The Besties - Sonic the Hedgehog: THE MOVIE

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

The gang heads to the theaters to see the latest and greatest video game movie adaptation: Sonic the Hedgehog. But what happens if it's actually...good? Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

Give me a second. My wife used my studio for podcasting yesterday, and she's got all my settings. My wife. My wife. Russ, you did it. Oh, shit. Justin, are you okay? Did you guys hear that?

Am I going crazy here? This guy's doing Borat, but he's not even Borat. Yeah. Oh, Russ, you're gonna hurt him. How am I supposed to do a podcast with this fucking guy? Sasha, are you there? Are you pretending to be Russ? No, no, it's me, Russ.

I was just doing it. I was doing it. That's what he would say, though. That's what Sasha would say. That's true. He's always deep cover. He's always pretending to be Russ. Wah, wah, wee, wah.

Oh, my God. Guys, we got to do our show. Stop. Stop. Who's Sasha? Dude. Dude, poor ass stop for the price of none i didn't even buy a ticket to borat i'm getting it in 3d over here griff you got one oh uh kazakhstan Oh, Kazakhstan. Hmm. I don't know. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best movie of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I'm having fun in the summertime at the cinema.

My name is Christopher Plant, and I'm not here to spoil the end of this film. My name is Russ Fershing, and I know Sega. Oh. What if it had always been Russ's voice that did that before all the Sega games, and it was just Russ from all the way back from the beginning of time? Do you think we'd still be- We little baby? Do you think we'd still be talking about Sega? Do you think we would have just-

Do you think the Sonic the Hedgehog movie would have crossed the finish line? You think I would have ruined it if it was me? I think you would have maybe poisoned the timeline a little bit see i feel like the opposite i feel like the uh say yeah like the angry oh shit you're like that scared people off it created the toxic video game environment if we just had the gentle coup of a baby russ frik. We're talking about an entirely different video game timeline. Can I try it? Yeah, sure. Give us another one.

Sega! That's a little baby. That's pretty good. Yeah, I love when Russ pretends to be a baby. Justin, I'm sorry. You were introducing the show. Yeah, it's the besties, where we feature the latest and greatest in interactive video game technology. latest and greatest in interactive video game technology it is a game of the week book club

that goes all year long so wait uh the latest and greatest of video game technology which is why uh last week we did a 30 year old video game and this week a movie which is your fault the last one was your fault we covered that extensively um so i want to do a little table setting before uh we get into the bulk of the discussion when we had planned to talk about i'm having i'm in a little bit of a tailspin because when we had planned to talk about the sonic the hedgehog movie i think we were all on some level planning to have a little fun at Sonic's expense. And now we've all seen the film and I'm sitting here trying to wonder

how we're going to get 20 minutes out of material from Sonic kind of fucks. Yeah, Sonic kind of rips ass, dude. It's, we all had a good, we were all, I've never quite seen anything like the text chain we all got going this past weekend as we all excitedly realized like wait a minute sonic rips ass dude what what i never would have guessed

let's be fair here the three of you were negative uh nillies and i said before we had all seen the movie i said i have word from an inside source that there is a joke in the movie we are sonic farts right and then james marsden says whoa you better clean that fur implying it was a very wet fart and i i assumed that that would have set the record straight before we walked into the movie theater that this movie would rule oh you like that oh hold on wait you like that because i actually wanted to call that scene out as being the worst imaginable sort of piece of sonic media worse than the kiss with the girl um worse than nude sonic with his scarf like it's the worst that scene made me conjure up an image of sonic it made me conjure up two things one an image of sonic his fur matted with his own spoiled shit um his own that he that he

confesses is because of chili dogs like it is a repugnant image sure sure sure uh and it also makes you think about what that little blue gentleman actually smells like and i hate that i do not want to think about what that is that that sort of brings me to the conundrum of the sonic the hedgehog movie and it's how i feel it's not i don't know how you all feel about i was disappointed while i was watching it that i knew that while I was watching this, it's very hard to talk about a movie that was pretty damn good. Well, but here's the mystery of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. I went with my three-year-old son, who I have taken to see two movies in the past. And he has like, one of them, he sat through Detective Pikachu. He was like fucking in there like swimwear. He was glued to the screen loved every second

of it Toy Story 4 some of the dramatic beats he got a little antsy oh Frozen 2 same sort of deal same sort of deal got a little antsy during so I was like I don't know how he's gonna do during Sonic the Hedgehog he was into it the whole way it is very much a kid's movie that's kind of like the news coming out of the reviews of this film is that like it is very geared towards a very young audience and that's fine uh i enjoyed this movie on a level i cannot really explain because it is comedy forward let's say it has it has assertive notes of comedy and also almost every joke in the movie fails catastrophically on pretty much every level incorrect incorrect i disagree with you i think it is a return to form for jim carrey yeah i haven't even touched on mr carrey's work in the film he he jim carrey Jim Carrey as Dr. Robachnik is very funny. And we remember, despite some dark times with Jim,

maybe some anti-vax sentiments, maybe some nihilism, maybe some inappropriate comments in interviews. Number 23, thank you, the majestic. Dark crimes? Wasn't he in one called Dark Crimes? He's had some moments, but the main thing is he's back in that

Ace Ventura mode, of all things. And it's such a wild pull and he actually sells every joke in this movie I was laughing repeatedly at Jim Carrey which was already, talk about I was so repeatedly at Jim Carrey, which was already... I was soundly nostalgic for Sonic

and Jim Carrey making me laugh. It was two at the same time, which I thought was fantastic. I thought he was genuinely very funny. The funniest... My favorite laugh in the movie, though, was not actually scripted into the film itself. I have two quick stories.

This is the first one. When James Marston appears on the screen for the first time, a seemingly six-year-old kid seated behind me and my daughter said out loud to his mom, Oh, it's a normal guy. That is the fucking most James Marston yep he's a normal guy he's just james morrison a normal guy that's um the other the other very quick story i want to tell before we talk more about the film itself i saw it in the beautiful marquee cinemas in west virginia the pulmon plaza and i'm watching the movie and when it's in the first uh like music big music cue I think it's don't stop me now my queen and he's running through the forest or whatever I realized

that the music was muffled okay and it was like very distracting to me and I got it in my head that like I'm not going to be able to properly evaluate this film because the music track is muffled so I go out to the um I go out to the counter i'm like excuse me there seems to be a problem with the sound the music is muffled and they're like okay we'll check it out so i go back to my seat and i see the person come in from the theater and stand there and it's at a part where there's no music so it sounds fine and the person then leaves three minutes go by there's another big music cue it's muffled suddenly i'm the lunatic that's come out the second time it's like no no no you have to understand the music is muffled you have to wait till there's music so then the manager

comes in and i slink back to my seat and just watch out the corner of my eye as the manager has to stand there through 10 music free minutes of the Sonic movie because this fucking madman has to have it exactly as the director's intended. Yeah, just fucking bounce it out. I'm curious about Russ and Chris's thoughts of the comedy

because to frame it my problems with it are twofold one like just so many fucking like fart fart jokes and that's fine like i i'm not shitting on like kids kids forward comedy but like it is it is a lazy kind that i just let me just pause for a second because i think we are so deep down the hedgehog hole at this point that I think we should take a step back and just give a quick overview of the plot of this movie for people that have not seen it yet. Because I do think from a storytelling perspective, it succeeds on a lot of levels. And that's what I was getting to is like as an adventure and as like an action movie, weirdly, like I enjoyed it in the same way I kind of enjoyed

like the Fast and the Furious movies, but it is like a buddy, buddy. It's like a road trip, buddy comedy. Road trip, yeah. Let me start from the beginning and I'll try to do the rundown. Baby Sonic awakens in the jungle. He has been living on a land very reminiscent

to the Sega Genesis games with loop-de-loops and squares on the textures and like everything you remember from Sonic the Hedgehog, the video game. I want to warn you, I'm watching you do this and pretending I'm just watching

a YouTube video and talking to yourself. Okay, perfect. That's great. So he's a little baby, but he's still very fast. And he meets everyone's favorite adult character

in the Sonic franchise, Longclaw, an owl who I do not recognize at all is long call like a thing it's you saying that you have sealed your own fate with some sort of community some sort of that some sort of faction in the community is now going to burn your house okay i'm sorry long claw ease uh anyway long claw is there and she's like a mentor to sonic but unfortunately there's a rival faction that appears to be only in the movie a bunch only in the movie by the way only in the movie which is wild that thing's got 50

million animals you can't pull one more out of your ass it seems surprising that they didn't where's that reference so apparently there's some knuckles like echidnas chasing after Longclaw and they shoot the owl with an arrow and she's like, run, baby Sonic, run! And gives him a bunch of rings and the rings are like teleportation devices

that he can throw on the ground and think of a place and he'll go there. So he's basically on the run from Knuckles and his friends. I know we've never talked about a movie on this show before but i don't think we should recap every hold on this is important this good setup i'm not gonna do every scene but it's important you understand how we get into the

into the contrast james marsden says i want to move to san francisco because i want to be a cop it's very important okay so he's in america now he's where is it montana or something and the pacific james martinson is indeed a cop and he's on the road scanning cars but what's this something goes by very quickly anyway skip ahead sonic's living in this small town and then he runs really fast because he's super lonely because Longclaw died or something. And then he runs around a baseball field so fast that he creates an energy beam that brings Jim Carrey to chase after him,

and they end up in San Francisco and have a big fight. You detailed the entire first five minutes and then skipped the actual plot. No, that was the plot. Sonic and James Marston go on a road trip to San Francisco. Yeah. To get his rings back, for what it's worth. Three seconds to get his rings back.

I think the friendship that forms between James Marston, who, by the way, puts on a fucking clinic in this movie. He does. He's very good. He is not phoning this in. He is a glue and he is a normal guy who let's remember was just yelling at nothing for yeah i think that's the big takeaway from this film is that nobody phones anything in and that's why it's so good is because everyone commits so hard core to everything they're doing which ordinarily you

wouldn't expect from a sonic the Hedgehog movie, but man, people go for it. Now, one might argue, though, that there was one performer in the movie who had maybe too much energy that maybe it did need to be reined in, even just a little bit, and I'm not talking about Sonic the Hedgehog

and his power quills, I guess? His electricity quills? Sure. Is that a thing? Don't say Jim. I just want to know how, Russ and Chris, how did jim treat you because i feel like he he grabbed the the dial so firmly that was titled that the dial

named jim carrey and he turned it up to fucking maximum and then he tore it off and threw it in a river okay this fucking guy this fucking guy i i think that the i don't think there's a problem with the movie. I enjoyed this. I think somehow they made two movies, and then the editor had both these films, and they were like, oh, I can't remember which one was marked the movie we were supposed to ship, and then spliced them together. And the reason I say this is you say, you know, like,

the jokes, they're all kids' movie jokes that fail catastrophically. That's true. I don't know, maybe like 70% of the time. Then there are jokes like the following one, which I will describe to you, where Jim Carrey plays Dr. Robotnik. He is supposed to be the world's smartest man slash supervillain technocrat, right? And James Marsden uh average guy small town cop jim carrey says to james marsden i was writing formulas when you were sipping formulas and then james marsden says actually i was breastfed and then jim carrey says way to rub it in my orphan face it's fucking very good great and it is not at peace with the rest of the movie and I can't figure out how it

happened that doesn't feel like a um improv line no it feels like something that was in the script I think there's more like sort of hints at what you're talking about plant um Neil McDonough is introduced at one point as sort of like a military heavy. If you don't know Neil McDonough, you probably

may remember him as Vincent Sofel from Paul Blart Mall Cop 2. He was also in Justified. Yeah, he's been on a lot of stuff. Yeah, but Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 is like the main, is the biggie. He's introduced as sort of like a military heavy. He's like seventh bill in the film, and he is in it for 10 seconds.

Yeah, that's about right. And then just vanishes, which makes me think that like maybe he was more of a presence earlier on. I mean, did you miss him? And then they really drilled. Did you miss him? Did you feel like you lost something? I love Neil McDonough. Me too, he's a great actor.

So his absence was felt by me because i think he's he's actually genius um and it makes me wonder if like you you don't get a neil mcdonough for that role if you don't need a neil mcdonough in that role you get the cheap version of neil mcdonough right you get a discount yeah he was definitely a bigger role i just didn't think i think that they needed more military guys smattered around to bounce off Jim Carrey I'm just saying it's a weird it makes me think that he maybe was more prominent and then they like scaled it back and focused on other things yeah here's what I'm gonna say I'm gonna agree with Griffin I think the for me I understand for children probably youngsters uh the uh Jim Carrey scenes were probably pretty entertaining in so far as he's

a wacky guy shouting things for me i found him the weakest part of the movie and i was extremely eager to return to sonic and his saga um i wanted sonic to kill him i wanted him to die at sonic so maybe that's i want to talk to spin through what about the dance break that's what i wanted to like that was the next thing i want to talk like this is exactly What about the dance break? That's what I wanted to, like, that was the next thing I wanted to talk about. Like, this is exactly what I'm talking about. He has a fucking dance break where he like,

turns on this 3D projector and goes skiing in front of it. And it's like, what the fuck am I watching right now, Jim? Here's, the argument I would make is that Jim Carrey,

here's what he brings to this movie for me. One, the selling gags in certain scenes, like Ashley Landon for me. I think he is able to do, he brings an actual genuine menace to the character without riding that rail between menace and still not threatening to kids.

Like Brendan Gleeson in Paddington 2. Yeah. So it's genuinely kind of scary but also not gonna freak kids out or whatever and i think that his sensibilities which i feel like are probably injected through the movie through things like the dance scene and his last like scene after you know at the end of the film i feel like are sort of his more surrealist sensibilities that keep it from being sort of a stale just like straight by the numbers you know sonic film plant what do you think i think he's perfect i would not change a thing he did i do want to talk about the third film because

i realized i left this out my theory it is not two films there there are three films uh one is the traditional children's movie uh two is the existential nightmare that jim carrey is inhabiting and three is the direct to camera advertisements oh yes which there are a surplus um i did want to bring one of these up so i'm glad you mentioned it well the the three i counted one of which gets a callback is zillow yes optical illusions a glasses store is that a real glasses store i i think so i think and we should check and then the last one is olive garden which gets two very big um moments but in the. But they're fucking funny. But they are good. It's so good. They bring the point out.

It's good. It serves a story focus because he is excited to get an Olive Garden gift card and that submits his status as a normal guy. He's just a regular guy. To be fair, he's disappointed. That's what i found interesting

about that uh product placement he is disappointed that is not bigger than an olive garden gift card it is implied that he will his house uh suffice to say gets wrecked throughout the movie and as a reward the american government gives him an olive garden gift card for 50 yes also inconsistencies i agree with justin the olive garden deeply relatable. The only app he has on his phone, Olive Garden. What's not relatable is the Zillow product placement where they look at an apartment in San Francisco and the rent is $4,600 a month. $6,600 a month. Yes, I wrote the same thing down. Now, something to keep in mind. He is a small town sheriff. His plan

is to move to San Francisco from this small town and be a street cop. So, a street cop in San Francisco, I don't know what they would make. Let's say it's $50,000. It's a wild MacGuffin of his big dream that he's chasing

is to also be a cop still in a bigger city. A more threatening city. Yeah. But now his intention is to move there with his wife, who is a vet, and pay $4,600 for an apartment in San Francisco. Now, that is an accurate portrayal of the apartment prices in San Francisco. Now, that is an accurate portrayal of the apartment prices in San Francisco. Fair.

All right, listen. We're running out of time. Okay. I'll take all day to talk about this fantastic film. We talked about specific weird things about the movie, and I don't think we've really necessarily nailed down why it works. Why does it work?

Yes. Aside from genuinely great performances. i really uh not a joke like i can't remember seeing james marsden in anything where he left like quite as big an impression and maybe it's just because like he was uh providing me like you know i was deep deep under the jim carrey ocean and he would provide me with uh with oxygen so my my mentality on why this movie works uh I need to step back briefly and say um for whatever reason I got president's day off this year and what it left me with was an entire day off that no one else on the planet has off which means that I had to see this movie alone at 11 30 in the morning surrounded by

children on a quasi day off so it did leave me with the sense of like having to analyze this movie not in the eyes of a child but so much as like my creepy sitting alone in a theater watching a children's movie and why did it work i think i mentioned this earlier but i really do think it's because everyone goes for it ben schwartz who plays the voice of sonic yeah we even mentioned is like i mean his milieu is going for it. Ben Schwartz, who plays the voice of Sonic, is like, I mean, his milieu is going for it. Like everything he ever does, John Ralphio and House of Lies and his Middle Ditch and Schwartz improv shows

is going for it with a capital G. But never grading. And never grading. And a genuine earnestness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I do think because of that energy, like without that energy, I think as good as James Marsden was,

the movie does not work in the least. The fact that I cared more about Sonic the Hedgehog from this film than I did from 30 years of video games. Yes. It's really impressive. The action scenes are also like pretty fucking tight and uh the movie culminates in like what was a shockingly kind of like badass moment like a shockingly kind of like fuck hell yeah get him yeah i said to myself to myself as an adult, fuck him up, son. I said this. To myself, an adult.

And yeah, it's just, it is an, I guess it's an uneven movie for me because some of the jokes did work and they were really good. The pretzel lady who is the sheriff's wife or girlfriend, her sister in the movie hates sheriff and has like is dropping non-stop bombs like she's throwing out fucking hand grenades like she's crushing it hysterical so like it's it's uneven in that regard but the it is so it's a surprisingly sweet yeah and like super competent like action buddy comedy adventure i i just want to just i want i want to know why this worked for justin real quick i feel like it works because it is a i mean i i understand what you're saying about

the joke some of the jokes like not landing but i feel like they landed for who they were supposed to land for uh almost without fail it reminded me of watching something like um cloudy with a chance of meatballs for the first time where it's like oh this is like actually confident comedic voice like and it's well scripted and there are moments that work for the adults and there's moments that work for the kids and it's all written i think to support strengths of sonic the character as he is there's a character in the movie called uh uh crazy carl who has seen sonic in this town and has like tried to get people to believe that he's real and no one does believe him and at the end of the film he is vindicated uh in this and there's little beats

throughout that throughout the movie like that that are like that really pay off and are really funny and i think that it just like it's never at uh i think the other thing that it succeeds in where so many video game adaptations fail is one it's working with something of a blank slate because there's not a lot of narrative to to append to this guy but also it doesn't shoehorn in a bunch of winky references it does them very tastefully uh where you'll hear like a music cue from green hill zone yeah and it's just like dropped it it's not like punch you in the face with it just a note on that and why i think this movie is lovely and why i think it will actually age very well. So I love Hocus Pocus, which is a movie I'm not sure if it is good or bad, but Hocus Pocus is distinctly of the year it was released.

Everybody is wearing jackets that look like MC Hammer had them. They have words carved into the back of their head the mother at one point is dressed as madonna it is a movie of the era without being a movie where it's just repeating other jokes from the era which is the thing i think a lot of kids movies do where they're like hey you remember this joke from that movie that came out last year and sonic reminds me so much of that the jokes themselves are not referential but sonic flosses and there is app humor and the enemy is drones and the entire credits like closing credit song this movie is so distinctly the year 2020 um and i am so excited to watch this movie in 10 years and for it to feel like this bizarre time warp.

What's he doing with his arms? Oh, yeah. He's moving his arms back and forth. What is that? That was when Fortnite was only in season 2. Before it was elected President of the United States of Games. Hey, let's go to a break. So we're back to talk more about Sonic

and why my brother's wrong about jim carrey no sadly no we have no more time for this uh what are you all uh what y'all been playing on the video games uh i'll cool down from watching the sonic film i'll go first since mine's pretty short i i uh just wrapped up the expansion for uh Emblem, three houses that just came out. It's really kind of neat how they're doing it. It's called Cindered Shadows, and it's all about this secret fourth house, like this underground fourth house in a place under the monastery where the whole game takes place called the Abyss. So it introduces these new characters and also introduces like a handful of new, like entirely new classes that kind of like

add a lot of like neat depth and new stuff to uh to like the team compositions that you can put together and also tells like kind of a like cool story like the characters are actually really well developed uh much better i think than most of the characters in the core Three Houses storyline, which I haven't finished. I just restarted my playthrough as a Blue Lions devotee this time around. But I really do enjoy these games. It is tough for me to finish a Fire Emblem game because I feel like my desire to engage with that level of tactics, it burns out like fairly quickly. Yeah, I think the pacing is probably the problem long-term. So I agree with you there for sure.

The idea of a seven chapter like storyline where each battle also has like weird distinct like mechanics that really take, it's fucking hard. Like it's way harder than anything I played in the original game. And so like, it's fucking hard. Like it's way harder than anything I played in the original game. And so like, it's a really satisfying puzzle. There's one level where you start at like one end of this like underground channel

and there are two gates that close after 10 rounds. And so you have to like get your whole team race through there as two factions of enemies are fighting each other around you. Like it's fucking cool. And most of the battles are like that. I think it's great. And then also, once you finish it,

you can recruit them into the main game. And there's new paralogs and new... Genuinely, a ton of new stuff. I just like that there were sewer children. You've talked about this for too long. Okay. Too long you've talked about this. I want to talk about something else.

Fair. Go for it, Justin. You're burning Jim Carrey time. Justin, what were you playing this week? Got an Oculus Quest. Been playing some stuff on it there's a really good one called uh uh pistol whip you guys tried that not yet okay here's the here's the pitch imagine y'all played super hot yes play super uh imagine if super hot was a rhythm game and that is pretty much the best description i can give you of pistol whip. There's a sort of pulsing techno song,

and you're moving forward on rails, and dudes are like popping out of nowhere, like kind of shadowy, spectery dudes without a lot of definition, very much like Superhot, are popping out of nowhere, and you shoot them with your gun and point down to reload. You can also punch. If somebody gets close enough to you, you can punch and refill gun and point down to reload. You can also punch. If somebody gets close enough to you, you can punch and refill your health.

Or pistol whip them. Or pistol whip them, if you like. That's what you're actually doing. And there's barriers also that will come at you that require you to physically move to avoid them or duck to avoid the barriers. But you are scored better if you shoot on the beat so you get into this groove that is the closest i felt to like a john wick sort of feeling of like this choreographed action sequence because i am like waiting for the beat to shoot dudes and when you get into a groove with it where like six guys pop

out out of nowhere and you're you know bang bang bang and there's bullets coming at you that you're also dodging as you're moving out of the way and like popping these guys it's it's really really really great exercise too like you're moving all around like i've i've ended up sweaty after a couple of like harder difficulty levels i'm a big like beat saber fan like i managed to get it and did all the shit you have to do to hack it to put your like own songs into it and i would play that like i don't do it as much these days but i'd play it for you know a half hour at a time at like the highest difficulty and be like my watch would be like dude your fucking heart's about to explode you you need to calm down i think i need to try pistol whip again and turn up the difficulty a little bit because

on i i wanted that feeling of that that john wick feeling and i feel like on easy mode or normal mode or whatever like you don't really get it because it's just it's too like it's too slow it's like playing guitar but yeah i would say bump it up uh you can also turn on a modifier that lets you use two pistols okay um and that was like that's primo yeah i will talk about what i've been playing i i mentioned last week i was playing blood stand on switch which i ended up finishing and was like super thrilled with it um especially on the fact that it runs on switch okay and then i was like really still hankering for metroidvania stuff so i dip back into rogue legacy which is a game i bought for like six bucks on sale on switch

and just been like grinding that out because i absolutely love it and then this morning just this morning uh i saw that a witcher patch has been released for switch the switch version which will let you play saves uh on pc like you could transfer your save from switch to pc wow um which is extremely cool to think that like i've been playing this game for 100 hours and it looks pretty janky on switch i mean it works but it looks pretty so to think that i could like jump into the future and be like oh damn this game is fucking awesome and i don't have to like start from the beginning to play it on pc with mods and all sorts of stuff so really cool but it's

mostly just like kind of going back to games that i've played before um but it's it's been really good they did that with uh divinity right divinity has the same sort of functionality yeah really it's so it's so fucking smart yeah like it's it is such a cool feature that i wish like every pc game on switch could could do yeah uh plan my game of the week i'm not playing i'm watching and i know that hoops are gonna be right there with me survivor winners at war oh yeah i'm watching it too and i not on that tip yet really i'm shocked'm shocked. Yeah, I was so... You know what? Honestly, the last season bummed me out so much.

I bailed halfway through it. I didn't even realize it had come back until it popped up in my DVR, and I haven't had a chance to. See, I bounced off Survivor probably three years ago. Missed last season, which I heard was... This last one was... Yeah, I heard it was a horror show.

Garbage. Yeah, it was real bad. But Winners at War, it feels like they're trying to make up for that was this last one yeah i heard it was a horror show garbage yeah real bad but winners or i you can it feels like uh they're trying to make up for that because it's just people who've won the game and boy oh boy does that make for a really good show especially in the early episodes where i if you've all watched survivor before the early episodes are usually uh dull because a whole bunch of people who have vaguely similar names like todd todd and rob chris harry yeah they uh they all kind of stink at the game and they make amateur mistakes and there isn't really a lot happening and everybody's timid or

somebody tries too hard and it takes like until the merge about halfway through for anything exciting to happen the opposite is on there you'll go on yes best ever play the game by the way number one it's ridiculous now because everybody is so hardcore i mean you can tell that they're just having to cut the show in an entirely different way where you know in previous seasons somebody would say something to a person. They would say something to person B. And then later in the episode, there would be a big moment where person B tells person C and like,

now it's like person A tells something to person B. And then it just cuts to C telling it to D and then D telling it to E and then E telling it to A and then A going back to like, it just is so, so fast. Yeah. It's like your galaxy brain for an hour basically there are a lot of new rules that i think almost make it so complicated that it prevents players from having good strategy but we will see still early on if you ever want to pivot by the way and just make this a survivor podcast when we talk about the meta of survivor i'm i'm

i'm in there's like a new currency too that you can use to like buy either benefit rewards it's vbucks actually it's fire tokens and you get them on whatever last extinction or whatever yeah yeah i want to talk about reader mail uh there are so many people and i love everybody who listens to this program like they're my child so many extremely bad takes about us that i literally i cannot some people are very appropriate um let's see uh here's one from niche uh i watched sonic hedgehog movie on its release day and was not expecting great things i was however expecting a movie about sonic the hedgehog you know the little blue spiky chap who collects rings, frees animals from robots,

and collects chaos emeralds to go supersonic. This movie isn't about Sonic. They used his name and then did a load of other new nonsensical shit and then put him in a car for 90% of the film. Strange. Incorrect. You've described a very bad Sonic movie, although you are right that he is in a car for an extremely long time

that is fucking extremely accurate it is a while how much time uh yeah it is it's i mean it's pretty bare bones adaptation wise like it's sonic he's got red shoes and he comes from he lives in green hill zone well he does earn his red shoes but yeah oh yeah uh yeah i get that bob said uh how was there only one chili dog reference he wouldn't shut up about them in the cartoon show bob are you high you've described a bad version of this this is a bad version the good version is one chili dog even that was too much because it came after the aforementioned wet fart. Yeah. I have a at coffee Lance a lot says the Sonic Hedgehog movie was a lot of fun for me as a longtime Sonic fan. Though my biggest complaint is that there was a severe lack of Sonic the Hedgehog's

feet. Though we got a lot, a little bit of teases. I would like to see more in the sequel. Okay. So this is interesting. I don't know if you guys are aware, but there is no canonical agreement as to what Sonic's feet look like. Sega's very careful

about not showing Sonic without shoes on. This movie actually has shown more of Sonic's feet than I think any Sonic product before this because there's a moment at which his shoes need to be removed. He's wearing socks, but the socks are very worn because of all the running.

So you do actually see his feet briefly, but only like kind of parts of his feet. There's an x-ray of his foot at one part that Dr. Robotnik does. Like we see his foot pretty fucking explicitly. So like, I don't know how much more Sonic foot action. This is the most Sonic foot you've ever gotten. And you're complaining that there's not more Sonic foot in it. This is the only correct take in our email from Megan. Never has a group of five college-educated women

been more confused yet delighted by a film. Jim Carrey gave an Oscar-worthy performance as a deranged Eggman, while Sonic flossing made me kick out my legs in a strange fight-or-flight reflex. That's accurate. The accurate response. When the jokes hit, they hit, and when they didn didn't you were just watching sonic fart i guess that's a solid three stars megan does not say out of how many stars votes gets three stars i'm assuming out of four what a wild episode this is it really

sliding doors right there's a version of this episode where the movie is just fucking garbage because boys that trailer set to uh gangster's paradise like did not inspire confidence i'm not even talking about like everybody was so up in arms about sonic's aesthetic and uh like joking aside it is kind of wild how much effort went into fixing that because he looks actually great and kind of cute now. But I was more worried about the fact that all the jokes in the trailer were stinkers and the movie looked pretty terrible. And somehow it was good and fun.

Y'all, before we go, I want to share a thing, but it involves the post-credit scene. Oh, we shouldn't. Okay. We should not. Okay, okay. We can't spoil it. Yeah, if people,

I got to share it because this brought me up. We can talk about it, but we can give people a window. Hold on, let me check the time. Okay. We are currently at 41.50. It'll be different once it's edited,

so that doesn't matter. Yeah, but we're 41.50. It'll be different once it's edited, so that doesn't matter. Yeah, but we're 41.50. You can probably just dip out of the rest of the show if you don't want to hear it, I guess. Yeah, you're not going to miss much. Two minutes. Follow and share on Spotify. Okay.

So at the end of the movie, Sonic saves the day. Dr. Eggman Robotnik is sent to the Mushroom World. Then credits roll right and come back and who is floating over the pacific northwest but tails a lifelike cg version of sonic 2's best character and probably the greatest character in sonic mythos that alone is great what is even better is the entire theater i am in erupting i mean like like sports uh final seconds game winning shots level erupting erupting and i'm like who is this who are these people are the this didn't sound like children. They sounded like grown people, men and women. So I leave the theater, go to the restroom, go outside. And outside I find a group of probably a dozen or so college age kids. And they are almost sobbing with joy about what they have experienced. experience now all i can vaguely hear is sonic movie so i'm like okay these are the people this is who it was and i i inch my way close while uh you know taking out my phone because i don't want

to look like i'm spying on them which i am and one of the men in this group says and i quote this exactly i wrote it down immediately if i get married i still won't be as happy as I was when I saw soft tails on the big screen. Fucking so good. I also enjoy that, considering what the character design process of this is, that they had the strength of their own convictions to just show tails at the end. Like, he looks like this.

Fuck off. This is what he looks like. Can't change it. Can't make us change it. Looks like this. Although I will be surprised if they don't replace the voice actor yeah or well known that's two minutes that's the end of the spoiler segment and that's the also the end of this program what are we gonna next week we're gonna be next week what are we gonna do wow i was like this dreams baby start

go to sleep tell us about your dreams. And now here's for the reader mail segment. Don't talk about the game dreams. Just email us about your dreams. I just want the longest emails you can give us about your dreams. And if you see anything particularly weird in the game dreams, you can please let us know about that as well.

Don't email us about your actual dreams. That would be, I would just delete them. I'll set up a spam filter if I have to. You can follow us on Twitter at TheBestiesPod. You can also join our newsletter, which is linked on our Twitter feed.

That's going to do it for us, so thank you, and be sure to join us again next time for The Besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? The besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Vox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!