Sonic has been running faster than the speed of sound since he made his first appearance in Sega’s original Sonic the Hedgehog video game from 1991, but with the recent live-action release of the Sonic The Hedgehog movie, the blue blur finally has some real competition: himself. When comparing the speeds of Sonic in the movie versus Sonic in the video games, which iteration of the blue hedgehog moves faster?
Directed by Jeff Fowler, Sonic the Hedgehog is the first live-action film based on the Japanese video game franchise of the same name. Hiding from a tribe of echidnas who wish to harness his power, Sonic (Ben Schwartz) lives out a lonely existence on Earth undetected by the people of Green Hills, Montana. Bored with his job as a small town sheriff, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden) dreams of joining the San Francisco Police Department until he meets Sonic and sets out to help the speedy blue space hog escape the clutches of the mad scientist Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey). While super-speed has always been Sonic’s most defining trait, the recent film offers a new frame of reference by which to analyze just how fast the hedgehog can go.
Based on his namesake, which means “relating to the nature of sound,” Sonic has the capability to run at the speed of sound, which travels at approximately 767 mph. In the live-action film, however, Sonic is shown to be traveling at a much slower rate early on in the film. When Tom is sitting in his police car on the highway, he captures Sonic’s speed with a radar gun, measuring it to be about 300 mph. While this seems rather slow for the speed demon, there is a more complicated way to calculate Sonic’s speed in the movie (via CBR).
In the scene when he is running down the highway, Sonic’s speed can be measured by counting the painted broken lines in the middle of the road, with every yellow line measuring at 10 ft and the gaps in between at 30 ft. Traveling about 70 ft per frame in a scene with a total of 24 frames, Sonic therefore travels at a rate of 1,680 ft per second or 1,145 mph. While that speed more accurately lives up to the Sonic name, it pales in comparison to the character’s speed supposedly featured within the video games. In the Sega video game Sonic Unleashed, the hedgehog’s maximum speed is measured to be approximately 2,889 mph.
With only those measurements taken into account, the video game Sonic would, therefore, be faster than the live-action Sonic, with the classic beating the newbie by a 1,209 mph lead. However, video game Sonic is simply fast on paper and doesn’t reflect those speeds in the actual gameplay. If Sonic were to actually match the speed the video game claims, the blue blur would be moving too fast for the gamer to control, which wouldn’t make for much of a video game unless you enjoy a challenge. Judging which version of Sonic moves faster with basic perception alone, movie Sonic comes out on top since video game Sonic doesn’t appear to reach speeds any higher than the average automobile.
While video game Sonic sets the bar pretty high with his top speed close to 3,000 mph, the live-action Sonic in Sonic The Hedgehog may one day give the classic version a run for his money. Since the iteration of Sonic featured in the film started out with a low speed of 300 mph, reaching higher speeds as the film progressed, movie Sonic may one day surpass his predecessor’s maximum speed if Paramount decides to move forward with Sonic The Hedgehog 2.
