Characters / Sonic the Hedgehog (film series) - Extraterrestrials

aka: Sonic The Hedgehog Film Series Sonic The Hedgehog

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Main Characters

Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic the Hedgehog

Voiced by: Ben Schwartz (English), Taishi Nakagawa (Japanese) ^{Foreign VAs}Luis Arturo Villar (Latin-American Spanish), Christian Hedlund (Swedish), Manolo Rey (Brazilian Portuguese), Maël Davan-Soulas (Quebec French), Malik Bentalha (EU French), Renato Novara (Italian), Um Sang-hyun (Korean), Wang Chenguang (PRC Mandarin), Cheung Yu Tung (HK Cantonese), Guo Lin (TW Mandarin)
Baby Sonic Voiced by: Benjamin L. Valic (English), Mahoto Terajima (Japanese)^{Foreign VAs}Luca Tesei (Italian)

Appearances: Sonic the Hedgehog | Sonic the Hedgehog 2 | Sonic Drone Home | Knuckles | Sonic the Hedgehog 3

"Today's forecast calls for clear sunny skies, and a 100% chance of adventure!"

^{Click here to see Super Sonic}
"It's over, Eggman."

"I'm Sonic, a little blue ball of super energy in an extremely handsome package!"

An anthropomorphic blue hedgehog gifted with super speed who hails from a mysterious planet far away from Earth. Having escaped his home planet as a child to avoid being hunted by those who desired his power, he now lives on Earth in secret around the sleepy town of Green Hills, Montana. However, when his super-speed inadvertently causes a massive EMP that disables all electrical power in the surrounding area, he catches the attention of the government and one particularly peculiar scientist. Caught in a bind when his portal rings go missing, he comes to rely on the assistance of a local sheriff that he's seen around the town to recover them.

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• 11th-Hour Superpower: Downplayed. Sonic regularly demonstrates a "power" that manifests as some form of blue lightning that appears to allow him to move faster, deal outsized damage to objects he Spin Dashes into, and destroy any electrical devices nearby. This power only manifests when Sonic is showing some form of negative emotion (in particular stress/anger), and he doesn't use it when running from Robotnik during the final chase. However, when Tom stands up against Robotnik and states Sonic is his friend, Sonic suddenly erupts with this electrical energy and is able to actually harness it for the final battle, which both overloads Robotnik's flying machine (which is using one of Sonic's quills) and allows him to deal serious damage to it. Played more straight in the second movie, where Sonic makes use of the Chaos Emeralds that emerge from the shattered Master Emerald, becoming Super Sonic.
• Accent Adaptation: Although Ben Schwartz uses a standard American accent as Sonic, in the Latin American Spanish dub, Sonic speaks with a slight undescribable European accent, probably to make him sound more alien compared with the rest of the human cast. This is quite justified in this case, as his voice actor, Luis Arturo Villar, is a Mexican man of Czech origin.
• Achievements in Ignorance: During the highway chase, in being pursued by Robotnik's convoy, Sonic accidentally trips into a ball and uses his Spin Attack for the first time, having no idea what he did, how he did it, or why it worked. When it comes time for the final confrontation, he now understands how it works and how to use it to great effect, repeatedly slamming into Robotnik's ship before the doctor can even react.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Adaptational Cuteness, that is. The final design used for Sonic is very conventionally cute, not just compared to his original movie design, but also to his "modern" look in the games. This Sonic is very fluffy and wide-eyed. Due to his new backstory and desire for companions, Sonic looks more child-like compared with his games counterpart, who has more of a "bad boy" design and is flawless by comparison.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: In the main games, Sonic is a more collected Magnetic Hero, void of angst or a stated backstory, and he is frequently confident and popular with his friends. In the movie, he is more akin to a child who is desperate for companionship after years of isolation and the loss of his mother figure, even though he masks that with his usual snarky attitude and playful charisma.
• Adaptational Heroism: Downplayed. While Sonic is undeniably a hero in the games, as his Image Song "It Doesn't Matter" indicates, he tends to not care about whether or not he is seen as a hero or villain, preferring to do what he feels is right in his heart, regardless of how he's perceived, which sometimes means he'll do things that clash with his heroic perception on occasion. In the films, however, he actively wants to be regarded as a hero and tries to do the right thing whenever possible, even if he causes things to go awry due to his recklessness.
• Adaptational Personality Change:
  • Sonic in the games is described as a free spirit. He has no home nor a need for one, and it's constantly on the move, always visiting new places. This Sonic, however, spent ten years living in the same place despite not being able to interact with anyone, hates the idea of having to abandon it, and desperatedly craves a place he could call a home.
  • While Sonic would never be considered the height of maturity in the game canon, he's generally shown to be somewhat self-reliant and capable of acting alone. Here, in part due to being younger than his usual self, he's portrayed as more immature and in need of a guardian figure to help him figure out his way in the world.
  • In most media, Sonic is always cool and collected, and is never seen crying or even getting too emotional, never fears anything (except maybe deep water) and has a constant air of invincibility. This Sonic, on the other hand, is much more emotional (to the point that the first movie's plot is triggered by Sonic suffering a spectacular emotional meltdown), expresses sadness and fear at various points, and generally comes off as much more vulnerable.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Downplayed with Knuckles at first, he and Sonic start out as enemies similar to in the video games. But when they reconcile, they not only become friends, but Sonic and Knuckles actually agreed to be co-protectors of the Master Emerald and it's implied Knuckles allowed himself to be adopted into the Wachowski family, becoming Sonic's brother in all but name.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: In the games, Sonic has always been associated with the wind. In the movie, his speed conjures static electricity. That said, he does learn how to manipulate wind somewhat in the final chase with Robotnik, utilizing his speed to create a localized sand tornado while in the desert.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Rather than the peach-colored arms he has in the games, Sonic instead has blue arms like his Sonic Boom counterpart.
• Age Lift: In the games, Sonic is officially stated to be 15. According to director Jeff Fowler, this film’s version of Sonic is slightly younger, at either 13 or 14.
  • It's likely that Sonic was 13 during the events of the first movie and 14 in the sequel, given the approximate 8-month time spam between the two movies, and Sonic had noticeably matured physically in the sequel.
• Agony of the Feet: The first pair of shoes he's shown wearing are falling apart, being held together with duct tape, and have large holes in the bottoms. When Maddie removes Sonic's shoes, there are also large holes in his socks, and Maddie notes that Sonic's feet must really hurt from all the running he's done in them. Maddie's niece Jojo fixes this problem by giving Sonic a pair of brand new shoes, and some fresh socks, that closely resemble his game counterpart's. It's also a plot point, as part of why Robotnik is able to realize what he is, as the resulting footprints show his strange feet and give Robotnik a lot of details about him.
• Alien Among Us: Upon fleeing his home planet and ending up on Earth, Sonic spent 10 years hiding in Green Hills and spying on its citizens, with Crazy Carl being at least aware of his existence. After tagging along with Tom, he still keeps a low profile and wears a disguise when at the bar, and is hidden in a bag when taken to San Francisco.
• Aliens Speaking English: It isn't explained why he can (and he can also read English since he has several comic books in his hole) unless he spent his years listening to humans to pick up English and Longclaw talking to him was Translation Convention. There's no such excuse for Tails and Knuckles, especially the latter.
• All-Loving Hero: Robotnik aside, Sonic is friendly to just about anyone he meets.
• Always Someone Better: He's this to Dr. Robotnik. While the mad scientist is the smartest person in the world, has experience in black ops, and can even tap into the Master Emerald, these factors turn out to be pointless in the face of Sonic's functionally limitless potential.
• Amusing Alien: Sonic is explicitly an extraterrestrial and treated as such, albeit responsible for much of the films' humor thanks to his fun-loving personality and a very hyperactive disposition.
• Anthropomorphic Shift: Sonic was more humanoid-looking than his normal Funny Animal appearance in the original promotional material. This extended to his teeth being more human-esque than usual and him having fingernail-esque claws on his non-gloved hands. Post-fandom backlash, Paramount made him look far more cartoony and expressive to keep him closer to his origins, but he still looks slightly more humanoid (having visible shoulders, smaller hands, a small-but-visible neck, and slightly-pronounced calf muscles).
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Despite being an alien and having lived on Earth for a year, Sonic is quick to tell Tails, who tells him Knuckles is on Earth for the Master Emerald, that said emerald was just a bedtime story. He's soon shown to be wrong in that belief.
• Badass Adorable: His redesign after the pre-release has made him look infinitely more adorable, and even more so when he was a baby, but he's still fast enough to run through his entire hometown in less than two seconds.
• Berserk Button: In the second film, threatening to hurt his family is very much a big one, with Robotnik exploiting it upon his return to leave Sonic open to Knuckles' attacks. He eventually learns at the end why not to, when Super Sonic swiftly obliterates his giant robot and leaves him to fall to his potential death after the doctor attempts to kill Tom and Maddie along with him.
• Be the Ball: Much like in the games and with real-life hedgehogs, Sonic can curl into a ball. He initially does this for more mundane tasks, such as disguising himself as a ball in Tom's attic to hide from Robotnik's drones and later acting like a basketball for him to play at the Piston Pit. Sonic eventually learns to weaponize this skill to perform his signature Spin Dash attack.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Sonic pretty much acts like a hyperactive teenager with a short attention span, but as seen in several scenes, when he has to deal with a serious threat, he can become crafty and downright dangerous.
• Big Brother Instinct: It doesn't take long for Sonic to develop this towards Tails, most notably when he protectively places himself in between Tails and Robotnik's robots in the ice cave.
• Big Eater: At the Piston Pit, Sonic orders nachos and buffalo wings, and when the order doesn't arrive, he downs an entire basket of chili dogs during his Bullet Time run inside the bar.
• Blatant Lies: He says in his opening narration that he's "living his best life on Earth". This is a complete lie. Despite having made himself a home, Sonic is not only desperately lonely, but he has to constantly keep himself hidden, because he knows that people will exploit his power if he's ever found out.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • Ever since he was a little kid, Sonic was constantly hunted down on his home planet due to his powers. This led him to flee to Earth, only to find himself chased by Robotnik (and by extent, the United States government) for the same reason.
  • Downplayed, but this is partially the reason he chooses to give up being Super Sonic, as being Harmful to Touch means he can't give or receive hugs, not to mention being all-powerful doesn't help if you still want to grow and develop as a person.
• Blood Knight: While not as prominently so as his game counterpart, there are still shades of this trait present, as Sonic loves a good fight, due to him watching too many action movies. It's best shown when he faces the thugs in the bar or when he insists on fighting Robotnik's Badnik drone in Tom's house despite his weakened condition from the tranquilizer dart and Tom trying to get him away from it.
  Sonic: Aww, don't tell me that's all you got. I'm just getting started! Let me know if you want to go round 2 with the blue!
• Blue Is Heroic: Sonic is a blue hedgehog who is the hero of the movie. Contrast him with Robotnik, who wears black and later red.
• Bouncing Battler: Downplayed. Movie Sonic isn't restricted to his signature abilities and has a more diverse moveset this time. However, bouncing off enemies after hitting them in ball form remains the key component of his fighting style.
• Bullet Time: Sonic's Super-Speed allows him to move so fast that everything appears to stand still or move in super slow motion.
  • In the first movie, the first time he uses this ability is to save himself and Tom from irate patrons at the Western-themed bar, messing around with all the participants of a Bar Brawl he accidentally started. The second time is when he pushes Tom & Maddie off the Transamerica to save them from Robotnik and his drones, who immediately fire a Macross Missile Massacre at him. Unfortunately, Robotnik uses Sonic's dropped quill to enter Bullet Time himself, and his jet now moves at the same speed as Sonic does, at which point he fires a blast at Sonic that knocks him out of his Bullet Time focus.
  • Again, he uses this twice in the second movie. The first is during the snowboard sequence to destroy a wall of Badniks, either by jumping off them or turning a Buzz Bomber's laser on its allies. The second is during his rematch with Knuckles in the labyrinth, cutting a swath through the staircase to the Master Emerald with his speed and curling into a ball to repeatedly slam the echidna further down into it before he can react.
• Came Back Strong: After he gains his Heroic Second Wind, the electricity that powers him increases so much that he's just pulsating with power.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • He uses the phrase "Gotta Go Fast!" at least once in both movies and the Pre-Quill comic.
  • In Japanese, he uses the phrase "rakusho daze"^note  Meaning "Easy Victory", but is a more casual and compared to "Piece of Cake", which he also has a habit of saying in the games.
• Character Exaggeration: Sonic's quirkiness and energy level are ramped up here. He's depicted as barely keeping still in the film, while his game counterpart is more laid-back.
• Cheerful Child: As a kid back on his homeworld, before he was separated from Longclaw. He's still relatively cheerful on Earth, but he does lay on the snark from time to time.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Downplayed. His sequestering and lack of social interaction/schooling have left some pretty noticeable gaps in his understanding of the world. For example, he can read and hold a conversation normally^note this is actually very difficult to learn correctly without two-way communication in real life, but doesn't seem to understand geography or maps.
• Code Name: In the second movie, he prefers to be called by his "superhero name", Blue Justice^*trademark pending.
• Color Character: In the second name, he starts to fight crime under the code name of Blue Justice.
• Colorful Contrails: Whenever Sonic is on the move, he kicks his trademark speed into high gear by blitzing himself across the terrain at such speeds so fast, he'll leave behind a blue-colored trail behind himself, hence why he's even nicknamed the Blue Blur. Pretty much a given due to his well-known Super-Speed.
• Comically Missing the Point: He calls Maddie "pretzel lady" because he observed her practicing yoga, which led him to believe she had no bones.
• Composite Character: He has shades of this in both design and personality:
  • Following the redesign, Sonic's design has struck a balance between his Classic, Modern, and Boom designs. He has the height, larger torso, and attire from the Classic design in addition to being a little bit younger; the green eyes, darker blue fur color, and quill length of the Modern design; and the blue arms, scruffy/bushy quills, and visible neck and shoulders from his Boom design. He also maintains his general expressiveness from all three designs. Additionally, his trainers appear to be a hybrid between his iconic red shoes and the Soap Shoes from Sonic Adventure 2.
  • Personality-wise, he's mainly his Modern self: cocky, cool, and not being one to take most things seriously, but simultaneously knowing when to step up once things truly get dangerous. However, he also likes to horse around and be silly, much like his Boom and Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog incarnations, with the latter specifically also giving him his trickster-esque personality.
  • In regards to his abilities, along with his speed, he also has electrical powers which are tied to his emotions, specifically his anger. The only character in the Sonic mythos who has elemental powers that are fuelled by emotions is Blaze the Cat. His electric powers also bring to mind his Evil Knockoff Metal Sonic.
• Conjoined Eyes: Subverted. His eyes are separate, instead of having his eyes close enough to touch. Despite not looking like it at first glance, there's a tiny white patch of fur between his eyes to give the impression of the aforementioned closeness.
• Cool Big Bro: True to his game counterpart, he quickly becomes this to Tails in the second movie.
• The Cowl: Played for Laughs in the trailers for the sequel. He perches atop a building under a full moon and readies himself to jump into action and stop some robbers like a vigilante anti-hero... before almost running over a pedestrian and letting dynamite fall into the sewers. Tom explicitly says Sonic is trying to act like Batman.
• Dash Attack: His signature Spin Dash from the games makes its way into the movie, though Sonic initially pulls it off only by accident. He learns later to control his powers and use it regularly. By the sequel, he has trained it sufficiently to perform it at will against Knuckles.
• Deadpan Snarker: Like every other version of the character, this Sonic really knows how to lay on the snark, though it helps that the movie seems to run on being a World of Snark.
• Death Glare: Once he regains his strength, he gives this one to Robotnik. He later gives an intense one to Robotnik again in the second film while confronting him as Super Sonic.
• Delinquent: Trailers and promotional material describe him as a juvenile delinquent. The reality of the movie is less so: he's a spunky, hyper-active character, but the delinquency is mostly down to his status as a loner living on the outside of society, with only himself as company. Otherwise, he has everyone's best intentions in mind, and is typically very friendly.
  • With that said, at no point in the movie is he shown actually paying for anything — not that he reasonably could without being discovered, to be fair — and it's made clear that he's never been to school. It's implied that he starts going when he's adopted by Tom and Maddie, though.
• Destructive Savior: In the second movie, his vigilante activities accidentally contribute to a city block in Seattle being destroyed, which earns him a talking-to from Tom.
• Disney Death: In the climax of the first movie, it appears that Robotnik manages to kill Sonic in Green Hills. However, when Tom declares he was his friend, he gains the willpower to come back at full strength and beat the villain.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Sonic is clearly caught off guard by how his lone running around a baseball field caused the enormous EMP-like phenomenon that caused a blackout across all of the Pacific Northwest. He also admits that he has no idea how he could hit one of Robotnik's vehicles so hard with a spin attack that it crashed.
• Does Not Like Spam: He doesn't like mushrooms, and dreads having to retreat to Mushroom World to escape danger and villains. This is possibly a friendly jab at either his longtime rivals from the Console Wars, or a sly reference to his own series' Mushroom Hill Zone.
• Drives Like Crazy: Judging by how wrecked Rachel's car is upon arriving at the tower where his bag of rings ended up, it's certainly safe to say he does this to a T. When fleeing Robotnik along with Tom on a highway, he pulls some equally reckless moves behind the wheel because he's reading the instructions and driving at the same time. He's more experienced by the time he has to escape from Knuckles in the sequel, taking the wheel from the new crazy driver, Tails.
• Emotional Powers: This is how his offensive abilities actually work. His body starts producing blue lightning whenever he starts feeling anger, extreme joy, sorrow, etc., while his eyes turn from green to glowing blue. The first example of this power being shown is during the baseball scene, where Sonic realizes that he is completely alone, and all the stress of being alone on Earth for 10 years causes Sonic to emit a powerful electromagnetic blast that causes a blackout across the Pacific Northwest. Come the end of the film, The Power of Friendship causes Sonic to consciously bring out his full power, and it is implied that he has learned to control this.
  • Discussed in a deleted scene between Sonic and Tom.
• EMP: Sort of. Sonic accidentally causes one by running around in the baseball field, and it triggers a power blackout affecting the entire northern Pacific coast of the United States. What's unusual is that the energy pattern specifically doesn't resemble an actual EMP blast, which is caused by a nuclear weapon going off, and would destroy all non-shielded electronics in the area of effect, instead of just knocking out the power. This is relevant to the plot inasmuch as it's why the government sends Robotnik in to investigate rather than immediately declare war.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • While taking a role as a Vigilante Man, he's against using his powers to unnecessarily take away a common criminal's life, and resorts to Fight Like a Normal. However, when Dr. Robotnik attempts to kill Sonic's loved ones and threatens to take over the entire universe so long as he lives, Sonic (in his Super form) lets Robotnik fall with his Giant Eggman Robot, not caring if he'll die from the long fall.
  • Also Played for Laughs in the second film. Despite said mutual contempt for Eggman and wasting no time trying to punch his lights out upon their reunion, he is quite creeped out when the doctor takes their vendetta to the point of a "going rabid" and clawing at the heroes' vehicle like a feral animal.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials: Sonic's only choice of clothing in his life is a pair of white gloves and his sneakers. Even when disguised at the bar, his outfit doesn't have pants. He is aware of it somewhat, as he mentions to Tom that he wears no pants. In the sequel, when he and Tails disguise themselves in winter wear, they actually are wearing pants.
• Fast as Lightning: He has the ability to generate lightning when he runs, similar to The Flash. It's because of this that he causes a huge blackout across the entire Pacific Northwest.
• Five-Finger Discount: Implied. Given his Super-Speed and being a talking alien hedgehog, he can't exactly walk into a store and buy food, toys, and other such things. One very brief gag even has him disappear and come back from a tourist trap with a bunch of souvenirs suddenly in hand. However, Jeff Fowler, in an interview, touched on this by pointing out that most of the things in Sonic's collection are "old" and "secondhand", indicating that even if Sonic stole some things to survive, he also took a lot of his stuff out of the garbage.
• Flying Brick: As Super Sonic, he's seemingly indestructible and strong enough to easily swat Robotnik's Humongous Mecha aside.
• Fragile Speedster: Zigzagged. While renowned for his supersonic speed, Sonic's small height and lithe figure keep him from hurting a burly biker at a bar with a bottle. There's also the fact that being in close proximity to some explosions knocks Sonic out cold, even to the point of nearly dying twice. However, this is due to Sonic not understanding his powers or how they work, but he eventually unleashes his full strength once he gains the will to actively fight Robotnik in the climax, hitting his ship with enough strength —- while powered by conducted electricity —- to send him flying through a portal and send him packing into the Mushroom Planet. Sonic's also shown to recover from injuries that would normally leave humans limping.
• Friend to All Children: He quickly becomes attached to Tom's niece Jojo after she gives him new shoes, aka the traditional red sneakers he's always been featured with. It also doesn't take long for him to become a big brother figure to Tails after they meet.
• Friend to All Living Things: His first scene as a teenager has Sonic saving a tortoise from being run over by a truck and treating it to a high-speed run with him.
• Furry Reminder: What are hedgehogs known for? Sonic occasionally curls up into a spiky, non-rolling ball, for example, to hide by blending in with other sports balls.
• Gasshole: A downplayed example, since it only happens twice in the first film, but after he eats some chili dogs during the bar brawl scene, he is seen burping and then letting out a loud fart much later on.
• Glass Cannon: Much like in the games, Sonic's fleet feet are offset by relative physical fragility. While he manages to total a tank in one shot on pure accident, he is knocked unconscious by a small bomb from one of Robotnik's machines, and later is almost killed by a single blast from the laser cannon on Robotnik's hovercraft. Soon after recovering, he's at full strength and quickly tears the Eggpod apart.
• Glowing Eyes: Sonic's eyes shift from green to glowing bright blue when his body is conducting electricity. His eyes flash for a moment in the first trailer (as electricity momentarily travels along his body), and are shown to full-on glow in every trailer afterward.
• Golden Super Mode: He turns into Super Sonic when he gets the Chaos Emeralds, essentially a Reality Warping Flying Brick that is Harmful to Touch.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Downplayed. While not insane, Sonic has clearly gotten desperate for meaningful contact after more than a decade of being alone. When the film begins, he's been living in a cave on Earth for ten years, and his extended isolation has taken a toll on his mental state. He pretends to have conversations and activities by using his Super-Speed, and also pretends to have friends by spying on the residents of Green Hills. He even acknowledges at one point that his loneliness has driven him a "bit crazy". Sonic finally hits his breaking point while playing a baseball game by himself. He scores a home run, cheers for himself, and looks over at the stands to see them completely empty. The resulting frustration and sorrow Sonic feels is what leads him to trigger the EMP that knocks out power across half the country.
  Sonic: I really am alone... all alone. Forever.
• Good Is Not Soft: Like his games incarnation, Sonic pulls no punches at all in stopping the likes of Robotnik. Perhaps taking it a step further than said incarnation, since this Sonic doesn't expect his Robotnik to bounce back afterwards.
  • Exploited when Sonic sees Robotnik for the first time after the latter's banishment. After ignoring a blatantly angry Sonic's warning to get lost and mercilessly pushing his Relative Button, Sonic concentrates his power into his fist and tries to punch Robotnik in the face with it. From the absolutely pissed look on Sonic's face, he was definitely planning on messing Robotnik up for daring to return, and might have succeeded if Robotnik hadn't brought a certain red echidna with him to enact his revenge.
  • Discussed at the end of the same film where his transformation into Super Sonic and cold defeat of Robotnik (with intent of death) leaves Knuckles to think the new form has made Sonic into a different and very dangerous being...only for Sonic to act like his normal playful self immediately after, making clear that nope, he was in perfect state of mind the whole time.
• Gratuitous English: Just like Jun'ichi Kanemaru's take on the character, this version of Sonic is not shy to spout out English words here and there in the Japanese dub.
• Happily Adopted: He was raised by an owl called Longclaw, and is essentially adopted by Tom and Maddie at the end. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 goes one step further and has Sonic officially see Tom as a father by calling him "dad" at the end.
• Harmful to Touch: According to Knuckles, Super Sonic is this, as the former warns Tom and Maddie to not touch him. Sonic agrees with/confirms this by noting the two would have burst into flames if they had hugged him.
• Hates Being Alone: He enjoys his solo life on Earth, but he hates feeling lonely and longs for true friends. While Sonic follows Longclaw's instructions to remain out of sight, he's gotten a little desperate for someone to talk to, having been alone for 10 years since he arrived on Earth.
• Healing Factor: Robotnik shoots him with a laser right as he's about to enter another of his portal rings, and he comes out of it with most of his fur on his body looking frizzled and charred, specifically around his torso. Even his own gloves and shoes become tattered from the blast. Moments later, he has a Heroic Second Wind as his power suddenly emerges and fully rejuvenates him. The injuries that he's received from Robotnik earlier are nowhere to be seen at all.
• Heroes Love Dogs: While Sonic, at first, resents Ozzy because Tom considers him his best friend, once they meet, the hedgehog quickly warms up to the dog.
• Heroic Second Wind: In the final confrontation with Dr. Robotnik, Sonic is struck by an explosion that knocks him out, and it appears he's either dead or unconscious. As Robotnik mocks Sonic, Tom jumps in to fight him, but is knocked off. Robotnik then mocks Tom for trying to risk his life for "this... thing", and Tom angrily corrects him, stating that thing is named Sonic, and he was his friend. Sonic, who has spent the entire movie believing he would live alone without any friends, suddenly opens his eyes as blue sparks erupt about his body, and immediately challenges Robotnik to round 2 using his innate power.
• Heroic Wannabe: The sequel shows at the beginning that he's trying to be a comic book superhero in real life. Unfortunately, despite his power and good intentions, he's too inexperienced and unskilled, which results in quite a lot of property damage. Even the hostage rescued told him twice that he sucked at heroism.
• Heroic Willpower: In the sequel, when he becomes Super Sonic, Knuckles fears the ultimate power will consume Sonic, but luckily, he completely retains his entire personality while in this god-like state, and even willingly gives it up once his battle with Robotnik is over.
  Knuckles: ...Okay, he's exactly the Sonic you once knew.
• Hidden Depths: Several Freeze Frame Bonuses during the second movie and the comic show that Sonic likes drawing self-portraits.
• History Repeats: Sonic left his homeworld to avoid being hunted by those who would like to harness his power. Ten years after moving to Earth, Dr. Robotnik begins to hunt him down for the same reason, to which Sonic resolves to reluctantly leave Earth for the Mushroom World. By the end of the movie, Sonic decides it's finally time to stop running, and sends Robotnik away from Earth instead of escaping again.
• How Do I Shot Web?: Though Sonic is naturally adept at running at high speed and going into Bullet Time, he has to learn how to weaponize his Super-Speed. The first time he performs his signature Spin Dash comes completely by accident, and he doesn't fully master it until the climax. Trailers for the sequel show him as already proficient with the move, performing it at will against Knuckles.
• Humble Hero: While the second film does show Sonic playing hero early in the film, Sonic ultimately is happy to live a quiet life in the peaceful community of Green Hills with friends and family of his own. Even when he gains godlike power as Super Sonic, he gives it up soon after saving the day, with his only indulgence being summoning a couple of chili dogs.
  Tails: Sonic, you were the most powerful hero in the universe, and you let it go. Why?
  Sonic: Because... I still have some growing up to do. And I kinda like being a kid.
• I Choose to Stay: After getting back his bag of rings in San Francisco, he hesitates before escaping to another world —- and is stopped from doing so by Robotnik. After beating him, Sonic decides to stay on Earth of his own accord, and gets adopted by the Wachowskis.
• Iconic Attribute Adoption Moment:
  • He has a good handle on his powers, but isn't a fighter because he's been in hiding for ten years, so he doesn't use any of his attacks from the games. He accidentally performs his trademark Spin Attack for the first time during Robotnik's first attack on him and Tom, figuring out how to deliberately use it during the climactic battle against Robotnik.
  • Sonic doesn't start with his usual red sneakers, instead wearing extremely worn-down shoes that are being held together with duct tape. He receives the classic red shoes as a gift from Jojo, Tom's niece, to replace his old ones.
• I Got Bigger: Downplayed, as it's not mentioned by the characters, but Sonic ages between the two films. In the first movie, Sonic only reaches up to Tom's chest when the human kneels down. By the second film, Sonic is tall enough to go past Tom's shoulders when he's kneeling down. Sonic has even grown enough to lean on his parents' shoulders in the final battle of the second movie when they're sitting right next to him, while in the first he only reached their waists. Sonic's face is also chubbier and rounder in the first, but has sharpened and become more angular ever since. Even his spines are pointier, and his frame has grown. This is rare in mainstream Sonic media, since we have never seen him progressively age before, allowing him to feel more like a real teenager and less like a mascot. It's likely he's grown nine inches ever since getting adopted.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: Hiding from literally everyone after getting to Earth has left him incredibly lonely. Unsurprisingly, he becomes instantly attached to Tom when he finally shows himself. He doesn't even decide for himself that Tom is his friend, keeping this unfulfilled wish as the last item on his bucket list. Cue Tom protecting Sonic's believed-to-be-dead body from a callous Robotnik, declaring Sonic to be his friend, and then...
• Improv Fu: When Sonic's superspeed isn't enough to defeat whatever (or whoever) he's fighting, he often resorts to these sorts of tactics. Drills, snowballs, boar heads, cop cars, you name it. Notably, he starts off the avalanche scene in the second movie by destroying a badnik to use its scrap as a snowboard. This stands in contrast to Knuckles' more straightforward and honourable form of combat, and Tails' reliance on his gadgets.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: The climax of the second movie shows that Sonic's heart is so pure that he doesn't get corrupted by power of the Master Emerald, who has a history of turning its wielders to evil. Though Knuckles feared he would be warped forever by the Emerald's power, Sonic uses its magic for the mundane purpose of conjuring up a chili dog, gladly reverting to his regular form after defeating Robotnik.
• Inexplicably Awesome: It's never revealed how or why Sonic has his powers. We're only told that Sonic must keep those powers away from people who would abuse them.
• Innocent Aliens: Sonic is, at his core, a nice and good-hearted kid who wants nothing but to make friends. Even though his bucket list includes stuff such as "starting a bar brawl", he sees it as an innocent form of living life to his fullest before he leaves Earth.
• Innocently Insensitive: He causes a fair amount of unintentional grief towards Tom during their adventure, though he improves later on.
• Intelligent Gerbil: Sonic is an extraterrestrial being who happens to resemble a bipedal hedgehog. However, as analyzed by Maddie, his physiology is completely different from any animal on the planet.
• Interspecies Adoption: Before coming to Earth, his primary caretaker and parental figure was an owl named Longclaw. By the end of the movie, he gets adopted by his human friends, Tom and Maddie.
• Interspecies Friendship: He develops one with Tom Wachowski throughout the movie, and one of the items in his to-do list is "make a real friend". The sheriff is probably the first friend he's had in his entire life.
• Keet: He is, in his own words, a "little ball of super-energy", and the movie proceeds to show him as a highly energetic and hyperactive hedgehog who will do about anything to avoid standing still.
• Kid Hero: He's described as a juvenile delinquent and generally behaves like a child. Jeff Fowler confirms here that Sonic is either 13 or 14 years old in the movie - which makes him even younger than his canon age of 15 in the games.
• Kiddie Kid: Downplayed. His cave features some toys meant for children slightly younger than him, and he tends to be more emotionally vulnerable than most children his age. This may be justified, given his years living in isolation would realistically have resulted in stunted development.
• Klingons Love Shakespeare: Sonic has become quite taken with some of Earth's entertainment. One of his most prized possessions is his stack of The Flash comics, and his favorite movie is Speed —- he considers Keanu Reeves to be a "national treasure".
• Lightning Bruiser: His transformation into Super Sonic, just like in the video game series, increases his powers immensely to god-like degrees. His strength is so powerful, he can just nonchalantly Punch Catch and outright No-Sell an incoming colossal fist from Robotnik's Death Egg Robot without even being physically recoiled from the impact, break apart said fist in an instant right after catching it, and can plow into its body with numerous Speed Blitz attacks with his already jacked up Super-Speed.
• Literal-Minded: When Tom states that a bucket list is about things you want to do before you "kick the bucket", Sonic assumes he needs to actually kick a bucket, which he excitedly admits he's never done before.
• Load-Bearing Hero: Moments after his transformation into Super Sonic, just before the Death Egg Robot's foot can crush Sonic, Tom, and Maddie, Sonic holds it aloft to save the Wachowskis from becoming paste.
• MacGuffin Super-Person: In the source material, Sonic is blindingly fast and remarkably powerful, but without a Chaos Emerald in hand, his skill set doesn't go much farther than that. Here? He's a living reactor of theoretically infinite power, to the point where a single quill's charge is sufficient to power robots and armaments well beyond anything else in modern society.
• Magnetic Hero: By 2, he has started to gain the traits of his video game counterpart's ability to befriend others simply by entering their lives. Tails warms up to him instantly, and Knuckles, while initially misguided, accepts Sonic's offer of friendship after proving himself as honorable and genuine.
• Motor Mouth: Owing to his hyperactivity, Sonic talks a lot. When Maddie is surprised to learn that he can talk, Tom retorts that Sonic doesn't know when to stop, and he can be heard talking behind a closed door through the entire, meaningful conversation between the Wachowskis. He can't shut up even when hiding in the attic from Robotnik's robots, much to his own dismay.
• Mundane Utility: In general, Sonic finds many everyday uses for his powers and artifacts. He can use his super speed to cheat at a basketball arcade game and clean his house in a matter of seconds. Also, he can use his Rings to make the Wachowskis instantly travel to Hawaii. The Chaos Emeralds can warp reality, turn mere men into gods, and as Super Sonic demonstrates, create really good chili dogs.
• My God, What Have I Done?: He has this reaction immediately after losing control of his frustration, thus causing the EMP blast.
  • He has this reaction again in the sequel, blaming himself when Tails gets knocked out by Robotnik in the snowboarding scene.
• Mysterious Past: It's unknown who gave birth to him or why he has his powers in the first place. Longclaw had been his only parental figure up until he escaped to Earth, and he's had his powers for as long as he's aware of.
• Nice Guy: Maybe even more so than his game counterpart; while game Sonic has a good heart and an easy-going personality, he also has something of an attitude. In the movie, he's much more cheerful and outwardly friendly to all creatures, most likely due to his desire to make friends, and will put his life on the line to protect others. Longclaw herself tells Sonic that he has a heart like no other creature she has ever known.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Sonic's running ends up causing an EMP-like sonic boom to knock out all power in the Pacific Northwest, resulting in the US military hiring Robotnik to capture him.
  • It's also the reason why he ended up on Earth in the first place, since he couldn't resist speeding around on his home planet despite knowing people, in this case the Echidna Tribe, were after him for his power. They managed to track him, and he led them right to where Longclaw and he were staying, forcing them to run and her sacrificing herself to protect him as he crossed through a ring portal into Earth.
  • His reckless attempt to become a hero and stop a robbery in the beginning of the second film causes him to accidentally release several bombs into the city sewers and cause destruction to an entire city block. He understandably gets called out on this by Tom shortly after.
• The Nicknamer: Having spent much of his life on Earth eavesdropping on Tom and Maddie Wachowski, he gives them the nicknames "Pretzel Lady" for Maddie's dexterity in practicing yoga, and "Donut Lord" for Tom because of his penchant for eating donuts (and talking to them). Of course, he calls Robotnik "Eggman", because his drone army all have a white color scheme and ovoid shape, which makes them resemble eggs. He continues his streak in the second movie, where he dubs Knuckles "Clifford the Big Red Rage Monster".
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: Played with: this Sonic does still have the same sarcastic banter and taunts around Eggman as most other incarnations. The difference, however, is that this Sonic fully recognises Eggman's threat level to him and those around him, so when it comes to finishing things in both movies, he is done joking and is out to make sure Eggman goes down and stays down. This decisiveness is straight up chilling as Super Sonic.
  Sonic: It's over, Eggman...
• Not So Similar: Both he and Robotnik grew up orphans, with no friends and a burdensome power (Sonic his Super-Speed, Robotnik his Super-Intelligence). That's where the similarities end: whereas Sonic is a Nice Guy who Hates Being Alone and just wants to have friends, Robotnik is a Jerkass and Misanthrope Supreme who embraces his loneliness and makes a point of having no friends at all.
• Offhand Backhand: As Super Sonic, he pulls this when he casually stops an incoming punch from the Death Egg Robot with one hand, keeping his eyes locked on Robotnik the whole time.
• Oh, Crap!: His reaction in the climax of the first movie when he sees Robotnik's hover jet enter Bullet Time along with him and keep pace with him.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When even Sonic tells you to slow down, you know it's serious.
  • When he goes Super Sonic in the second movie, he goes completely silent and doesn't utter a single quip while trashing Robotnik's giant robot, except a single calm-yet-furious line "It's over, Eggman". He's even content to let Robotnik go down with his robot, seemingly not caring if he lives or dies. Don't EVER threaten or bring any harm to Sonic's friends and family.
• Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: In-Universe, Sonic is regarded as a mysterious creature and urban legend, with Crazy Carl being the only one in Green Hills to be 100% certain of his existence, nicknaming him "The Blue Devil". Like most portrayals of these kinds of creatures, Sonic even lives hidden in the woods.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: His "disguise" when at the western bar is a red shirt and a hat. Somehow it works, and no one but Tom finds anything strange about a little blue furry humanoid walking around. A waitress believes Sonic to be Tom's child, and the sheriff comes up with a lie on the spot to justify his appearance. Sonic's snow gear in the sequel is a bit more convincing, but he noticeably still has comically large eyes.
• Parental Abandonment: As in most incarnations, barring maybe Sonic Underground and the Pre-Genesis Wave Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) to a certain extent, Sonic's parents are non-existent. His only parental figure is another older animal, this time an owl.
• Personality Powers: Fittingly for a character renowned for his Super-Speed and associated with lightning, Sonic is a ball of hyperactiveness and energy who can barely stand still and be quiet, a noticeable contrast with the more laid-back Sonic from the games.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Downplayed. It is not shown if there were any actual deaths from his EMP-like blast, but Sonic is shown to generate enough energy to cause a blackout across the entirety of Green Hills and the Pacific Northwest coast, disabling even satellites in orbit and turning off electricity for millions of people.
• Physical God: The Chaos Emeralds merge with Sonic to transform into his iconic Super Sonic form to save his friends and effortlessly destroy Dr. Robotnik’s giant robot. Tails states that Sonic in this form has become the most powerful being in the universe, but he ultimately gives up the power, since he still has growing up to do.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: He's significantly a small humanoid blue hedgehog that's roughly around the size of a toddler (or a child at the very least), and is capable of wrecking weaponized vehicles such as an armored truck and Robotnik's hovercraft. Although, he's unable to do so by default since he had to highly augment his Shock and Awe powers to increase the speed and strength of his Rolling Attack for total effectiveness. He's gotten rather stronger in the sequel where in the beginning he attempted to stop a robbery, as he fully knocked a burglar out of a truck with a double-kick unlike in the last film, where he was unable to harm a big man in a Bar Brawl with nothing but continuous punches, no matter how many hits he's landed on him. He's managed to hold his own against Knuckles gradually well during his third initial fight in the Master Emerald temple, despite the latter being vastly superior in both combat techniques and physical strength as he rammed Knuckles through chunks of solid rock multiple times, even though the echidna warrior wasn't slowed down in the slightest and continued his onslaught.
• Pop-Cultured Badass: Naturally, considering how he's been raised on Earth pop culture since he was a small child, as it was basically one of his few means of interacting with the world.
• Power Echoes: In a sheer contrast to Super Robotnik's voice in his Super Mode that sounds utterly demonic, Super Sonic's voice is layered with an echoed reverb.
• Power Incontinence: Whenever he's sufficiently upset or distressed, his powers overload in the form of light-blue electricity. The first time this happens, the plot-inducing power surge occurs. He learns to control it in time to put an end to Robotnik.
• The Prankster: He occasionally pranks people in Green Hills without ever being noticed as his way to interact with them. His favorite person to prank is Crazy Carl, who calls him "The Blue Devil".
• Pride: More or less the same as his game counterpart, as he views himself as an incredibly handsome hedgehog and is always confident that no one is able to keep up with his super-speed, until Robotnik uses one of his quills to power up his hovercraft and match his speed.
• Primary-Color Champion: His fur is blue, and he wears red shoes, although he doesn't get them until Jojo gives them to him near the beginning of the climax of the first movie.
  • In the sequel, he's fighting crime under the name "Blue Justice".
• Punch Catch: He doesn't take the time to bat an eye when he casually holds back the Death Egg Robot's incoming punch whilst glaring directly at Robotnik.
• Randomly Gifted: We're given no explanation as to how he got his powers or who his biological parents were.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: He attempts this in a bar fight, but it has no effect. He resorts to Bullet Time instead.
• Reality Warper: It's implied he can do this as Super Sonic, but he just ends up using his powers to conjure chili dogs.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Akin to his (Modern) video game counterpart, this incarnation of Super Sonic has piercing bright scarlet irises along with a violent expression, as he certainly does not hold back his power to destroy Robotnik's mechanical behemoth, and even goes the extra mile to topple the mech with Robotnik standing right on it, regardless if he will perish from this or not.
• Required Secondary Powers: As the bar fight displays, while Sonic may be unbelievably fast, that doesn't necessarily make him strong. It isn't until the final battle with Robotnik where he fully grasps using his momentum to fight and actually completes the Spin Attack. He has the usual speedster power where objects he manipulates at Bullet Time speed appear to be frictionless and do not suffer from the effects of sudden acceleration, as he's able to easily push Tom several feet during the Bar Brawl, can manipulate missiles in midair, and can remain dripping wet with seawater after running across two states.
• Rolling Attack: His Spin Dash move, much like in canon, involves Sonic rolling towards his opponents with his Super-Speed for damage.
• Sad Clown: He still has his signature cocky attitude and makes plenty of quips, but it's all to cope with the loneliness he suffers from, having escaped his home dimension leaving the only other person he had ever known behind, and not allowing himself to befriend anyone lest he put everyone in danger. His only alternative to observing the people of Earth make friends and live their lives is to escape to a barren mushroom planet with absolutely no intelligent life aside from himself. It's not until he attempts to play a climactic inning of baseball with himself that his loneliness finally overwhelms him, causing him to unleash his stress by running fast enough to cause a nationwide blackout and kick off the plot.
• Sent Into Hiding: Sonic was hidden by Longclaw from the echidnas wanting his power. When he was caught by them and forced to live on Earth, he had to remain concealed from the sight of humans in case they wanted his power. And they did, forcing him to reveal himself to the "Donut Lord".
• Shock and Awe: Sonic's ability to conduct electricity, normally shown when he's using his Super-Speed and signified by Glowing Eyes. Both trailers show him accidentally producing enough while running to cause an EMP blackout across the entire Pacific Northwest. Even his quills are capable of generating unlimited energy, as Robotnik uses one to power his flying machine.
• Skewed Priorities: Sonic throws a What the Hell, Hero? speech at Tom over leaving Green Hills while they get chased by a killer robot. Tom calls him out on it.
• Sleep Cute: Sonic vows to stay up all night while he and Tom stay the night at a motel but as soon as Tom goes to turn off the light so he can sleep, Sonic has already drifted off to sleep like a child who had an exciting day at the theme park.
  • In the sequel, he and Tails fall asleep side-by-side in the Siberian tavern, with Tails drapng his namesakes over Sonic.
• Smug Super: Much like his video game counterpart, this incarnation of Sonic isn't a bit shy about boosting his ego.
  • Toward Robotnik when he corners him on the skyscraper rooftop:
  Sonic: Your flying eggs are pretty impressive, Mr. Eggman. But let's face it, you'll never catch me!
  • Toward Knuckles while he chasing him down the mountain by snowboarding:
  Knuckles: You're no match for me. I've been training for this my entire life!
  Sonic: ...And I have no training at all, yet here I am ahead of you! This has gotta be embarrassing.
• Spin Attack: Of course, Sonic's a hedgehog. He knows how to curl into a ball, and he knows how to spin at high speeds, but he doesn't know how to weaponize this skill. At first, anyways. He figures it out during the first movie's climax, weaponizing his speed against Robotnik, and it becomes a significant part of his moveset in the second.
• Stalker without a Crush: He spent most of his time in Green Hills spying on the citizens, considering himself part of the town and particularly enjoying movie nights with an (unaware) Tom and Maddie Wachowski.
  Tom: So you've been spying on us all for years?
  Sonic: I mean I wouldn't call it spying. We're all just hanging out, only I wasn't invited and no one knew I was there.
• Stepford Smiler: He acts happy with his life without interaction with Green Hills' citizens, but it's only to cover up how alone and distant he feels, which tends to come out when he reflects on his situation (a particularly bad moment kicking off the events of the movie).
• Strong as They Need to Be: During the first trailer, Sonic's speed is a bit inconsistent. One minute, Tom is able to tag him in the leg with a tranquilizer dart before he has a chance to react. The next, he's shown going into Bullet Time, moving so fast that the hundreds of missiles and robots Robotnik sics on him appear completely frozen. This is averted in the movie proper, where it's clear that Tom tags him because he's too distracted by the two of them screaming at each other to react.
• Super Drowning Skills: When Tom tells Sonic to "head west", Sonic speeds off, but then returns soaking wet with seaweed, a starfish, and a saltwater fish on his head. Sonic claims he got them from "crashing into the Pacific". Thus, much like his game counterpart, Sonic can't swim. In 2, he is faced with multiple moments of having to confront his issues with water, and in the Chaos Emerald temple it's shown that he actually sinks straight to the bottom when in water.
• Super-Speed: It wouldn't be Sonic the Hedgehog unless he was the fastest thing alive.
  • The first trailer sees Sonic zoom past Tom's police cruiser. The car's radar gun clocks Sonic's speed at 760 miles per hour, which is just under Mach 1.
  • The second trailer shows him moving so quickly around a baseball diamond that he causes an EMP that causes a gigantic blackout in the United States' Pacific Northwest. He also speed-reads a stack of comics on The Flash, moves fast enough to play table tennis and baseball with himself, and runs fast enough to be in multiple locations at once.
  • Sonic can use his power to enter Bullet Time, with everything around him appearing to stand still. Robotnik uses this against Sonic with one of his quills, able to enter the same state to keep up the chase.
• Super-Speed Reading: He can read all of his large stack of The Flash comics in seconds. He also learns how to drive Tom's car by reading the manual while being chased by one of Robotnik's robots.
• Super-Strength: Downplayed. If he seemed to lack for power in the previous movie (not that he was completely weak), his strength becomes much more prevalent and increased in the sequel. While his is inferior to Knuckles' natural power, he does try his best to shove a large broken stone pillar off of Knuckles to prevent him from drowning, although he is visibly straining himself, which is highly justified, as the pressure of being underwater makes the effort a lot more stressful to pull off.
  • During his third and final match against Knuckles, the power of his own punches actually manages to stagger the echidna and has even sent him flying just by diving into him in mid-air. In one particular moment, he plows him down through thick layers of rock with repeated uses of his Spin Attacks, and ends the combo with a powerful punch. In the climax, he destroys some of Robotnik's Master Emerald powered drones with mere breakdancing kicks.
  • As Super Sonic, he simply holds up a crushing stomp from Robotnik's Humongous Mecha, and starts obliterating it by plowing through its body merely by flying into it. After he bulldozes the robot to oblivion, he knocks over the colossal machine by ever-so-lightly tapping his foot against it.
• Super-Toughness: Extremely zig-zagged in the first film, as he's taken out by an explosion from a rather tiny bomb that basically destroyed the very boulder he implanted on earlier. Thankfully, he doesn't actually perish from the blast, although his body suffered many injuries as a result, and had to be taken to Maddie (who's an experienced veterinarian) to have him be fully healed by her. Although, earlier he actually totaled a powerful high-tech armored truck with his Spin-Dash, but was left completely uninjured from the impact, only for him to be a little dazed afterwards, which can be justified as being in a curled up spiky ball (which was something he did to hide himself from Robotnik's drones) miraculously cushioned him from the blow.
  • His durability becomes much more advanced in the second film, where a singular blow from Knuckles' punch outright plows him through the walls of the Wachowski's household, and has even survived getting knocked into oblivion from his devastating Ground Punch that created a widespread rippling red shockwave. Sonic was still breathing from that brutalizing pummeling.
• Talking to Themself: Sonic has adopted this habit since he's going mad from isolation, has no one to talk to, and has to play his own therapist and his own baseball team. Even after coming out of hiding and interacting with Tom, Sonic still talks to himself from time to time.
• Taught by Television: He admits to Tails that he gets knowledge about Earth by watching Discovery Channel.
• Time Stands Still: How his Super-Speed is portrayed when shown from his own perspective.
• Tired of Running: He spends most of the film on the run from Robotnik, planning to use his rings to flee Earth. During the climax, he decides not to try to escape anymore, going all out and eventually banishing Robotnik himself from Earth.
  Sonic: This is my power, and I'm not using it to run away anymore. I'm using it to protect. My. Friends!
• Took a Level in Badass: Initially, he always relies on his speed instead of facing enemies head-on. As shown in several sequel trailers, Sonic displays combat skills while fighting some robbers and, eventually, Knuckles.
  • When he is escaping from Knuckles with Tails, he takes the wheel of the car Tails put on autopilot when he sees that they're in danger of causing an accident, and is successful in avoiding crashing into anyone, in strong contrast to his other attempts at driving.
• Toy Disguise: Sonic blends in with balls for various sports in Tom's attic to hide from Robotnik's drones by curling into a ball himself.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Chili cheese dogs, as has become typical for the character. He tastes his first ones at the bar, since the hot wings he originally ordered never came on time, so he tries (and accordingly eats an entire basket of) chili dogs instead during his slow-motion run through the Bar Brawl.
• Tranquil Fury: As Super Sonic, he does not make any wisecracks or even crack a smile until after he takes down Robotnik's Mecha.
• Troll: Sonic loves to lightly make fun of people (such as Tom and Crazy Carl) with his super-speed, as it's the closest thing he could do to interact with them without being noticed.
• True Companions: He becomes this with Tails, like his video game counterpart. He also eventually becomes this with Knuckles.
• Unskilled, but Strong: He generally uses his speed to get through trouble, and since he's too fast, no one can keep up with him or catch him. When Robotnik is able to match him in speed with his own skill, he briefly freaks out, as that's the first time it's ever happened. From then on, he has to rely on strategy, and eventually assistance from Tom, to defeat him. When he meets a certain echidna with similar powers in the second movie, he finds out the hard way that he's actually still very, very far behind.
• Vigilante Man: Since the events of the first movie, he has taken to doing this, with Tom directly saying that he's trying to be Batman.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: He becomes this with Knuckles by the end of the second movie.
• Vocal Dissonance: In the first trailer, he had a very child-like design and a very adult-sounding voice. His design and vocal work following the second trailer's redesign look and sound more like a teenager.
• Weak, but Skilled: As shown in the Bar Brawl, Sonic doesn't have much strength behind him in a straight-up fistfight where he can't use his speed power. When he does Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs on a large biker, it does nothing at all. Instead, he wins by dropping a mounted bear's head on top of the thug and tripping him.
• What the Fu Are You Doing?: One of his several possessions is a pair of nunchaku. While twirling them and making Funny Bruce Lee Noises in one scene, he ends up whacking himself in the head.

  Sonic: OH! [pained] I'm okay!

• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • He isn't exactly pleased with Tom for tranquilizing him and making him lose his rings.
    Sonic: I shouldn't even be on this planet right now, but I am. Why? Because you shot me!
    Tom: I know.
    Sonic: YOU SHOT ME!
  • He also isn't happy when Tom tells him of his plans to leave Green Hills for San Francisco, so much so that his powers start to flare up.
• White Gloves: While he doesn't have them in the first trailer, he does wear them in the second trailer, the TV spots, and the actual film (as pictured above).
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Knuckles warns Tom and Maddie to stay away from Super Sonic, as he's no longer the Sonic they once knew. Super Sonic then summons a storm similar to Eggman's, shoots energy into the sky... and creates a chili dog.
• The Worf Effect: Sonic is able to completely total a genius-built tank and an aircraft in the first film. The trailer for the second film illustrates Knuckles' Super-Strength by having the echidna casually catch Sonic mid-attack and slam him to the ground, causing an explosion. Justified in that in his original appearance, Knuckles was strong enough to knock Sonic out of the superstate with a single punch, so his strength here is fairly close to canon.
• Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning: Each time his limitless power charges up, his whole body is always bathed in cyan-colored lightning. In the climax, his lightning becomes so intense that when he achieves his newfound Heroic Second Wind, his power manifests as various lightning arcs are seen traveling skyward.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Sonic was forced to flee his homeworld as a child, due to being hunted by an echidna tribe who wanted to harness his power. Longclaw, giving him her power rings and opening one to Earth, stressed that because of his power, he would always be hunted by villainous factions so long as he remained on his planet, thus why he hasn't gone back in ten years.

Miles "Tails" Prower

Miles "Tails" Prower

Voiced by: Colleen O'Shaughnessey [films, Knuckles],^note Uncredited in the 2020 film's theatrical release, but is credited in that film's home video release Alicyn Packard [Sonic Drone Home] (English); Ryō Hirohashi (Japanese) ^{Foreign VAs}Marisol Romero (Latin-American Spanish), Emelie Clausen (Swedish), Vii Zedek (Brazilian Portuguese), Sébastien Reding (Quebec French, first movie stinger), Marie-Ève Sansfaçon (Quebec French, Sonic the Hedgehog 2), Marie-Eugénie Maréchal (EU French), Benedetta Ponticelli (Italian), Mu Xuanming (TW Mandarin)

Appearances: Sonic the Hedgehog (in the Stinger) | Sonic the Hedgehog 2 | Sonic Drone Home | Knuckles | Sonic the Hedgehog 3

"If these readings are accurate, he's here — I've found him! I just hope I'm not too late!"

"Growing up, I didn't have any friends. Everyone in my village thought my two tails were weird. [...] But then I saw you—the fastest creature in the galaxy. You were weird too, but you were a legend. That made me think, 'Maybe being weird isn't so bad.' You inspired me to leave my village—to find you and help you in your mission!"

A flying two-tailed fox who comes to Earth looking for Sonic.

---

• Ace Pilot: He's able to fly a biplane with no problem, and can avoid a whole swarm of missiles without having his plane damaged, though he's not ace enough to avoid the Stache Smasher.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: In the video game series, Tails met Sonic when he saw the latter running past him and shyly followed him, earning the hedgehog's respect when he was able to keep up with him. Here, Tails already knew about Sonic and came to Earth specifically to find him after learning that Knuckles was after him.
• Adaptational Badass: This Tails has many gadgets ready to go, including what seems to be an anti-gravity device, which Maddie accidentally uses to send a G.U.N agent flying, not knowing what it does. He's also a more active participant in combat than his video game counterpart.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Downplayed. Tails looks very much like he does in the games, but his fur is a more vibrant shade of orange (much like he had in the older games) compared to the more yellow fur he has in 3D Sonic games.
• Adaptational Species Change: A downplayed example, but most versions of Tails hail from the same world as Sonic. Tails implies that his home planet is different from the one where Sonic lived with Longclaw.
• Adaptation Personality Change: Inverted. Tails having a lot of admiration for Sonic is actually Truer to the Text of his original concept from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (only apparent in the Japanese manual), despite his more low-key, close friend/brother to Sonic presentation in the localized Sonic Adventure games.
• Affectionate Nickname: Knuckles calls Tails "Fox" after they become Fire-Forged Friends.
• Aliens Speaking English: He can speak perfect English, for whatever reason, and even his given name is one that an Earth-born human could have, but needs Translator Microbes to communicate with the people in the bar in Siberia. Given how he's been secretly monitoring Sonic for a while, he may have picked up English as a byproduct.
• All-Loving Hero: He's sweet-natured and kind, despite his initial awkwardness with new people. Tails even apologizes ramming the police car into Knuckles to save Sonic.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Much like his backstory from the games, he states that he was seen as a freak by others due to his extra tail.
• Ascended Fanboy: Tails had been watching Sonic from his computer on his home planet to the point of idolising him. He not only ends up meeting and teaming up with him but ends up as his close friend and adoptive brother.
• Audience Surrogate: Just like real-world Sonic fans, Tails has spent a great deal of time watching Sonic without his knowledge and memorizing trivial facts about him.
• The Baby of the Bunch: He's the youngest member of Team Sonic and the Wachowski household at eight years old, and he has the least self-confidence and adventuring experience of them.
• Badass Adorable: He has an array of highly effective gadgets that he presumably invented himself, and is one of the most adorable characters in the movies.
• Big Brother Worship: Towards Sonic, even though they’re not related. Later becomes more literal when Tom and Maddie adopt him and he becomes Sonic’s new adopted brother.
• Big Damn Heroes: Sonic first meets Tails when the latter saves him from Knuckles with a hijacked police car.
• Car Fu: He strikes Knuckles with a police car (out of nowhere) right into a shed, just to rescue Sonic from getting overpowered by Knuckles.
• Character Catchphrase: In the second movie, it's "Only Sonic the Hedgehog could... [insert action here]".
• Character Development: Is introduced as a timid kid who feels he's not up for field work, ends the film as a more confident fighter who smirks in the face of danger.
• Cheerful Child: He's very upbeat in his interactions with Sonic.
• Child Prodigy: He's a young boy who is also a Gadgeteer Genius.
• Combination Attack: He performs one with Sonic by swinging him around at the robots while flying.
• Comically Missing the Point: Despite being a boy genius, obvious things sometimes go over his head. He thought it would be hard to figure out why everyone calls him Tails, and when Sonic asks if he watched him while he was in the shower, Tails calls it out as a trick question, stating that he knows Sonic prefers bubble baths, missing his point that he's creeped out that Tails watched him bathe.
• Composite Character: Of both his modern and classic selves. He is a Gadgeteer Genius who is able to create weapons and machinery like his modern self. However, he also worships Sonic and is mostly shy, like his classic self.
• Cowardly Lion: He's one initially in the second movie, though less for a lack of valor and more because he has little faith in himself, and thus gets freaked out and self-conscious at the idea of actually being within the action. As the plot goes on, Sonic inspires him to be more confident, and this trait goes away.
• Cursed with Awesome: Tails having two tails means that he's able to fly using them like a helicopter, but it also saw him being bullied and incredibly lonely as a child, to the extent that he ended up hero-worshipping Sonic from afar because he was different too.
• The Cutie: Like in the games, Tails is really adorable.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Similar to his game counterpart, Tails was ostracized by the people on his planet because of his two tails prior to meeting Sonic.
• Deuteragonist: He takes this role from Tom in the second movie due to being Sonic's main ally in the film.
• Drives Like Crazy: Understandably so, given that in the scene where he does, he's driving away from a furious Knuckles at the time, and that's after ramming the car into him in order to save Sonic. Even Sonic insists on taking the wheel at one point.
• Dub-Induced Plotline Change: There's a minor one in the second movie's Spanish dub. It happens right after Tails supposes that Sonic is "probably wondering why" everyone calls him "Tails," and Sonic correctly guesses that it's "because of the extra tail."
  Tails: (in English) That's right! I should've known you'd get that.
  Tails: (in Spanish) ¡Exacto! Debí suponer que hablabas inglés. (Exactly! I should've guessed you spoke English.)
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: In his appearance in the first movie's second stinger, Tails' shoes look more akin to slip-ons. In the first trailer for the second movie, when showing the same scene again, they had been changed a bit to have shoelaces. His head now also looks less wide than it did in that first version, and his fur is slightly more yellowish.
• Establishing Character Moment: The first thing Tails does upon arriving on Earth and discovering Sonic's whereabouts is to jump off a cliff... and perform his signature Propeller Flying ability to hover back up before speeding off to find him.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials: He only wears a pair of white gloves, sneakers, and a yellow backpack. However, he briefly dons a coat, scarf, gloves, and pants alongside Sonic in the second movie.
• Fanboy: He completely geeks out when he meets Sonic.
• Foil: To Dr. Robotnik. Both are gadgeteer geniuses who had been outcasts during their childhoods. However, while Dr. Robotnik uses his gadgets for evil and is a Psychopathic Manchild , Tails is a young Child Prodigy who uses his gadgets for good. Also, Robotnik hates Sonic, while Tails idolizes him.
• Gadgeteer Genius: He carries a huge arsenal of gadgets and weapons in his yellow backpack, including a holographic projector and a laser gun. Maddie and Rachel even use some of his gadgets to rescue him, Sonic, and Tom from being held captive by G.U.N.
• Glass Cannon: He's fairly speedy, as he can keep up with Sonic while flying, but very delicate; he spends several hours unconscious after being hit by Dr. Robotnik's missiles.
• Good Counterpart: Tails and Dr. Robotnik are both geniuses with a knack for engineering. However, Tails' inventions are harmless for the most part, with even his weapons designed to incapacitate the targets rather than hurt or kill them, and he adores Sonic. By contrast, Robotnik uses his machines to hurt and destroy above all else, and he absolutely loathes Sonic to the point of wanting him dead.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: A kind-hearted fox who is covered in yellow/gold fur.
• Hammerspace: Averted. Like Sonic, Tails wears a satchel to store his items. However, this wasn't added until later in the second movie's development, as he wasn't seen wearing it in early trailers.
• Happily Adopted: He seems to have been taken in by Tom and Maddie alongside Sonic and Knuckles at the end of the second movie.
• Helicritter: Much like his game counterpart, he has two tails that he can spin like a helicopter's rotor blades to fly through the air.
• Hero-Worshipper: Tails thinks the world of Sonic and constantly praises him throughout the second movie.
• History Repeats: In the first movie, Sonic admired Tom's achievements from a distance before finally getting the chance to be with him later on. In the second movie, it's revealed that Tails had been spying on Sonic in a similar way before he forces himself to find Sonic to stop Knuckles from killing him.
• Humble Hero: To an almost detrimental degree; Tails has very low self-esteem even after searching several planets just so he could warn Sonic about Knuckles coming after him and then going on to ram a car into Knuckles to protect Sonic when he's a little too late. He does improve after Sonic takes him under his wing and gives him a much-needed confidence boost.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: In his village, he was shunned by the other villagers because of his two tails, and he ends up going to Earth to help Sonic defeat Robotnik and Knuckles. When Sonic calls Tails "his pal," this makes Tails happy enough to give Sonic a hug.
• Innocent Aliens: Tails is perhaps the most innocent one between Sonic, Knuckles, and himself. He only came to Earth to warn Sonic about Knuckles, and then only stays to help protect both him and the planet itself.
• Innocent Blue Eyes: He has baby blue eyes to fit his sweet and innocent nature.
• Interspecies Adoption: He's an anthropomorphic fox who is seemingly adopted by the human Tom and Maddie at the end of the second film.
• Kid Hero: He's notably quite a bit younger than both Sonic and Knuckles, just like in the games.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: He says that he hopes he's not too late... having arrived during The Stinger after the events of the first movie.
• Light Is Good: Tails has yellow/gold fur and is unambiguously nice and heroic.
• Lovable Nerd: Tails is both nerdy and extremely sweet.
• Meaningful Appearance: He wears a pair of sneakers very similar to Sonic's own despite having never set foot on Earth before. That said, Tails is quite the fanboy, and may have purposefully chosen a pair of similar-looking sneakers to better emulate his hero.
• Mythology Gag: The yellow scanning device he uses to find Sonic on Earth closely resembles the Miles Electric. The sequel minces no words about it, and "Miles Electric" is written on the device's interface.
• Mysterious Past: All we know is that Tails is from another planet and that his village shunned him for his extra tail; we don't know if it was a birth defect, a mutation later in life, or simply a natural trait of his species.
• Nice Guy: Tails is a helpful, friendly fox.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: During the snowboarding chase in Siberia, Sonic almost manages to talk down Knuckles by appealing to their Commonality Connection. Unfortunately, before he can truly succeed, Tails launches an electric net at Knuckles, causing the latter to believe Sonic's sincere plea was just a trick to lower his guard.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Just like the games, everyone calls him Tails. However, unlike that continuity, he is never introduced as anything but "Tails." He is called by his true name just once in the entirety of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and even then it's as "Miles 'Tails' Prower".
• Primary-Color Champion: He has yellow-orange fur, wears red (and white) sneakers, and has Innocent Blue Eyes.
• Ray Gun: During the final battle, Tails uses his laser gun to shoot down Robotnik's robots.
• Related in the Adaptation: In the video games, Tails, Sonic and Knuckles are just friends. In the film adaptation, Tails is seemingly adopted by the humans Tom and Maddie Wachowski, making him and his new friends Sonic and Knuckles adoptive siblings.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Even Sonic isn't immune to his extreme adorableness, particularly in the scene in which the kid curls up by the fire and Sonic takes the time to tuck him in for the night.
  Sonic: (regarding Tails in "interviews") He's a double threat. Fluffy and adorable!
• Sarcasm-Blind: When Sonic sarcastically "guesses" as to why he's called Tails, the kid doesn't realize that he's being facetious at all and is just stoked that Sonic got it right away.
• Self-Duplication: He can use a function on his device called the "Miles Multiplier" in order to create holographic duplicates of himself. He does this in the bar scene in order to make backup dancers for Sonic. He later uses it again to distract Robotnik while Knuckles gets into position.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: He's the sensitive guy to Sonic and Knuckles' Manly Men. Tails prefers to use his gadgets to help him in combat and is also shy and cheerful, while Sonic and Knuckles are more physical in combat and both of them have more boisterous personalities.
• Sequel Hook: He shows up after the first movie's conflict is over, determined to find Sonic on Earth, foreshadowing his involvement in the sequel.
• Sleep Cute: He falls asleep in front of a fireplace. Sonic drapes a blanket over him and joins him, sleeping back-to-back. Tails in turn drapes his tails over Sonic.
• The Smart Guy: He's the brains of the good guys, being a super smart Gadgeteer Genius.
• Stalker without a Crush: He's been tracking Sonic ever since his electromagnetic pulse at the beginning of the first movie with aid from his self-invented gadgets. He was drawn in by Sonic's sheer bravery against Robotnik. He spied on Sonic so much, he even knows that he prefers bubble baths to showers. Sonic is noticeably and understandably creeped out by this, but doesn't hold it against him.
• Stronger Than They Look: While he doesn't exhibit the amount of strength that Knuckles has, he's not a total weakling by all means and has a let of pep for a small fox child as he's able to swing Sonic around in a circular motion by pulling off a mid-air Human Hammer-Throw version with enough force to destroy some of Robotnik's drones and has even managed to carry Knuckles himself while airborne (although he was visibly struggling to hold him at first) with the latter proudly claiming that he's "one million percent muscle!"
• Summon Backup Dancers: He summons hologram backup dancers during the dance off, and later uses them to distract Robotnik.
• Super-Speed: Much like Sonic, Tails can move incredibly fast. He flies from the top of a cliff overlooking Green Hills into the town proper in just a few seconds, leaving an orange trail behind him.
• Tap on the Head: He is knocked out by Dr. Robotnik's missiles, rendering him unconscious for about a fourth of the second movie. He wakes up just in time for the Final Battle, ready to pilot his plane, and takes part in the fray without any need for medical attention.
• Thinking Up Portals: He can do this with rings like Sonic can. The prequel comic sees Tails using them to look for Sonic on other planets, and we see him use one in the movie itself to come to Earth. The book adaptation mentions he used his last ring to come to Earth, meaning he's trapped on the planet.
• Took a Level in Badass: Compared to his recent incarnations, Tails is now just as capable as Sonic and Knuckles when it comes to fighting Dr. Robotnik's badniks, and is able to fly the Tornado expertly through a barrage of missiles. He keeps up with them incredibly well despite being both younger and smaller than them.
• Translator Microbes: He has to use a translator to repeat what he says in whatever language the Siberians speak, though it gives offensive My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels translations. Needless to say, he can speak perfect English for some reason.
• True Companions: Much like his game counterpart, he becomes this with Sonic, and seems to have become this with Knuckles by the end of the second movie.
• Undying Loyalty: To Sonic. When Tails finds out Knuckles is coming after Sonic, he immediately sets out searching the galaxy for Sonic, one planet at a time, so he can warn him. Later, when Sonic leaves to fight Robotnik and Knuckles alone, Tails wants to go with him, despite being injured.
• Walking Spoiler: The fact that Tails shows up at all in the first movie is a spoiler in and of itself; he is never mentioned before his brief appearance in The Stinger.
• Weak, but Skilled: Tails lacks Sonic's speed and Knuckles' strength, durability and fighting skills. However, he is also very agile and his flight gives him great evasion. He also carries an array of tools and weapons of his own invention that are very useful in battle.
• White Gloves: Like Sonic, Tails wears white gloves over his hands as part of him being a cartoony Funny Animal.

Knuckles the Echidna

Knuckles the Echidna

Voiced by: Idris Elba [films, Knuckles], Fred Tatasciore [Sonic Drone Home] (English); Subaru Kimura (Japanese) ^{Foreign VAs}Octavio Rojas (Latin-American Spanish), Adam Fietz (Swedish), Ronaldo Júlio (Brazilian Portuguese), Widemir Normil (Quebec French), Frantz Confiac (EU French), Maurizio Merluzzo (Italian)

Appearances: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 | Sonic Drone Home | Knuckles | Sonic the Hedgehog 3

"I do not make jokes. I make warriors."

"It is my destiny to do what my ancestors could not: to restore the ultimate power to the home of my people."

A red echidna with super strength to match Sonic's speed, who joins up with Dr. Robotnik in order to get a lead on the blue hedgehog himself.

---

• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: He was hit with the death of his father and the last echidnas of his tribe when he was still a child, giving him an angsty backstory much like the one the film version of Sonic has. The two even bond over their mutual feeling of loss. Also, he genuinely considers Robotnik a friend at first, and his betrayal hurts Knuckles more than usual for his canon counterpart.
• Adaptational Badass: Knuckles debuts in the games as a threat because he blindsides Sonic and sets up traps for him in the various levels, but as a boss, he is a pushover. While Knuckles is more effective as a hero, he is at best Sonic's equal. In the movies, Knuckles is Always Someone Better to Sonic. He inflicts a Curb-Stomp Battle in his debut with Sonic in their first meeting, and while their rematch is much more even, it is unclear if Sonic could have won.
• Adaptational Curves: Downplayed. He's noticeably more muscular and top-heavy than his counterpart from his first appearance, but less so compared to his Sonic Boom incarnation.
• Adaptational Intelligence: Whenever Knuckles gets tricked by Eggman in the games, he doesn't catch on until the doctor straight-up betrays him to his face. Here, he almost relents on his hunt of Sonic during their encounter in Siberia after the latter sincerely pleads a Commonality Connection and starts to question his judgement of Sonic when he chooses to save Tails over recovering the compass to the Master Emerald. He also seems to be much more eloquent than he is in the games. Plus, during the Final Battle, he immediately catches onto Sonic's plan to defeat Robotnik.
  Sonic: I know what his weak spot is; it's me! I'm the groin! Think about it; I live rent free in this dude's head, so if I go out there and rile him up...
  Knuckles: He'll focus on only you, leaving himself open to a flanking maneuver from me and the fox!
• Adaptational Job Change: He is not the guardian of the Master Emerald in the cinematic version, being instead a treasure hunter that seeks to use it for his own purposes instead of protecting it. Although upon retrieving the Emerald after the final battle with Robotnik, he gets to protect it alongside Sonic, Tails, and the Wachowskis.
• Adaptational Nationality: Most versions of Knuckles tend to speak with an American accent, whereas here Knuckles speaks with Idris Elba's natural English accent.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Overlaps with Adaptational Intelligence. Knuckles gets his sense of empathy and firm belief in teamwork and friendship taken up a notch in the films. Here he almost lets go of his vendetta against Sonic when the latter pleads a Commonality Connection, and starts to question his judgement of Sonic when he chose to save Tails over pursuing the compass, revealing that Knuckles sees a lot of value in friendship. Also as he shields Tom and Maddie from what it seems like Super Sonic going mad with power (it turns out he was just summoning a perfect chili dog), he solemnly tells them that he is no longer the Sonic they once knew, after he sees them protecting Sonic before he becomes Super Sonic.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Downplayed with Sonic at first, he and Knuckles start out as enemies similar to in the video games, but when they reconcile, they not only become friends, but Knuckles and Sonic actually agreed to be co-protectors of the Master Emerald and it's implied Knuckles allowed himself to be adopted into the Wachowski family, becoming Sonic's brother in all but name.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: Similar to how Sonic is supercharged with electricity capable of limitless energy, Knuckles seems to get his strength from some sort of red lightning.
• Adaptational Villainy: Downplayed, as while he is by no means a bad guy, his conflict with Sonic here is much more personal, rather than being tricked by Robotnik into thinking Sonic was trying to steal the Master Emerald from his island like in the games. This changes after Robotnik’s betrayal and his Heel–Face Turn.
• Aliens of London: He's an extraterrestial being like Sonic and Tails, and he speaks with Idris Elba's natural British accent.
• Aliens Speaking English: Like Sonic and Tails, he somehow already knows how to speak perfect English and even speaks with a distinct Earth accent, despite never having been there before the events of the film.
• Always Someone Better: The first fight between Knuckles and Sonic sees Sonic get flattened as Knuckles' Super-Strength counters attacks by Sonic's Super-Speed. Sonic fights smarter in their rematch, but his attacks still do not inflict any real damage, while Knuckles puts him down for the count with a few direct hits.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: Knuckles looks down on Sonic for, amongst other things, being "unskilled" and "untrained" in combat like him. He drops this attitude after he and Sonic save each other from drowning.
• Baritone of Strength: It comes with being voiced by Idris Elba, being a conscious decision by the producers to harken back to Dan Green's performance. In the trailer for Sonic 2, Knuckles asks Sonic "Do I look like I need your power?"
• Because You Were Nice to Me: He becomes one of Sonic's allies and pulls a Heel–Face Turn after Sonic rescues him.
• Berserk Button: Subverted. In the final trailer, the editing of the scene frames that Knuckles really doesn't take lightly for being insulted as a "space porcupine". In the film itself, Knuckles is completely innocent of Stone's disdain, and breaks his arm as part of a Running Gag in which Knuckles gives everyone a Crushing Handshake.
• Big Eater: Shows himself to be this in the eponymous miniseries. He is shown guzzling down a full bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, drinking a full pot of coffee, and eating an entire buffet of food during a dinner at Wade's house. One TV spot shows Knuckles in Wade’s car eating a cluster of green grapes, his favorite food on Earth.
• Blood Knight: In The Official Pre-Quill Comic, he states that it feels good to defeat the giant beast he was forced to fight.
• Boisterous Bruiser: He certainly becomes more hammy and chummy after his Heel–Face Turn.
  Tails: Oh, you're really heavy!
  Knuckles: That's because I am one million percent muscle! FASTER, FOX!
• Brains and Brawn: The Brawn to Robotnik's Brains. Robotnik uses his technology and gadgets to track down and hinder Sonic, while Knuckles serves as a physical rival to the hedgehog.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: True to his game counterpart, Knuckles is a tough, powerful warrior with a strong sense of empathy, and becomes something of a Cool Big Bro to Tails.
• The Brute: Ultimately what his role amounts to in Robotnik's schemes. Despite Stone worrying about having to share his position as The Dragon with him, Robotnik has no use for the echidna as anything other than muscle to fight Sonic. He gladly tries to eliminate him once he's no longer useful.
• Bullet Time: He appears to just as capable of this as Sonic, as the rain around them slows down when Knuckles catches Sonic's Spin Dash, possibly indicating that Knuckles is also capable of Super-Speed to a certain extent.
• Catching the Speedster: He gives Sonic The Worf Effect when Robotnik led him to Sonic residing at the Wachowski's domain. The Blue Blur attempted to attack Knuckles head-on with an electrical-powered Spin Dash to ram straight into him, although, by the very second he collided into him, Knuckles instantly caught him, regardless of how fast he moved as his outstretched hand is holding Sonic, who's still continuously spinning into his spiked glove. He keeps him held for several seconds until he finishes the fight with a powerful Ground Punch.
• Character Development: Knuckles goes from an intimidating, no-nonsense, Cold Ham, Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy to an excitable, goofy, Large Ham, Bruiser with a Soft Center over the course the movie.
• Chekhov's Skill: One of the several displays of his Super-Strength is his extremely tight grip, which is used for comedy as he gives unintentional Crushing Handshakes to other characters. However, this ability comes in handy after Robotnik's defeat, as Knuckles applies pressure to a fractured Master Emerald in order to restore it to its original form.
• Colorful Contrails: He has his own degree of superhuman speeds whenever he uses his own powers that are similar to Sonic's if he chooses to boost his mobility even further, in one example is where he's pursuing a police car driven by Tails, a red lighting trail is shown behind his body as he's sprinting.
• Co-Dragons: He and Agent Stone end up as this to Doctor Robotnik, working to defeat Sonic and find the Master Emerald, with the red echidna serving as Robotnik's big bruiser while Stone serves as the assistant and tech guy. Of course, Robotnik never intended to keep working with Knuckles for long before betraying him.
• Cold Ham: The sheer foreboding delivery of Knuckles' Pre-Mortem One-Liner "Do I look like I need your power?" while also being accompanied by his piercing Death Glare after grabbing Sonic (as he's Spin Dashing no less) with no effort brings a layer of serious menace to show that he's a force to be reckoned with.
• The Comically Serious: Knuckles is a serious, foreboding Cold Ham who reacts to other characters' quips with complete befuddlement. His unfamiliarity with Earth's culture doesn't do him any favors. Maddie actually finds him funny because of his battle-based mentality.
• Commonality Connection: To Sonic. Both of them lost everything and everyone they ever knew on the same day, and had to grow up alone. After saving each other from drowning, Knuckles solemnly wonder how despite sharing the same tragic origins, Sonic turned out much more cheerful and optimistic than him.
• Crushing Handshake: After Robotnik introduces him to the concept of shaking hands, using the Exact Words "grip each other's hands tightly", Knuckles gains a tendency to accidentally inflict pain (and dislocate fingers!) on others with his handshake due to his immense strength.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: When Robotnik "introduces" Sonic to Knuckles, the blue hedgehog stands little chance against Knuckles' overwhelming strength, being absolutely battered and thrashed around the Wachowskis' house. He even catches Sonic's Spin Dash mid-spin and hammers him to the ground. If Tails hadn't arrived in time to save Sonic, Knuckles would've ended Sonic right then and there.
  • This is also somewhat extends to their eventual rematch, as while Sonic manages to land multiple spectacular hits on the echidna this time around, Knuckles proves to be quite the Implacable Man and dishes out a few heavy punches in return to knock the hedgehog down. If Knuckles hadn't been interrupted by Robotnik's betrayal, Sonic may well have lost.
• Defrosting Ice King: Downplayed, but after defeating Robotnik, Knuckles is especially hammy, as seen as when he joins Sonic, Tails, and the Wachowskis in a game of baseball and declares that he won after punching the baseball into oblivion. Oh, and he's openly ecstatic when learning that ice cream comes with sprinkles.
• Death Glare: A majority of his expressions signify an aura of him being constantly seething with sheer hostility, where most of his glares are unmistakably aimed at Sonic whenever he confronts him in battle. He noticeably loses this trait when took the path to his eventual Heel–Face Turn, as he lightens up by becoming more lively and cheerful.
• Didn't See That Coming: Robotnik's betrayal catches him completely off guard.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: His Running Gag of hurting people with his handshakes without meaning to. Downplayed by the fact that Knuckles is very aware of his strength, but handshakes are one of many Earth customs he's unfamiliar with, and no one thinks (or is brave enough) to tell him to ease off.
• The Dog Bites Back: Unlike his game counterpart, Knuckles gets to fight Robotnik alongside Sonic and Tails after he betrays him, and even knocks the Master Emerald out of him.
  Robotnik: Dis-loyal.
  Knuckles: "Dis" is how I roll.
• Dragon with an Agenda: While he willingly works with Robotnik, to the point of considering him a friend, Knuckles' goal to get to Sonic is first and foremost to him.
• The Dreaded: In this continuity, instead of being a unknown hermit, Knuckles went out and gained a reputation as "the most fearsome warrior in the galaxy", according to Tails. He's so dangerous that the mere threat of him finding Sonic was enough to get the at-the-time timid Tails to track Sonic down to warn him.
• Dumb Muscle: Not nearly to the point of his Sonic Boom incarnation (who is literally the page image for Adaptational Dumbass), but he is a bit of a Literal-Minded Boisterous Bruiser, akin to Drax the Destroyer. He is utterly baffled by concepts such as holograms, ice cream, and baseball since he'd never seen such things in his life up until this point.
  Knuckles: (smashes a hologram projector showing an image of Sonic) Tiny magic hedgehog destroyed!
• Easily Forgiven: Despite Knuckles indirectly trashing their house during his first encounter with Sonic, the Wachowskis make no mention of the incident and accept him into the household just fine.
• Enemy Mine: He teams up with the mysterious scavengers that captured him in the Official Movie Pre-Quill comic in his hunt for Sonic, giving them a bag of rings in exchange — not that their alliance means all that much to him, Robotnik takes them out easily with his traps when they make their stop on the Mushroom Planet.
• Et Tu, Brute?: He takes Robotnik's betrayal pretty badly, prompting him to join Sonic and Tails to stop his former ally.
• Everyone Has Standards: Even prior to his Heel–Face Turn, Knuckles shows signs of discomfort towards Robotnik insulting Stone and disregarding allies.
• The Farmer and the Viper:
  • Knuckles saves Eggman from a rolling boulder by holding the stone door open long enough for him to get through. Like in the games, the bad doctor repays this debt by stealing the Master Emerald and leaving him and Sonic to die in the labyrinth.
  • Subverted immediately afterwards, when Knuckles gets trapped under a pillar as the room is rapidly being flooded. Sonic decides to save Knuckles despite his inability to swim, letting the echidna swim to the water's surface while he's still floored. It almost looks like he's done for, but then Knuckles comes back for him.
• Fastball Special: While in the middle of fighting Super Robotnik's drones from his Death Egg mecha, Sonic and Knuckles do a literal variation of this attack with Knuckles grabbing Sonic right as he's curled into a ball and chucks him into one of the drones.
• Fatal Flaw: Naivete is his biggest flaw. Putting his trust in Robotnik and believing he was his friend is what almost gets him killed.
• Fiery Redhead: An echidna with red fur that is also a Boisterous Bruiser and Blood Knight.
• Fire-Forged Friends: He becomes this with Sonic after they save each other from drowning, and later with Tails as he works together with him to disarm Robotnik of the Master Emerald.
• Fish out of Water: While also an alien, he has the least familiarity with Earth life out of Team Sonic compared with Sonic being a pop culture buff and Tails' tech skills.
  • He spends most of the second movie confused and Literal-Minded about Earth culture and tech.
  • In his eponymous series, Knuckles finds himself unable to reconcile his warrior life style with modern civilization.
• Foil:
  • A red echidna with Super-Strength to counter a blue hedgehog with Super-Speed. His stoic and no-nonsense personality contrasts Sonic's wild, carefree, and very talkative demeanor. Unlike Sonic who has Super Drowning Skills, Knuckles actually can swim.
  • His brutish strength and aggressive personality also make him a polar opposite to Robotnik’s calculated villainy.
    Robotnik: Work smarter, not harder.
• Groin Attack: During the Death Egg Robot battle, he suggests attacking the groin several times. The punch he uses to knock the Master Emerald out of Super Robotnik's body to depower him is aimed towards his groin.
• Happily Adopted: He seems to have been taken in by Tom and Maddie alongside Sonic and Tails at the end of the second movie.
• Heel–Face Turn: Just like in his original appearance, he ends up going along with Sonic when Robotnik leaves him for dead in the collapsing Master Emerald temple.
• Hey, You!: Knuckles initially never calls Sonic with his actual name as he only refers him with "hedgehog" until his Heel–Face Turn. He also refers Tails as "Fox" even after they become allies. It eventually becomes something of an Affectionate Nickname for the latter.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: Underneath his gruff, no-nonsense, and blunt demeanor lies a person who truly values friendship and has a strong sense of empathy and knowledge of the difference between right and wrong.
• Hopeless with Tech: Knuckles is as equally bad with technology as Tails is good with it. His people lived in the jungle, so it's implied he's unaccustomed to any trappings of modern civilization. When he tries to make himself at home on Earth, he builds a primitive-looking battle arena with scavenged parts and tools.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Knuckles puts his trust in Robotnik and sincerely believes the Mad Scientist is his friend, which leads him to mock the echidna for being so gullible as to trust him. Unlike his game counterpart though, this is Played With at best because of their shared enmity with Sonic and he's also perceptive enough multiple times, such as to note that Sonic ignoring the compass in favor of rescuing Tails is not something an evil guy would do.
• I Am Not Weasel:
  • Knuckles is offended by Stone calling him a porcupine, as he sees such a mistake as an insult to the Echidna heritage he's deeply proud of.
  • Knuckles himself thinks Ozzy is a wolf, apparently having never seen a dog before. In his defense, domestic dogs are a subspecies of wolf.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: It's very subtle, but Knuckles takes the time to note that Sonic saved Tails instead of retrieving the Master Emerald Compass, and he himself views Robotnik as his friend (not knowing that Robotnik is only using him). Since he likely grew up without any friends, Knuckles sees a lot of value in friendship, and ultimately befriends both Sonic and Tails after Robotnik betrays him.
• Implacable Man: Knuckles has been hunting Sonic for many years. He will stop at nothing to achieve his goal, including tracking him through multiple planets across the universe and paying the bandits who had captured him to track Sonic down for him. Even being knocked down by Sonic multiple times doesn’t do anything but slow him down.
• Intelligent Gerbil: Like Sonic and Tails, Knuckles is an extraterrestrial being who happens to resemble a bipedal animal from Earth. Agent Stone even derides him by calling him some sort of "space porcupine".
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's acerbic, gruff, and unfriendly (at first), but he has a strong sense of right and wrong. After his Heel–Face Turn, he's become much friendlier.
• Knight of Cerebus: Of the non-villainy aspect. Before his Character Development, Knuckles brings an air of intimidation with Cold Ham qualities and shows Sonic his own power without even trying during their first encounter. Even if he's teamed up with Robotnik, who's Laughably Evil, the echidna is not even directly phased by his odd and lunatic mannerisms of any sort (but does react with confusion) and whenever Sonic takes him to blurt out his quips, Knuckles ponders on why he thinks everything tends to be a joke to him. He no longer has this demeanor when he befriends Sonic and Tails and becomes apart of their group when they play baseball together.
• Large Ham: After his Heel–Face Turn, he drops the Cold Ham trope and becomes more of a Boisterous Bruiser who is openly enthusiastic and also somewhat melodramatic.
  Knuckles: (referring to the Wachowskis' car) Ah, my victory chariot!
• Last of His Kind: In the tie-in comic, when Knuckles is captured and forced to partake in Gladiator Games, he is revealed to be the last surviving echidna. This is also stated to be the case in the film itself, since his father and the echidna tribe from the first film were already the last surviving members of their species.
• Lightning Bruiser: Knuckles is without a doubt a powerful beast compared to Sonic, as he can wreck just about anything that stands in his way with his physical might. He also possesses the sheer speed to keep up with a police car, unleash so many punches that his fists turn into red blurs via Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs, and even though Sonic is way faster than him at his max speed, he can still nonchalantly catch up with the Blue Blur at lower speeds.
• Literal-Minded: Knuckles doesn't get metaphors or fancy technology like holograms, and has to be guided through baseball by the analogy of the game as a form of combat. He reads the dots that appear when someone else is typing in a text messaging app out loud as if it were part of the conversation.
• Made of Iron:
  • Tails hits him with a police car to save Sonic, knocking him into Tom's shed. Knuckles simply gets back up like nothing even happened.
  • And later in the temple, when they're fighting over the Master Emerald, Sonic pounds him with his dash-attack, repeatedly, smashing him through several feet of stone floor. Knuckles still gets up and attacks Sonic with a flurry of punches like he didn't get hurt at all.
• Megaton Punch: He delivers quite a few massive hits over the course of the second movie. The first on-screen one is powerful enough to cause a massive shockwave, and he's strong enough to make the Death Egg Robot's hand flinch.
• Muscles Are Meaningful: He's visually much more burly than in the games to emphasize his raw power, with his design here between somewhere between his video game and Sonic Boom incarnations. However, his size also makes him heavier to lift and carry, as Tails finds out.
• Neck Lift: He clutches Sonic's neck in his grasp by holding him in place against a tree after he delivered a heavily one-sided beatdown against him.
• Noble Male, Roguish Male: Basically another way of displaying their Red Oni, Blue Oni personalities by showing how Sonic and Knuckles are portrayed and bounce off of each other. Sonic, who can be a bit of a Smug Super, is reckless, hyper, and has an extremely rowdy outlook since facing threats is more of a breeze to him while Knuckles on the other hand is a brute and an Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy but he takes practically everything seriously by wearing a rather dour expression who does not wish to waste such precious time on something important at hand and tends to be more reserved with himself.
• Nominal Villain: Knuckles only works with Eggman because of their shared enmity with Sonic and the scientist offering to help Knuckles find the Master Emerald. Even then, Knuckles only hates Sonic because of the war between the echidnas and the owl tribes, the latter of whom Sonic's adoptive mother was from, and has no malicious intent otherwise. After Eggman reveals his true colors and Sonic saves him from drowning, Knuckles joins forces with him and Tails to stop the madman.
• No Social Skills: Knuckles knows how to talk big and threaten people... but that's about it. Since he's the Last of His Kind and didn't have any friends growing up, Knuckles struggles with a lot of social cues, doesn't understand jokes, takes all comments at face value, and is completely baffled at Sonic's jovial behavior.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Knuckles retains Idris Elba's London accent. Why he has a British accent when every other extraterrestrial sounds American is never discussed.
• Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: He isn't deliberately said out to be evil by any means since he saw Robotnik as a potential guide to assist him through his quest to claim the Master Emerald to avenge his race, not knowing that he person he's aligned with wants to use steal it for diabolical purposes. After being betrayed by Robotnik, whom he considered his "friend", his faith in others dwindled down until Sonic sees him as a lonely individual. Sonic even brought mention to Tails that Knuckles isn't as antagonistic during their heartfelt conversation after they saved one another.
  Tails: (Lightly whispering) Hey, Sonic! Are you sure it was a good idea bringing you-know-who aboard?
  Sonic: Knuckles isn't really a bad guy. He's just a little... mixed up.
  Knuckles: I am NOT mixed up! I have steely focus! And I'm complex! And that's a lot for some people!
• Not Quite Flight: His gliding ability, though he only uses it very briefly to catch up to Sonic and Tails' police car.
• Not So Above It All: In contrast to his serious, honor-bound persona during most of the movie, he acts like this during the final scene, gloating about his "win" in baseball, and getting excited over trying ice cream for the first time.
• Personality Powers: Super strength and super toughness for one stubborn echidna who is always down for a brawl.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Downplayed. Knuckles is larger and taller than Sonic and Tails, with the strength to match. However, he is still tiny compared to normal humans and a giant alien beast he was forced to fight in the comic prequel to the second movie. Still, he is strong enough to cause Robotnik and Stone immense pain with a simple handshake and knock out the alien beast with one punch.
• The Power of Friendship: Knuckles is a firm believer in teamwork and companionship and attributes his and Robotnik's success in reaching the Hidden Temple to their will to work together. Upon seeing that Sonic holds the same values as him, he doesn't hesitate to join him and Tails to defeat Robotnik, even proudly declaring that they "make their stand here on the field of battle". After defeating Robotnik and retrieving the Master Emerald, Knuckles proposes a "vow" for the heroes to "watch out for each other" and calls their newfound alliance "a new tribe".
  Sonic: Look, we aren't strong enough to beat Robotnik on our own, but there's three of us. (to Knuckles) Your strength, (to Tails, who nods) your smarts, and my speed. Together. That's how we win.
  Knuckles: So we make our stand here... on the field of battle!
  Tails: As a team!
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: Doubles as an Ironic Echo. When Robotnik calls Knuckles disloyal for siding with Sonic and Tails, Knuckles retorts with ""Dis" is how I roll." before delivering a powerful punch to the groin to knock the Master Emerald out of him.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Knuckles talks of his echidna tribe and heritage with a lot of pride, and upholds a strong code of honour that they passed down to him.
• Randomly Gifted: The rest of Knuckles' tribe fought with weapons and armor, while Knuckles eschews any tools other than his fists. Inexplicably, Knuckles possesses Super-Strength, Super-Speed, and is Made of Iron. Why he's so different remains unexplained.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: In a homage to Sonic X, he does this to Sonic at the Master Emerald's temple. Sonic is fast enough to dodge them for a while, but Knuckles eventually tires him to the point that he manages to land a hit.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Whenever he's channeling his own bio-electric energy, his purple eyes morph into a vivid bright neon-red/magenta that not only matches his fur color, but gives him a rather vicious and empowered look.
• Red Is Heroic: Subverted. He's a vibrant red extraterrestrial who's a willing ally of Dr. Robotnik in his quest to catch Sonic. Then it gets Double Subverted when Dr. Robotnik betrays him, prompting him to join Sonic and Tails in stopping him and pulling a Heel–Face Turn. In his own view, Knuckles was heroically intentioned all along of course, viewing his quest as something he had to do to honor his tribe as the last of his kind.
• Red Is Violent: As is typical of the character, Knuckles' fur is a vibrant shade of red, and he's a Blood Knight who's quick to get physical. Sonic even nicknames him "Clifford the Big Red Rage Monster" and states he has "serious anger issues".
• Red Ones Go Faster: Downplayed. Knuckles is capable of some Super-Speed, but it's nowhere near the velocity that Sonic's capable of.
• Related in the Adaptation: In the video games, Knuckles, Sonic, and Tails are rivals turned good friends. In the film adaptation, Knuckles is seemingly adopted by the humans Tom and Maddie Wachowski, making him and his new friends Sonic and Tails adoptive siblings.
• Running Gag: After being told by Robotnik that shaking hands is a gesture of trust on Earth, Knuckles proceeds to deliver a Crushing Handshake on three occasions throughout the movie: first when he agrees to work with Robotnik, then when he meets Agent Stone, and finally when he warms up to Sonic and decides to team up with him to stop Robotnik.
• Running on All Fours: He briefly indulges in this while chasing Sonic and Tails through Green Hills, using his powerful arms for an extra push.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Knuckles spent his whole life training his powers and fighting skills to be the greatest echidna warrior and achieve his people's dream of reclaiming the Master Emerald. This also left him with No Social Skills, a tendency towards taking everything at face value, and never having had any real fun in his life.
• Saying Too Much: Right when Sonic asks of Knuckles' mentioning of Longclaw, the echidna (loudly) explains to the hedgehog about the ultimate power of the Master Emerald, as Robotink was in the direct hearing range which has caught his curiosity which also makes himself into a Manipulative Bastard to use Knuckles as a henchmen to guide him to the secluded whereabouts of the temple where he can achieve the Master Emerald all for himself.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Between Eggman's Co-Dragons, Knuckles is the Manly Man who routinely invokes honor and can break bones with his grip, while Agent Stone is the Sensitive Guy who makes art of himself and Eggman in latte foam.
  • Later on, after his Heel–Face Turn, he is a Manly Man to Tails' Sensitive Guy.
• Shock and Awe: He can tap into his raw Super-Strength to generate bio-electricity in the same way that Sonic can, if colored a bright red-orange to contrast with Sonic's cyan glow. His eyes even glow red when he taps into his power, just like Sonic's do.
• Strong and Skilled: Knuckles is not only as strong as Sonic is fast, but he has trained to be a warrior his entire life, giving him an advantage against the Unskilled, but Strong Sonic who has only been in a few real fights in his life. He even looks down on Sonic because of it, dismissing the hedgehog as being "unskilled" and "untrained".
• Super-Reflexes: He can't move or run quite as fast as Sonic, but he's able to perceive Sonic's movements at top speed and counter them, as long as he has a little advance warning. It's only when Sonic is actively trying to trump Knuckles in pure speed that the echidna can't keep up.
• Super-Speed: He has this, but not to the same extent as Sonic, as it takes him some time to catch up to a police car that Tails has hijacked. Sonic eventually is able to take advantage of this key difference and fight Knuckles evenly by focusing on avoiding his attacks with his greater speed and using openings to hit him rather than trying to counter his attacks directly. He even catches Robotnik completely off-guard when he darts himself across the walls within the Master Emerald Temple where Sonic himself hasn't even reached the Master Emerald in time. At one point in the climax, when Team Sonic is progressing towards the gargantuan Death Egg Robot, Knuckles is primarily shown to be keeping up with Sonic at the very least, as he even has a red trail behind himself as he's running beside him.
• Super-Strength: Knuckles is able to punch through a car and wrench its doors off with ease. Catching Sonic’s spin dash (that is enough to destroy cars and tanks on its own) does nothing but make him grimace a little. Also, he tends to give a Crushing Handshake to others even without intending to.
  • At one instance when he was pursuing Sonic in Siberia, he mowed down a row of trees right when the Blue Blur dodged his punch, and charged his bio-electrical energy to shatter an enormous rock to pieces.
  • Right when he's defeated Sonic in a duel at the Master Emerald temple, he hoists a large boulder without even trying as an attempt to crush him with it. During his initial team up with both Sonic and Tails to face off against Super Robotnik, he powers up his already brutish strength with an energy-infused augmented punch so devastating that he briefly held off the Death Egg Robot's gigantic hand.
• Super-Toughness: Tails ramming him with a car only slows him down, and even after Sonic steps up his game during their fight in the temple, being drilled several feet through stone by Sonic's repeated spin-dashes does nothing more than make him angry. He later outright states to Tails that being hit with the car didn't hurt him at all.
• Took a Level in Cheerfulness: At the end of the movie, he becomes excitable and goofy during the game of baseball, and is quite ecstatic about ice cream with sprinkles.
• Top-Heavy Guy: His chest and biceps are much broader and sturdier than usual mainly to show off his inhuman strength, while his legs are long but nowhere near as muscular and burly as his Boom incarnation.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Grapes, as established all the way back in the manual for his debut game. When he learns what ice cream is, his first question is if grapes are involved. In his eponymous series, he is shown digging hungrily into a whole cluster of green grapes. He also seems to have taken a liking to ice cream with sprinkles, Cool Ranch Doritos, and Shabbat food such as gefilte fish upon learning about them and trying them.
• Unwitting Pawn: Little does Knuckles know that Robotnik is just using him for his strength, until Robotnik, having achieved his goals by stealing the Master Emerald, tells him that he has served his purpose and mocks him for being dumb enough to even believe that he was his friend.
• Vile Villain, Laughable Lackey: Inverted. Robotnik is dangerously cunning yet is also an absolutely hilarious goofball. Knuckles, the one who's working for him, is predominantly a destructive Cold Ham even in spite of his trait of being The Comically Serious.
• Villainous Friendship: Knuckles initially sees Robotnik as a means to an end, but once they ally themselves together he begins to see Robotnik as a like-minded person adherent to his cause, and a friend. The scientist even introduces him to the hedgehog as his new best friend. Then it's subverted, as Robotnik never considered him a friend, and was only using him to reach the Master Emerald.
• Vocal Dissonance: Knuckles is in the same age range as Sonic and Tails, but whereas Ben Schwartz and Colleen O'Shaughnessey make their characters sound fairly young, Idris Elba's voice is too deep and adult-sounding to pass as a teenager. This is in keeping with most of Knuckles' voiced appearances over the years. He's usually claimed to be sixteen years old, but about the only version that sounds convincingly teenaged is the Knuckles from Sonic Underground, with every other voice actor giving him a deeper voice that makes him sound mid-thirties at least.^note Also, despite being much taller than Sonic and Tails, he's still short compared to the human characters, further highlighting the dissonance
• Wall Crawl: His recurring ability from the games is displayed when Sonic and Tails shake him off a polce car and throw him down a ravine. With the spikes on his gloves, he proceeds to climb his way back to the road.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Knuckles' first approach to a problem is to punch as hard as he can it until it stays down.
• White Gloves: He wears ones similar to boxing gloves that still allow his knuckle spikes to do their thing. They're prominently featured on one of the teaser posters, which is just his gloved spiked hand.
• Why Won't You Die?: Starts throwing nothing but Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs at Sonic relentlessly, given the way how he's raising his voice while doing so it shows that he's had more than enough of the blue hedgehog who's trying to defeat him.
  Knuckles: Why don't you stand still, and die with honor!?
• World's Best Warrior: He's gained this reputation outside of Earth, with Tails even describing him as "the most fearsome warrior in the galaxy". In the second movie, his first fight with Sonic is a complete Curb-Stomp Battle, and even in their last fight Sonic just can't overcome his sheer endurance.
• Would Hurt a Child: Subverted. Even though he does try to attack both Sonic and Tails during the car chase scene and even seems to plot some revenge against Tails for hitting him with the police car, Knuckles eventually works together with Tails and even becomes something of a big brother to him towards the end of the film.
• Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning: He conjures his own powerful bio-electrical energy with red colored lightning as opposed to Sonic's neon blue/cyan. Small arcs of red lightning bolts are seen exiting his body whenever he speeds himself up and his fists are surrounded by red electricity to deliver obliterating damage with his augmented punches.
• Your Normal Is Our Taboo: Knuckles grew up in an ancient-type warrior civilization where its practices included fighting to the death in an arena lined with hazards such as spikes. He is blind to the fact that these would be viewed as barbaric, if not illegal in modern civilization.

Others

Longclaw

Longclaw

Voiced by: Donna Jay Fulks (English), Rie Ishizuka (Japanese)^{Foreign VAs}Verónica López Treviño (Latin-American Spanish), Karen Ramalho (Brazilian Portuguese), Mylène Mackay (Quebec French), Françoise Cadol (EU French), Francesca Fiorentini (Italian), Zhang Meijuan (PRC Mandarin), Coco Sung (TW Mandarin)

Appearances: Sonic the Hedgehog | Sonic the Hedgehog 2

"Never. Stop. Running."

"The only way to stay safe, is to stay hidden."

A wise owl who acted as Sonic's caretaker when he was a child. After he gets followed by a group of tribal echidnas intent on attacking them, she uses and gives him Power Rings to escape to another world.

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• Annoying Arrows: She's shot with an echidna's arrow mid-flight, but aside from being knocked out of the air, she doesn't seem any worse for wear.
• Canon Foreigner: She was created solely for the movie, although she's based on Sophocles from Stay Sonic.
• Composite Character:
  • Being an owl who was initially the only character on Sonic's world to be aware of Sonic's existence makes her a rough analogue of Sophocles the owl from Stay Sonic, who was the first to discover Sonic.
  • Her acting as Sonic's mentor and Parental Substitute and being the one to give him the Power Rings is taken from Uncle Chuck from Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM).
  • She is also a mother figure to Sonic who has to abandon him at a young age from a greater threat, much like Queen Aleena from Sonic Underground.
  • Word of God during the second movie's press junket pointed out that they used Babylonian art and writing as inspiration for the owls' architecture to indicate the Owl Tribe's ties to the Babylon Rogues (a group of thieving birds descended from an ancient civilization that invented antigravity) from the Sonic Riders series.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: She takes down an entire tribe of echidnas attacking her in her final stand, a fact mentioned in her memorial.
• Fragile Speedster: For a huge owl, she can take flight to the skies (while carrying Sonic) with graceful speed and is able to outfly a fleet of arrows from the Echidna Tribe. However, one arrow finding its mark is all it takes to instantly strike her down to ground level.
• Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Despite being a wise owl, she is half-naked, and the only thing she wears is a gold chest plate.
• Heroic Sacrifice: While she could've gone with Sonic to Earth, she decides to stay behind and delay the Echidna Tribe long enough for the Warp Ring to close, despite knowing they would likely kill her. We don't find out her fate until The Official Pre-Quill Comic confirms that she is, in fact, dead.
• I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin: She gives Sonic the bag of warp rings and a map just before she sends him through the portal to Earth.
• Last of His Kind: She's stated to be the last remaining owl in the official novelization of the first movie, which is later confirmed by Knuckles in the second movie proper.
• Made of Iron: She's stabbed by an arrow underneath her right wing. After taking a fall from it, she doesn't seem to be fatally injured and looks perfectly fine.
• Mama Bear: She is perfectly willing to act as a shield against the echidnas to allow Sonic to escape.
• Mentor Archetype: Sonic explicitly describes her as "basically Obi-Wan Kenobi, if Obi-Wan Kenobi had a beak and ate mice." Tellingly, her only new scene in the sequel has her as a translucent blue hologram, not unlike a Force ghost.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Falls victim to this trope big-time. She finds a helpless Sonic and takes him under her wing, acts as his mother and protects him from those who wish to exploit him. All this gets her is being murdered by a tribe of savages.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Instead of a typical Funny Animal character in Sonic's world, she happens to be a normal great horned owl who is giant and can talk. Even her game redesign in the Sonic Forces mobile game only slightly tweaks her design.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: With Knuckles confirmed as the last of his kind, this means that Longclaw managed to take the entire Echidna Tribe down with her.
• The Owl-Knowing One: She is wise, motherly, and was responsible for giving Sonic the Power Rings.
• Parental Substitute: She acted as a mother figure for Sonic back on his home planet.
• Posthumous Character: In the sequel, she is already dead, but her role as a guardian of the Master Emerald as well as her eliminating the Echidna tribe has major importance to the plot.
• Retired Badass: According to the novelization, she was once part of an order of warriors dedicated to maintaining the planet's balance, but by the time Sonic met her she was a caring mother figure who didn't fight anymore. That said, as she is all but stated to have exterminated the echidnas before dying, it's clear she is still a legitimate badass.
• Small Role, Big Impact: She gives Sonic the bag of rings in the beginning of the first movie, which plays a major role throughout.
• Stock Animal Diet: If Sonic is to be believed, she eats mice, unlike the hedgehog, fox, and echidna that eat more human food.
• Taking You with Me: A rare heroic example, where she takes down the Echidna Tribe to protect Sonic, but dies shortly afterward.
• They Would Cut You Up: She always stresses that Sonic has to keep his powers secret for this reason. Between the echidna tribe, Robotnik, and G.U.N., it's clear her worries are valid. Although, after Sonic has spent time with Tom, he starts wondering if Longclaw was wrong and if it is possible for him to live peacefully with other people even with his powers.
• Uncertain Doom: Because the portal ring closes before it's shown what happened to her, it's not clear whether the Echidna Tribe killed her or not. The Official Pre-Quill Comic confirms that she really did die protecting Sonic, though she kills the entire Echidna Tribe and is subsequently hailed as a hero with her last stand's location being revered.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: The last a young Sonic sees of her is standing between the opened portal and the group of echidnas chasing him before the portal closes, just a few minutes after her introduction.
• You Shall Not Pass!: She stays behind to delay the echidna tribe and allow Sonic to get through the Warp Ring safely.

Echidna Tribe

Echidna Tribe

Appearances: Sonic the Hedgehog | Sonic the Hedgehog 2

"Turns out with great power... comes great power-hungry bad guys. And I led them right to us."

— Sonic the Hedgehog

A tribe of echidnas who covet Sonic's powers.

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• Adaptational Villainy: Retroactively. In the novelization, it is said that they served a powerful warlord who had chased Sonic his whole life. In the sequel movie, however, they are stated to have been a rival brotherhood of heroes to the brotherhood that Longclaw served in.
• Adaptation Origin Connection: In the games, Pachacamac and the Knuckles Tribe lived 4000 years before Sonic was born. Here, they're alive when Sonic was a toddler and caused the attack that forced Sonic to flee to Earth.
• Greater-Scope Villain: They were the ones chasing Sonic on his home planet to harness his power, and it is because of them killing Sonic's mentor Longclaw that Sonic has to go to Earth. This extends to the second movie, with it being revealed that the echidnas forged the Master Emerald.
• In Spite of a Nail: Just like their game counterparts, the echidna tribe were wiped out between the events of Sonic’s past and at least the prequel comic, seeing as Knuckles is addressed as the Last of His Kind.
• Malevolent Masked Men: They wear tribal masks and were pursuing Sonic to garner his powers.
• Predator Pastiche: The Echidnas, depicted with dreadlocks, masks, and various tribal weaponry, hunting a young Sonic in the jungle.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Their total screen time is very short, but they're the entire reason Sonic is on Earth in the first place.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Downplayed. In most Sonic media, Knuckles is the Last of His Kind, with his ancestors being a distant part of history; he doesn't even know how he came to be. In the movie, the echidnas were still alive when Sonic was a child, but are finally wiped out in their battle against Longclaw.
• Starter Villain: They're the reason Sonic has to abandon his home world and flee to Earth.
• The Unreveal: The first movie doesn’t reveal what they want Sonic’s power for so badly. The second movie reveals it was Longclaw they actually were after.

Pachacamac

Pachacamac

Voiced by: Christopher Lloyd

Appearances: Sonic the Hedgehog | Knuckles

Pachacamac as he appears in Knuckles.

^{Click here to see Pachacamac in the first film}

The former leader of Knuckles' tribe who personally led them to hunt down Longclaw and Sonic. He apparently has since gotten to Earth with a job at a bowling alley.

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• Freeze-Frame Bonus: First-time viewers probably aren't going to notice that the echidna who shoots down Longclaw is Pachacamac, the tyrannical tribe leader from Sonic Adventure.^note He can be identified by his purple eyes, and the shape of his mask resembles his large eyebrows and facial fur. The detail was so easy to miss that Tyson Hesse had to publicly reveal the cameo on his Twitter.
• Frontline General: During the hunt for Longclaw and Sonic; he was right there leading them on the field alongside the other tribe members, and even wears similar-looking armor to them. This trope is used so prevalently that Tyson Hesse had to confirm on Twitter, as seen above, that Pachacamac is among the group in the first place.
• Not Quite Dead: He was thought to have been killed by Longclaw along with the rest of the tribe sans Knuckles. It turns out he not only survived, but somehow ended up on Earth.
• Retired Badass: From frontline leader of a tribe of warriors to working at a bowling alley.
• Spared by the Adaptation: He is long dead in the canon of the games.

The Scavengers

Three alien mercenaries Knuckles hired to help him track down Sonic.

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• Aliens Speaking English: Defied. Unlike the more animal-like extraterrestrials, the Scavengers seem to speak their own language. The text featured in the comic looks nothing like written dialogue on Earth.
• All There in the Manual: The comic "Sonic the Hedgehog 2: The Official Movie Pre-Quill" reveals they were mercenaries that Knuckles encountered before bribing them with rings into helping him hunt down Sonic. Without this knowledge, it makes their presence at the beginning of the film confusing.
• Animal Motif: Their helmets have vulture-like features, and like the animal, they're scavengers. Their appearance in the movie is them approaching Robotnik's body, likely thinking he's dead to steal from him.
• Canon Foreigner: They have no direct counterparts from the games, cartoons or comics prior to the movie.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: On the receiving end by Robotnik, who by the way, was still stuck on the Mushroom Planet and only had limited resources to work with.
• Human Aliens: They have very human-like bodies, though it's unknown what exactly is under their helmets.
• No Name Given: Not only are their individual names not given, but their species is unknown as well. "Scavengers" is just what Knuckles called them.
• Non-Standard Character Design: They're the only alien characters introduced in the series so far who are not CG, but are depicted as people in costumes.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: After Robotnik manages to subdue them before running into Knuckles and makes a deal with him, they're never seen again. It's more than likely that, since he's found someone who knows exactly where Sonic is, Knuckles had no need for them anymore and left them on the Mushroom Planet (or if he considers that dishonorable, brought them back first and then dismissed them).

The "Project" (UNMARKED SPOILERS)

Shadow the Hedgehog

Voiced by: Keanu Reeves

Appearances: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (in the Stinger) | Sonic the Hedgehog 3

"My God... Project Shadow."

"Someone worked very hard to keep this hidden."

— Secretary of Homeland Security

The end result of Project Shadow, having remained dormant in a black site for over fifty years... until now.

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• Adaptational Early Appearance: Shadow is historically a character who didn't appear until much later on in the franchise's lifespan, with his first appearance being in Sonic Adventure 2 (canonically the sixth game in the mainline titles), but The Stinger for the second movie sets him up as an antagonist for the third movie, appearing before other villains introduced before him like Metal Sonic and Chaos.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: The last shot of him shows his eyes glowing with electricity, strongly hinting that he's also capable of using bio-electricity like Sonic and Knuckles.
• Celebrity Paradox: Keanu Reeves starred in the film Speed, which appears in the first film.
• Conjoined Eyes: Subverted. Much like Sonic, his eyes are separated, and also like Sonic, he has a patch of white fur between his eyes to give off the illusion of them being conjoined.
• Death Glare: In the last shot of the second film, no less. He awakens with a furious look in his eyes, which spark with electricity.
• The Dreaded: Commander Walters is audibly unnerved when he is informed that Project Shadow had been discovered.
• Evil Counterpart: Implied. He's a hedgehog with a strong resemblance to Sonic and implied to share the same powers. However, unlike Sonic, Shadow's first appearance in The Stinger depicts him as an ominous threat.
• Eye Awaken: After his capsule rises from the floor, Shadow opens his eyes, and they spark with electricity, much like Sonic's do whenever he uses his Super-Speed.
• Older Than They Look: Implied. It's mentioned the file for Project Shadow dates back over fifty years ago, yet Shadow doesn't seem to be visibly older than Sonic, much like in the games. However, it's unknown if Shadow is mentally a teenager or ageless like his video game counterpart.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: He has black fur with hints of red.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: He's depicted as having red eyes, and if Commander Walters being unnerved by Project Shadow is any indication, then Shadow is NOT someone to be messed with.
• Sealed Badass in a Can: According to the military, Shadow has been locked away in a black site vault for at least fifty years.
• Sequel Hook: Dr. Robotnik's whereabouts are unknown at the end of the second movie, but G.U.N. agents trying to wipe his records from their files anyhow happened to discover "Project Shadow" while Shadow himself reawakens after fifty years.
• Tsurime Eyes: Subverted. Shadow's eyes are rounded like Sonic's, but his facial markings make them appear somewhat sharp.
• Walking Spoiler: Just like Tails in the first movie, it's impossible to talk about The Stinger for the second movie without mentioning that Shadow makes an appearance.

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