Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Writers Tell Us About the Films Inspirations, Future, and if Chao Are Real
Last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Sonic the Hedgehog film co-writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller to talk about everything Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Weve already published stories from this interview about Big the Cats almost-cameo in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Casey and Millers dreams of making a The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker film, but I had so much fun chatting with them it only seemed write to publish the full transcript of our Sonic banter.Before I started recording, Casey noticed a Waluigi plush hanging on the wall behind me on Zoom and started telling me about how he had been in an online sketch show years ago where he played Waluigi with prosthetics and everything. I asked him if I could start recording immediately, so thats where we began. This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Pat Casey: I mean I don't even know if the sketch is still online. I don't even remember who it was, but my next door neighbor was a costume-maker and she was working on these sketches.IGN: You said you had prosthetics and everything?PC: Yeah, it was almost like 20 years ago, but they had a makeup artist and they gave me the nose and the ears and they were like, Can you do a Waluigi impression? I was like, I don't know. I don't remember what he talks like" So then I went and checked out some videos and I was like, "Yeah, I could do..." I mean it was just kind of like, WAAAH, something like that.Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for that delightful... just completely unrelated to Sonic, but still sort of tangentially related to video games of our childhood story.Josh Miller: I wonder if that's even findable.PC: Dude, it was like... the early 2000s, man. I don't know what has become of it.Okay, so Pat, you clearly have a video game history and Josh, I'm guessing you might as well. Tell me a little bit about your video game history and especially your past flirtations with the Sonic franchise.JM: I guess it was fortuitous in a way for us to, if we're going to do any video game thing to wind up on Sonic, we're both of the Sega Genesis era and I would say Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is probably the game I played the most growing up.PC: Me, too. I have a little brother and we would trade off, but most of the time I would make him play Tails when we were really trying to beat the game.JM: Because most two-player games it was like you played and then once you died you would hand the controller and your friend or sibling would play until they died. So it's like Sonic 2, it was kind of, not that it was the first game to do it, but it was certainly the first game I really had on a home console that was really easy and fun to play with two people simultaneously. I think that was-PC: You got to use real teamwork because when you're fighting a boss, it's Sonic's job to stay alive and it's Tails' job to just fling his corpse at the bad guy over and over again and die as many times as it takes.JM: It was great for if you had a younger sibling that they could be Tails and it was not as complicated for them to play.PC: Maybe we should explore that in the movie sometime, the fact that Tails is immortal.So did you two end up playing Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 when those games came out?JM: We did, just not, it was more an age thing. We just didn't play them as much. I mean, I never owned a Dreamcast though, so anytime I was playing it had to now be at a friend's place. The Xbox was kind of my console of that era.PC: The first time I played Sonic Adventure was actually, I had a friend from Japan and he got the Dreamcast early before I came out here. So I played Sonic Adventure in Japanese and I had no idea. I could not follow the story. I just knew I was running away from a whale. There was all sorts of great stuff going on. Later I played the English version. I was like, Oh, this all makes sense.JM: Oh, yeah. I mean I remember visiting, I mean we both live in LA now, we're from Minnesota, but I was visiting a friend in college who lived out here and they had the Dreamcast and I remember my mind kind of being blown by what 3D Sonic games looked like, but I guess that's how older people felt when they saw the Genesis games. I do remember my mom walking in the room for Sonic 1 and 2 and just kind of being like, How can you even tell what's going on?PC: Like, This isn't like the games I played when I was a kid. This isnt backgammon. Whatever happened to Shoots and Ladders?Did either of you have any core memories from playing Sonic that made it into any of the films, but especially Sonic 3?PC: When we were writing the first Sonic, we were actually on a really tight deadline kind of for no reason. So we didn't really even have a chance to be like, Oh wait, let's go play the games and then think of the story. We had to come up with the story immediately. So it was sort of like-JM: It was all sense memories.PC: The core memories is all that made it into the movie. It was like, there's rings, there's emeralds. That's all we were working with.JM: You've got to go through a loop. I mean, maybe that's a good example. It's funny because that's such a rudimentary thing, but I feel like it was always like, How can we get them to go through a loop de loop? I feel like we got to get that loop de loop back in there.PC: But we figured that was a good way to know if something was important was like, Is this something that we just remember all these decades later? Like the things that we remember, that's the important part. It's sort of like, Lynyrd Skynyrd never wrote down the lyrics of their songs when they were writing. If they couldn't remember them, then they weren't good enough.JM: Like Pat's saying, we were the Lynyrd Skynyrd of screenwriting. But also on the very first movie, too, it was kind of like the marching orders were a bit different from where the franchise has evolved. Sega wanted to view it as almost a prequel to what was happening with Sonic before we got to him in Sonic 1. PC: For Sonic 3, then, it was sort of like, what are the important parts of the Shadow story from Sonic Adventure 2, which is really, what did we already remember moreso than going back and playing? Yeah, Shadow being an edgy Sonic with jet-powered shoes.PC: Jet shoes we never explain in the movie. But we wanted to get him on the motorcycle, give him guns, the iconic imagery. Even though, why does he need a gun? Why did he ever need one?I understand that the story is a little bit darker this time around. I mean specifically because Shadow is involved. Is that correct?JM: Yes. I mean, I know the internet wondered if this one was going to be PG-13. I think our producers and Jeff Fowler felt pretty confident the whole time that they could somehow do it justice and still have it be PG. But yeah, I mean from the get-go the conversations were like, Well, this is the movie where a little girl is going to die.PC: We're certainly walking it right up to the edge of PG-13. But yeah, I mean it's like we're, I guess, four years into this franchise, three movies in, so it's like the franchise continues to grow up and our original audience is growing up. The kids who were little kids for the first one are a little older now. Its a little along the lines of how Harry Potter grew along with the kids, even though our CG guys don't have to go through puberty if we don't want them to. We have control over that.So I know that Dragon Ball was a huge influence on Sonic the Hedgehog, and I heard it had an influence on the films too. Can you talk about that, or any other non-Sonic influences you used?PC: It is true. The Chaos Emeralds and going supersonic, all these concepts were introduced to America in the Sonic games, but the Dragon Ball manga was already out in Japan. So it's like Sonic was parodying Dragon Ball even at that time. But it's like we in America experienced it first in Sonic before Dragon Ball hit. So the influence has always been there. I mean, we talked about Dragon Ball in the writer's room on Sonic 1 even.JM: But I mean, there's, trying to remember. I feel like I remember Jeff [Fowler, director] saying at some point that we're going to be in Tokyo and Shadow's going to get on a motorcycle. So he is like, Well, we've got to do the Akira motorcycle slide. It's amazing. I found a YouTube video, so I hope somebody updates it now that Sonic 3's out, but somebody put together every TV show and movie that does the Akira Slide and it's long. It's kind of amazing.PC: There's all sorts of references that we don't even know about, that we don't write in necessarily And then they hit this pose from that thing. But there's all these pose and shot homages throughout all the movies, and there are probably a bunch that Josh and I don't even catch.JM: I'm sure it'll be the same for 3... I feel like when 2 came out, a bunch of websites like, All the Easter Eggs in Sonic 2, and I'm looking at it, I'm like, Oh, I didn't even know about that one.So over the course of the films, first we just had Sonic and then we got Tails and Knuckles. Now we have Shadow, and I'm not going to spoil it for our audience who hasn't seen it yet, but I understand there is another character that is introduced at the end of this film potentially setting up more films to come. How do you two decide this progression? The Sonic cast is big!PC: It's certainly not only the two of us deciding.JM: That's above our pay grade.PC: Its a group discussion, but I think with Sonic 1, pretty early on, once we realized Tails wasn't going to be a main character, we were like, Let's do the teaser with Tails. Let's make him our Nick Fury. When we were working on Sonic 2, we were like, Who are we going to do at the end of this movie? And immediately Toby Ascher [producer] was just like, It's going to be Shadow.JM: Its got to be Shadow. And that I think is very much that the creative Powers That Be on the franchise are kind of trying to gauge what they sense the hierarchy is of who fans are most excited about next. That's who we'll do next.PC: I'll say that the next character is one that we've been wanting to get in there. We know that there's a great public demand, so I hope when you see the movie later, I hope you're happy.Are there any obscure deep cut characters that you're like, Dang, I wish we could find a way to sneak this person in? I know everybody's clamoring for Big the Cat.JM: Oh, yeah. I mean that's what we always say. That's our joke response. That's not even entirely a joke because it's so easy to imagine just kind of like a random joke you could use with him.PC: In one draft of Sonic 2, we actually, when they're going through the snowy mountains to the cave, we had a bit, because Sonic 2 was sort of an Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones, it's a trope that at some point a skeleton pops out at you and scares you. So we were going to do that, but with a skeleton of a, I would say, a Big the Cat, not necessarily-JM: Not necessarily the Big the Cat.PC: But we ended up cutting it. It didn't make any sense.The Sonic franchise over the years has been this magnet for all sorts of weird silly ideas over the years. But then you're also telling a story that has a little bit of emotional weight to it. How do you balance those two things to keep it just from being a humorous reference fest and make sure that there's a little bit of gravity to Sonic the Hedgehog?JM: I do remember there was a phase where we were kind of all worried like, Oh, is this too dark? But that was because we were really just trying to crack the Shadow story, and once you start dropping Sonic and Tails and especially Donut Lord in there, then if anything we're like, Oh, we got to make sure that we aren't undermining the seriousness of Shadow's storyline with how silly the rest of the movie is.PC: And well, Doctor Robotnik is always going to be very silly too. We found some good pathos for him in this one as well. But yeah, I mean it is about just finding that character. Like, that was the hardest thing in creating this whole franchise was kind of figuring out what Sonic's deal was in the first movie, and what was going to make people connect to him as a person and not just a silly animal, and finding that need for family, and the themes of loneliness and family carrying through all these films. And now kind of the hitting upon the theme also of loss and revenge.Well, you mentioned Doctor Robotnik, so tell me about writing for Jim Carrey, especially now that you're writing not just for one Jim Carrey, but a second Jim Carrey playing off the first one.JM: Much like we're from the Genesis generation, we're from the rise of Jim Carrey generation and the Ace Ventura years. So just the fact that we have done three movies that he's in is kind of mind-boggling to us and it's super fun, because when we wrote the first one, we didn't know that Jim was going to be Robotnik, so that was its own thing. But with the sequels now, it's so fun because we kind of compare it to... you want him to take whatever you wrote and find something even better to do. That's why you cast Jim Carrey. So we almost view it as like you're putting him in a playground or something and what can we design? What can this scene be to let him go bananas and do his Jim Carrey thing?PC: We're trying to give him a comic premise and roll out a box of toys for him. Him playing two characters in the same scene together so often, I mean, it was really interesting to watch how he did it even on set, because he would have to sort of build both performances at the same time, but he can only do one at a time because it took hours to get into his Gerald makeup, so he would do one side of it, and then come back the next day and do the other side, and it ends up cutting together so seamlessly. It's crazy.JM: We just saw it, I guess this is the third time we've seen it. We saw it yesterday in 4DX, which was great. But yeah, the more I see it, the more I just marvel at how complicated some of the routines he came up for himself to be playing off himself. That's normally the kind of thing that you have those two actors there rehearsing and honing these bits, but it was just like, nope, it was all in his head that he had to figure out.PC: I'm campaigning Jim Carrey, Best Supporting Actor nomination.I understand theres been a significant amount of improv done by the actors, and I was curious how you felt about that as writers, but it sounds like at least with Jim Carrey, you're like, Yeah, that's what he does. This is great.JM: Yeah, I mean, the truth is, if the improv's good, you always welcome it. It's only a problem if it's bad. Fortunately, I think this is a good enough creative team that if someone does a bad improv, it's not like Jeff's going to put it in the movie. I mean, with Ben Schwartz, Adam Pally, people who it's like that's their whole bread and butter is improv.PC: James Marsden is an underrated improviser.JM: Yeah. I think Jury Duty showed his skills off to the world for the first time.PC: And if an actor comes up with a great line and it makes the movie, we're always happy to take credit for other people.This is close to my heart because the memory I have of Sonic Adventure 2 is the Chao Garden. I lost it when I saw the trailer of the cast in the Chao Garden, which is now basically the Chuck E. Cheese of the Sonic world, I guess. Tell me about adapting that. How did you come to this? Are Chao even real in this world, or are they... what's happening?JM: You never know. Who knows how many sequels they'll end up doing? I think part of the logic was that Jeff has no immediate plans for the Chaos to really be in, and we already had that set piece, because that's a real type of restaurant that Jeff had encountered while promoting, I think, Sonic 2 in Tokyo. So we just thought-PC: We thought it would be funny, yeah, that this is a place where Sonic and the other critters can go without a disguise because they just blend in. I mean, obviously in real life, would that work? Would people think they're people in giant plush costumes? Perhaps not. But with the suspension of disbelief with film, you can believe it. It's like, Oh, we'll have a theme restaurant. And it's like, Of course it should be a Chao Garden.PC: It could be based on the real Chao.JM: Indeed. But yeah, I think in the context of this movie, Jeff just thought it would be a funny, funny nod to the Chaos and fans love or love-hate relationship with Chaos, I suppose, depending on-Who hates Chao? Who's doing that?JM: People with no soul.PC: I tell you what, Josh, last night watching the movie, I realized they cut out a shot that we saw in an early cut that was, I thought was the funniest shot in the movie. Its of the Chao, like on fire.JM: Oh, you're right. Every time I watch it, I just, my brain puts it in the movie.PC: We have to confront the team about this. What happened to that shot of the Chao getting killed?JM: Maybe that's what was going to push us to PG-13. It'd be like, You can't have a Chao on fire. Kids are going to run out of the theater screaming.Before the Sonic trilogy came out, there was a lot of talk, at least in video game spaces, about the fact that video game movies were sort of cursed to be not very good. I think that's largely been broken in recent years, not just by the Sonic movies, but we've had Detective Pikachu, there's been several other really solid video game films. And you two have been a big part of that, having these fairly successful, very enjoyable video game movies. Are there any other video games that you would want to adapt someday as films since this has clearly gone very well for you?JM: I feel like unfortunately we can't actually answer your question because there's going to be a couple of things we're trying to get going next year.Are there any that you're not working on at all that you can say?PC: I was going to say, we've already written a script for It Takes Two, which hopefully we'll get some good news on moving forward in the next year.JM: What's an old game that we're probably not going to adapt, that still would've been fun? PC: We've talked about Golden Axe. Golden Axe was another good Genesis multiplayer game.JM: A Boy and His Blob.PC: Oh yeah, that could work. Or the 7-Up game about the dot having a platforming adventure. [Cool Spot]JM: I think another easy one I think we can answer because the movie's already happening and we're already not doing it would be a Zelda. I remember always when we played Wind Waker, we were always like, man, I mean, it would probably be weird if they made a Zelda movie to start with Wind Waker versus the more classic Hyrule. But we both loved Wind Waker and it's so cinematic. Yeah. So after they make this Zelda movie, I guess we're putting it out there in the world, maybe we can do a Wind Waker spin-off.Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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