I'd have thought it would be common wisdom that all hedgehogs are good hedgehogs. Regions of the world where they'd be considered invasives notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine a creature more endearingly innocuous. Erinaceids are insanely adorable, and unless you happen to be an egg or a mollusc, essentially harmless. And yet there was apparently this guy named Shadow who let the side down back in 2001. My experience in playing the Sonic The Hedgehog games was limited to just the first three releases, so the narrative happenings of Sonic Adventure 2 remain a mystery to me. I couldn't tell you anything about Shadow himself and how he fits in with the broader Sonic lore. The game's promotional campaigning indicates that he was an exceptionally evil hedgehog and out to conquer the world right as Sonic was attempting to save it, but for all I know their rivalry could've turned out to be a giant misunderstanding, as it did with Knuckles in Sonic 3. In any event, this 30-second ad was happy to take that premise at face value and get a twisted little kick from imagining what it would look like if it were translated into real hedgehog biology. Take two hedgehogs, distil their respective natures to the very essences of good and evil, and what wonders might science behold?
Part of a series of ads from the early 00s that used footage of real hedgehogs to create a humorous contrast between Sonic's super-erinaceid abilities and his meeker real-world counterparts, this was less mean-spirited than those baffling Sonic 2 ads the UK got in 1992, at least on the hedgehogs' side of things. A cow meets a gruesome end, in a sequence that pays homage to the velociraptor feeding scene from Jurassic Park, but the carnage is handled with a heaping spoonful of absurdity that has it going down a whole lot easier. We all know that a hedgehog couldn't really do that to a cow, no matter much malevolent energy its deceptively small form might conceal (I'll also hazard a guess that the devouring of helpless cattle was not an accurate representation of how Shadow expresses his purported evil in the gameplay itself). There is likewise an intrinsic hilarity in seeing the ickle, distinctly non-threatening looking creature scurry around while the words "Evil Hedgehog" are displayed beneath it in big bold lettering. So what distinctive traits separate the good hogs from the truly rotten apples, according to the ad's internal narrative? A good hedgehog is a friendly little soul, docile enough to let you handle it and to feed genteelly from your palm, while an evil hedgehog must be safely contained behind a steel door, and its shockingly vicious appetite can only be appeased by feeding it live prey several times its size. This being a campaign that was fundamentally geared toward children, efforts were clearly made to restrict the resulting splatter to a tasteful minium, but you see enough to know that that cow did not exactly go out humanely. At the very end, the second hedgehog reaffirms its uncouth nature by belching, confirming itself as such an unrelenting revel that it hasn't even mastered civilised table manners.
The most flavoursome twist on offer was the decision to present this grisly scenario in the musty, washed-out aesthetic of an old-school educational reel, taking the absurdity to a degree that extends a little beyond the basic contrast between a good hog who eats politely and a bad hog who guzzles whole cows. The thing that most captivates me about this ad (besides the hedgehogs themselves) is the slight resemblance it bears to the cult BBC series Look Around You, a spoof of 1970s era science-focussed programming. It has the same cursed vintage tones and the same eye for understated detail that feeds into a bigger picture of omnipresent chaos. We might notice, for example, that the scientist tending to the evil hedgehog is missing an arm (if you look closely, you can make out the telltale bulge protruding from his chest where his arm has evidently been hidden away, but I think we can all suspend our disbelief for the sake of a morbid joke), indicating that live cattle aren't the only things the little pin cushion has a taste for. An even more macabre touch is the drain in the floor of the evil hedgehog's enclosure, hinting at the extreme amount of bovine blood these men anticipate being spilled. As with Look Around You, it plays like an artefact from a vividly uncanny bygone world, in which the rules of the universe appear significantly more unstable and the voice of authority becomes all the more suspect. Is this a window into an alternate reality where it's a fact of nature that hedgehogs can be divided into the conflicting camps of good and evil, and you have to know which one you're dealing with in order to live a long and healthy life? Or is the implication that these scientists actually created these little freaks of nature right there inside their labs (a line of thinking that is certainly invited by the Jurassic Park allusion) - an exceptionally good hedgehog designed to be the perfect pet, and an exceptionally evil hedgehog that's most likely in the running to join some kind of biological weapons program? Something tells me this won't end well for humanity.
The question of how the two opposing erinaceids would react if confronted with each other is not addressed here, but was answered by another installment within the same campaign, featuring two similar-looking hedgehogs, as well as an off-screen director engaged in the evil practice of inciting them to go head to head in the hedgehog equivalent of cock fighting. Once again, it was explicitly identified as a conflict between good and evil, yet despite being polar opposites on the moral spectrum, it would appear that they did not actually harbour any animosity toward each other - as soon they were set loose, they exercised their mutual pacifism by turning their pudgy round butts toward the screen. Sometimes it's only proper that adorability wins out.
No comments:
Post a Comment