Premier athletes praise Sonic The Hedgehog in new Superbowl ad

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Even among the world's top tier athletes there are legends that they look up to. In the early days of his career Michael Jordan praised the exploits and chased the success of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Joe Montana was six-time Superbowl champ Tom Brady's idol growing up. Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby dreamed of being Wayne Gretzky. Personally, all I ever wanted to do was make my varsity basketball team. (Spoiler alert: I did.) However, the key element of all the great names I just mentioned is that the people they admired were – well – actual people.

That's not the case with this latest Superbowl advertisement for the upcoming film SONIC THE HEDGEHOG. In the commercial featured above NFL stars Michael Thomas and Christian McCaffrey praise the speed and agility of…someone. Olympic track star Allyson Felix and NASCAR driver Kyle Busch do the same. In fact up until about twenty seconds in you might expect the group to be talking about Usain Bolt or Christian Coleman. Nope. Instead they are referring to the furry blue fastball that is Sonic the Hedgehog. I should have suspected something when they said he was "all about the rings."

Whether or not SONIC THE HEDGEHOG is a hit with audiences and critics remains to be seen. The $95 million videogame adaptation has had a bit of a bumpy ride to the big screen, including a huge fan backlash about the original rendering of Sonic. The criticism caused Paramount to completely redesign the eponymous blue hedgehog and pushed the release date back from November to February. However, you can't knock the marketing campaign so far. Attaching big name athletes to the promotional material is a huge, possibly desperate, swing. Hopefully for Paramount it pays off at the box office. At the very least Jim Carrey looks to be having a great time as Doctor Robotnik.

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG starring Ben Schwartz, Jim Carrey, James Marsden, Tika Sumpter, and Neal McDonough speeds into movie theaters February 14, 2020.