Something tells me there may have been some Film Theory fans working on the set of the new Sonic movie.
Remember in the trailer, when they showed Sonic running past a radar gun,
And it returned a value of 760 miles per hour?
Well, that trailer clip prompted me to respond with this video,
where I looked at the reality of radar guns.
Coming to the conclusion that no gun would be able to reach a speed that high,
and that the radar would instead cap out around 200 miles per hour.
And wouldn't you know it, the scene was changed in the final movie.
Where Sonic's new speed clocks in around 250-300 miles per hour.
Coincidence?
Maybe, but then how do you explain the scene
when Robotnik, out of the blue, just encourages Sonic to slow down,
telling him that his speed is dangerous for his joints.
"They proved it, you know..." is exactly what he says.
Now, who is this "they", Eggman?
Could it be US?
I mean, we did dedicate an entire episode to whether Sonic's body could survive his own extreme speeds,
concluding that it's ultimately bad for his joints.
I'm just saying, there were more than a few parallels to our past Sonic episodes.
And I'm not mad, by any means.
In fact, I'm kind of flattered.
But, next time, you could at least invite me to the premiere.
Now, if you'll excuse me,
I'm off to feed my sadness with this never-ending pasta bowl from Olive Garden.
*slurps*
It never ends!
Hello, Internet! Welcome to Film Theory!
Where I'm here to remind you,
Sonic turned his life around in one year, you can too.
Today, I'd like to start by congratulating the team working on the Sonic movie.
Well done, guys!
You managed to do the impossible,
like, 3 times over, by my calculations.
In one movie you managed to
1. Create a good video game movie,
2. Take the criticism of the internet rage machine and use it to better your film,
and 3. Make a kids movie with a minimal amount of cringe.
I mean, having Sonic floss, not just once, but twice
was starting to push your luck a bit there,
but, you know what? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
I like to think of it as a callback to the days when Sonic
had to maintain his weird, little human-like teeth.
I mean, why floss when you can ~floss~?
But, seriously, I had a lot of fun with this movie.
It was a perfect balance of original story telling and fan service.
The subtle references to Chaos Emeralds,
the Sega Saturn, the theme music from the game.
Some of Sonic's iconic poses,
the fact that his punch is about as effective as being slapped across the face with a flaccid noodle.
I mean, you even man aged to keep some of the big cameo reveals secret,
including, what was, to me, the highlight of the movie,
the guest appearance of Sanic.
I mean, how'd you pull that one out of your egg sac, Eggman?
But, don't let that comedically oversized head get any bigger there, Sonic Team.
Because, today can't be all about praise.
I got to knock you for some things.
First off, blatant product placement for Zillow?
C'mon! We all know that Trulia's where it's at, fam!
What, what!
Actually, to be fair, any smart apartment shopper would be wise to use all the major resources available to them,
so, I'm not really taking sides.
That was just for comedic effect.
Then there's Longclaw the owl.
Let me get this straight:
You made up a new character for this movie?
This is a franchise where there's more throwaway characters than Game of Thrones.
And you just added to the pile instead of taking an established one?
I mean, I guess it follows in the great tradition of the fandom's OCs.
The only thing missing with Longclaw was a watermark over her head reading,
"DO NOT STEAL," in all caps.
But it's the last eency-weency nitpick I have that I want to focus on for today's episode.
You know, a small, teeny, tiny little problem I have
with the entire premise of the movie!
Sonic drops his rings through a magic portal,
and they end up in San Francisco.
So he and his human buddy Tom need to get them back
via a road trip.
You took the video game character known for running real fast,
and you put him in a truck for a road trip.
Going, like, 65 miles an hour.
Oh, sure.
You make the excuse that Sonic can't find San Francisco, and, yeah,
I get that the entire road trip was a veiled excuse for Sonic to connect with humans
in a way that he always longed to,
but was unable to because of his self-imposed isolation,
I get it!
But I just don't care.
As I crashed into the cold, dark water of the Pacific, I realized a few things:
I have no idea where I'm going.
And clearly, I'm not going to be able to do this on my own.
Don't sell yourself too short, there, Sonic.
I have a pretty good feeling that you would have been just fine left on your own.
So, today, we're putting that movie's premise to the test.
Was Sonic's road trip with Tom a faster way of them getting to San Francisco
than Sonic just running there by himself?
Knowing what we know about Sonic's speed,
as well as his apparent inability to use a basic map,
would Sonic blindly running across the country,
ultimately get him to San Francisco faster than hopping in the ol' Chevy Silverado
and driving there human-style?
So, let's start off with what we know.
In the movie, their entire road trip
takes roughly 2 days.
First night is Sonic's big night out,
eating chili dogs at the local biker bar,
by the late afternoon of the next day, they're in
San Francisco eating clam chowder and fighting off Robotnik.
But, I want to double check that figure.
Seems like it's a bit too short.
We know that their journey begins in Green Hills, Montana,
a fictional city, that, apparently,
isn't all that far off from the World's Largest Rubberband Ball.
A clue that you think might help us identify the real-world location of Green Hills,
but it doesn't.
The largest rubberband ball in the world was made in
Lauderhill, Florida, and now lives in a museum.
Just a couple of states away from Montana.
I mean, Sonic could be seeing a sign for the world's second largest rubberband ball,
a 175,000 band behemoth that lives in Eugene, Oregon,
but it's still too early in the road trip for them to be all the way over here,
when they started somewhere in Montana.
So, you know what?
Maybe we're better locating Green Hills using another method.
According to the welcome sign for Green Hills,
the city has a population of 1,981,
and an elevation of 3,445 feet.
Now, finding a place in Western Montana that fits both of those criteria is surprisingly challenging.
Because the Rocky Mountains are going right through that part of the country,
elevations tend to be higher, on average, there.
4,500 feet and up.
But by cross referencing Montana elevation maps with Montana population maps,
I was able to roughly pick out Powell County.
And specifically the city of Deer Lodge
as our prime candidate for the real-world equivalent of Green Hills.
With an elevation of 4,567 [feet],
and a population of just under 3,000
-- yeah, it isn't exact, but it's pretty darn close.
And about as close as you're going to find
in this part of Montana.
What also helped me settle on Deer Lodge was this moment in the movie, when Robotnik
is tracking Tom and Sonic down.
We see red dots marked out on the map,
presumably key areas that they visited along the trip.
And the starting dot is roughly here,
right where Idaho has that first little chunk in the state.
So, track that over, and BOOM!
We're back in Powell County.
So, citizens of Deer Lodge, all 3,000 of you
who are clearly watching this show,
no longer will your city just be known as
the home for the Montana State Prison...
Really? Jeez.
That is a bummer of a thing to be known for.
Well, all of you watching from your little prison TVs
while you're stamping out license plates,
take pride knowing that you are now the featured city
of a pretty okay video game movie!
Anyway, using Google Maps to calculate the length
of the road trip from Deer Lodge to San Francisco,
we see that there are two possible routes.
The Northern route, going up through Washington and down through Oregon,
and another, more direct route headed down through Idaho and Nevada.
Again, going back Robotnik's map that
I mentioned earlier, it seems like Tom took the Northern and longer route.
We see red dots in both of those Northwest states.
Plus, when Robotnik zooms in on the map,
he's looking at Southern Oregon, which, again,
isn't anywhere close to the southern route.
So, knowing this, we see that it's an 18 ½ hour
road trip from Deer Lodge to San Francisco.
Pretty aggressive for a 2 day road trip, but it's certainly not impossible.
It's actually a lot faster than I expected.
So, now the question is:
Would Sonic have been able to blindly find San Francisco in that same 18 ½  hour time?
Or, was the road trip, unbelievably,
a more efficient way of getting him to his final goal?
We know for a fact that Sonic can read.
In the opening montage of his life on Earth,
we see him reading stacks of Flash comic books.
He also knows that his rings wound up in San Francisco
because he read it on Tom's skin-tight tee-shirt.
So, it's less of an issue of Sonic not knowing where San Francisco is when he sees it,
but more of him just needing help finding the city outright in the first place.
Now, I'm going to assume that he isn't reading road signs to follow directions,
or mile markers.
We're just going to assume that, once he reaches the city,
if he manages to reach San Francisco,
he'll be able to visually see the Transamerica building where his rings landed,
because it's just such a recognizable piece of architecture.
So, now, how do we calculate the odds
of him finding San Francisco in the first place?
Well, I propose that we do it by
working under the assumption that he's just going to
run every street in America until he finds it.
Just a bunch of trial and error.
Brute force his way around the country
until he finally sees a sign that says,
"Welcome to San Francisco," or, even better, just winds up at the foot of the tower.
Which, of course, as any Sonic episode does,
leads us to the inevitable question of Sonic's speed.
Now, last time we covered the Sonic movie,
we calculated that Sonic was running near the speed of light.
It's the only way he'd be able to emit an electromagnetic discharge
capable of shutting off power grids and interrupting satellite flight.
But, let's not go to that extreme of a speed just yet.
Let's give the movie the best chance it has at winning this little road race.
Right at the start of their adventure,
shortly after Tom and Sonic escape Green Hills,
Tom kicks Sonic out of the truck, telling him to find San Francisco on his own,
prompting the scene that I played earlier.
Sonic runs west, just like Tom tells him,
and he crashes into the Pacific Ocean,
and then runs back with a fish on his head.
Now, timing this scene out,
-- yes, I actually had a stopwatch in the theatre,
so not only was I the weird, single guy in a room full of
families and small children,
but I was also the weird single guy in a room full of
families and small children carrying a stopwatch
and using it during the movie
-- but from the moment he takes off to the moment
he returns to the truck, it takes exactly 3.9 seconds.
I'm just going to round this to 4, just to
make the calculations a bit more simple.
Speaking of 4 seconds, I have a challenge
where you gotta go fast:
can you,
in the time that it took Sonic to run from Green Hills
to the Pacific Ocean and back,
ring the subscription bell, and leave a comment
down below?
Bet you can't!
Let's test it out, shall we?
Four!
Three!
Two!
One!
Did you do it?
Well, whether you did or didn't, just know that your subscription is appreciated.
I'm trying to get to 10 million subscribers
sometime this year on this channel,
and I need all the help I can get,
so, you subscribing means a lot.
Thank you so much!
Now on with the episode.
If he took Tom's advice literally,
Sonic ran straight west to the Pacific,
and then back in that amount of time.
drawing a straight line out from Deer Lodge
out the Pacific, you see that, at this point,
there are about 550 miles,
or 885 kilometers away from the ocean.
That means, in 4 seconds, Sonic traveled
1,100 miles, or 1,770 kilometers.
That's 275 miles, or 442 kilometers a second,
or, our final number of 990,000 miles per hour.
1.6 million kilometers an hour!.
Now, Tom gives Sonic the instructions of, "head west,"
so, let's do that.
Let's assume that Sonic explores every roadway west of
where he currently is in Green Hills, Montana.
That's mostly going to be the states of Idaho
Washington, Oregon, California, a bit more of Montana,
and Nevada.
So, I added up all of the roadways,
both paved and unpaved, for all of those states,
and found that we're dealing with about
1,083,000 miles worth of roadway.
1.7 million kilometers.
Sonic would be able to cover all of that
in a little over an hour.
But, okay, maybe Sonic doesn't know what direction west is.
Maybe he goes the wrong way.
Well, across all 50 states, the US has
4,092,729 miles of roadway.
6.58 million kilometers.
It is far and away the best, longest, most robust
road system in the world.
And Sonic would be able to cover it all in 4 hours.
Giving him more than enough time to get lost,
double back, and stop for every
giant rubberband ball that he sees along the way
while still making it to the Transamerica building
3 times over before Tom's truck would.
And remember, that's still me assuming
the worst-case-scenario.
That's Sonic not traveling at light speed,
not reading road signs, that's Sonic traveling
all the roads in America before finally stumbling
across San Francisco as his very last destination,
'cause, you know, one of the nation's largest cities
might be hard to miss.
But you know what? Call me Angelica Schuyler
'cause I am still not satisfied!
What if Sonic got, really, REALLY lost,
and took a roadway that went south of the border?
Or up to Canada?
Or maybe he just wanted to enjoy a nice huevos rancheros near the Nazca lines.
So I tallied up all the roadways in all the countries and
territories of both North and South America,
because I didn't feel like separating
out the island nations, to be honest.
So I went the whole nine yards, and I got myself
7,029,306 miles of roadway,
11. 3 million kilometers.
7 hours and 6 minutes worth of Sonic runntime
to run every street, every roadway
both paved and unpaved,
in every piece of land in all of North and South America,
and still,
STILL he is taking up less than half the time
it would require for Tom to drive him
that 18 ½ road trip.
And so, yeah. I went there,
because I'd already come this far,
why not go the final step?
I went to the CIA's World Factbook and added up
all 215 entries they had for the roadways
around the world.
Paying attention to every last number,
even Tuvalu's little reported 8 kilometers of paved roadway because that's how type A I am!
An absolutely tedious process of data crunching
that was rendered entirely useless when I got to the
final 4 entries of that CIA list,
and saw that "World" was a separate entry unto itself.
Why wouldn't you put that at the top of the list, CIA?!
Or, at the very least, the very bottom?
I know that you watch this show,
because you're nervous about the things that are in my search history from researching this series,
so c'mon guys!
Do some basic data entry best practices for me, alright?
Anyway, I came up with, well, I came up with
a little more than half of what they reported as the world total.
Not 100% sure how it happened, to be honest.
I think they counted the European Union twice
in their calculations,
because their numbers just don't make sense
relative to what they're reporting.
Central Intelligence Agency my foot!
More like Crappy Information Archive.
And that, my friends, is why it pays to be thorough
and double check government organizations
with your own Excel spreadsheet.
Regardless, my final total for all the roadways in the world,
was 25,010,432 miles,
40.25 million kilometers.
A distance that would take Sonic 1 day and 1 hour to run.
Meaning that, finally, FINALLY,
we've reached a number that Tom's road trip is able to beat.
Or is it?
Remember, we said that 18 ½ hours was Tom's trip if he drove non-stop,
but we know that they took breaks,
they beat up biker thugs,
they farted around in their hotel room, figuratively and literally.
(flatulence)
In total, that road trip was at least a day and a half,
probably 36-40 hours total before everything is said and done.
Meaning that Sonic, running every roadway in the world,
would still end up taking a shorter time than
sitting shotgun next to Tom down the ol' Route 90 West.
And again, remember, this is me taking the conservative estimate on every step along the way, here.
We're not even factoring in his ability to travel near the speed of light.
And don't you get started on me about how they needed Tom
to smuggle him to the top of the building when he got there.
At the start of the road trip, they didn't know that little bit of information.
And, as Sonic and Eggman chase each other
through the city in the opening sequence of the movie,
we see Sonic's ability to literally run up the exterior walls of buildings.
Sure, it's an external view, very wideout from the action,
but still, he is scaling the building like a champ.
It's almost as if the whole thing was manufactured
by Sonic to make Tom feel important in the first place.
That manipulative little hedgehog.
Seems like speed isn't his only super ability.
So there you have it, my little chaotics.
You should watch the Sonic movie for a lot of reasons.
It's fun, it's funny, it does the characters justice.
Just don't roll in expecting a premise that makes a whole lot of sense.
Or an accurate location of the world's largest rubberband ball.
OR an appearance from Charmy the Bee.
C'MON GUYS! You make Longclaw,
but you neglect Charmy the Bee??
Time to fire up the internet rage machine one more time for the sequel!
But first, I have to shop for an apartment.
Zillow ... dot com.
But hey! That's just a theory!
A Film Theory!
Aaaaand cut.
*video game music*
