The first Sonic Movie got delayed after immense backlash from fans of the series who were unhappy with Sonic’s CG model. Backlash was so severe that entire parts of the film had to be scrapped and remade.
While the Sonic movie franchise has gone on to be a massive financial success, the outlook was bleak at the start. From an actual animatronic that left people scratching their heads to a CG model that wasn’t received much better, Sonic’s silver screen debut was fraught with controversy and expensive changes.
When the original Sonic Movie got hard reset on the hedgehog’s design, footage from the original film was thought to be lost footage.
However, that’s no longer true. Shots from the earliest test versions of the Sonic Movie have finally been discovered several years later, but their source left people scratching their heads: A Twitter user who made an account entirely talking about sniffing their own farts.
Lost media is a fickle thing in the digital age. It’s often true that media people spend years searching for is sitting in someone’s hard drive somewhere. This came true earlier this year, with lost footage from the Family Guy pilot episode being found on someone’s online resume. It was just sitting there for years, undiscovered.
However, when it comes to lost footage of the Sonic Movie, the person who found the footage came forward with it and presented it to the world. But the way they did it is what’s noteworthy.
For years, their account was dedicated almost solely to posting audio clips of them farting. It was a fart-centric account that, seemingly out of nowhere, showed never before seen screenshots from early in production.
https://twitter.com/joe44951318/status/1939004244427973114
The screenshots contain a mix of rough CG and unedited footage using the original physical Sonic prop, with the entire thread showing 2018 footage many believed would never see the light of day.
According to the original poster, the footage is from a “job that no longer exists” that they still had test footage from. They plan to edit out any information that could be incriminating or give away their identity before releasing actual video of this.
Through almost two years of fart-fueled antics, they’ve never disclosed their true identity on Twitter, so they’re trying to be careful not to change that. Until then, though, at least lost footage fanatics know that lost film from the cancelled version of the Sonic movie we never got to see actually exists.