. I'm glad it exists. "Around the World in 80 Seconds" is not a great contribution to "Sonic" lore nor an astounding achievement in art. But I like it as a sweet little time waster. That's all you need sometimes. [6/10]