THE HEDGEHOG EFFIGIES

I have the fortune of living super close to one of my state's biggest shopping malls, so my friends and I end up hanging out there a lot, and the bottom floor is lined with little kiosks selling overpriced little toys and trinkets. As it turns out, about 99% of those trinkets are bootleg merchandise for various popular properties. Where do these kiosks come from? How do they get away with existing, legally speaking? I don't know. But what I DO know is that one of the properties they tackle often and with aplomb is my good friend Sonic the Hedgehog.

Every time I visit, I try to make a point to check out the kiosks to see if there are any new standouts in my local realm of weird Sonic bootlegs. I've long been meaning to make a page for them, so here I record my findings all in one convenient place. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

This one started it all. One day I glanced at the toys lined up in the little baskets and then I stopped for a moment like "wait." and the rest is history. It planted the seed of having to check every time just in case there is Something like this. This is my stupid terrible bad holy grail.

This is Shadow the Hedgehog if you gave him the world's worst haircut and then also compressed him in one of those trap rooms with the walls closing in, and he escaped but not before it started to smoosh him into a new shape like a cartoon. The quills that point up, his most defining feature, were evidently too much effort for the manufacturers to figure out or too expensive to produce, so they have simply been surgically removed. He looks like he's wearing two of those shark fins you strap to your head when you go swimming to spook people. All of the smaller details, like his cuffs and also his eyelids, are made of the worst, cheapest felt imaginable. He has a suction cup attached to his head in case you want everyone to see this dangling from your windshield, which he will probably stick to for a grand total of maybe a minute before falling because he's way too big.

(I'd also like to extend my appreciation to the Knuckles on the bottom there, who was clearly part of the same "line" but was relatively far less interesting save for the absolutely bizarre shape of his mouth. It's almost normal save for the fact that the lips curl up way too high and makes the sidemouth look less like a stylistic choice and more like a distressing malformation.)

I went back later and made an inadvisable financial choice because this thing spoke to me so much, as something that is important to know about me is that my decision-making skills are almost always dictated by whatever I think would be funniest in any given situation. It cost $15, which is absolutely too much money and significantly more than it probably cost to produce. Was it worth it for the wonder of knowing this thing can live in my home forever now? No. Not remotely. But I'm glad he's here anyway.

More than a year later, I came across the same line but simplified a bit into slightly smaller versions with those big plastic keychain backpack-tags instead of suction cups (note: they are still too large for this not to be unwieldy at best). I want to say they are slightly better quality, given that Shadow looks slightly less misshapen and the eyelid highlights are just sewn on instead of being a weird fabric flap, but I look at those cuffs and I know in my heart of hearts that this is not true. Really, the fact that Shadow's new tall head shape looks a little more deliberate just kind of stands to make him feel Xenomorphic, which is further accentuated by the fact that his ears have migrated down to the sides of his head, making him look less like Sonic's Hot Topic counterpart and more like Crash Bandicoot's. His expression is more "pure, channeled fury" compared to Crash's more unreadable and unsavory flavor of unhinged, though. This guy would stab you in broad daylight instead of some dark alleyway.

Knuckles has had perhaps the most egregious of simplifications, because apparently sewing together all of his dreadlocks was too taxing and nobody's ever gonna look at these toys from an angle that isn't directly head-on, right? That's a reasonable thing to expect? Anyway, his head is just a flat red croissant now. His eyes are too close together, and the mouth is still that extremely weird shape. It looks like it was passably normal and then someone added an extra inch or two of closed mouth on the near end? It doesn't even flow into the curvature.

Silver is the least interestingly off-model of the three, but the fact that the quills on his forehead have been rendered in the same terrible fabric as all the other smaller bits means they have since flopped over into a miserable set of bangs that makes him look like a pathetic sopping-wet dork. This is truer to the spirit of Silver the Hedgehog than any official plush could ever dream to be, actually. (Also he doesn't have ears.)

This one's actually kind of cute? It's just some little animatronic with an interchangeable, marketable skin loosely slung over it that presumably does a little song and dance when you press its paw (helpfully denoted by the most generic music note sticker in the world), which I did not test. It is also not remotely shaped like Tails, and in fact I'm pretty sure it had no tails at all, and instead its butt was just a velcro opening to swap out the batteries in the huge chunky plastic bit inside. It seems remarkably unhuggable for a plush toy. This is Tails if he was a weird baby instead of a weird eight-year-old, which can still be sort of like a baby in some ways but they have the agency to insist they're not.

Looking at the bulbous head shape, I think this might have started as a skeleton for toys of Tweety Bird, who is a character with a legacy of being bizarrely omnipresent in pop cultural marketing despite the fact that he's just like, fine, I guess. I haven't seen him around as much anymore, which can possibly be chalked up to the fact that I don't use Facebook, so I guess the manufacturers here had an excess of leftover Tweety skeletons that they had to do something with and just haphazardly started slapping new characters onto them.

This is maybe the most pleasant thing here, which serves in direct contrast to its horrible kin encountered on the very same trip.

You know those dancing cactuses? The ones that have been haunting these sorts of mall kiosks since time immemorial? I'm pretty sure one of them is a plot point in an episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, a cartoon that aired almost 20 years ago. Those things still exist, but now instead of just cactuses they are also putting interchangeable Marketable Character Skins over these too. It's terrible every time! Wow!

This is by far the worst one I've seen, if for no other reason than because Tails does not wear any clothes and so there is nothing to obscure the fact that this is a beloved character distorted into a terrifying new shape in an act of capitalism-fueled body horror. The strange new white bands around his arms and neck do little to assuage this feeling, even if they do abstract it slightly, which I'm assuming is the reason they're there because these toy designers have never once cared about giving themselves the benefit of the doubt on copyright law. I think the worst part is that the pot he's... in?... is the same color as his fur instead of taking advantage of the fact that Tails has red shoes, implying it's all part of the same fleshy mass. But at least the eyes are blue, which makes it a little more accurate than the last Tails! And he can do a little dance for you! So it's fine, actually!

There was an Amy, too, whose actual clothes made her far less actively distressing. It's always her classic design at these kiosks, weirdly, even though her modern design is way better-known; presumably so they can just reuse Sonic's sewing pattern and stick on some bangs made out of more cheap fabric. Does make me wonder if I'll ever come across someone like Mighty eventually, though.

It's our first Sonic! He hasn't been able to appear until now because someone has hunted him down in the wilderness like a wolf and turned his pelt into a ferocious display of rugged masculinity. Sorry.

This is one of those hats with the little gloves attached, but there are no pockets on this one so actually it's just a hat with really long flaps. It has no quills attached to make this actually look like Sonic, because that would be far too costly, so they've simply opted to make a weird blue Thing and hope the vague resemblance afforded by the (incorrectly-colored) conjoined eyes will be enough for some unsuspecting child who has yet to develop any quality standards to convince their parents to buy it. Those eyes are terrifying, by the way? It turns out the reason they go for oval-shaped pupils instead of round ones in this series' character designs is because when they are realistically circular it puts the fear of God in your heart. The ears are also way too big, but making them that shape ironically does make them more accurate to a real hedgehog. If you really stretch you could pretend this is profound somehow.

Recently there's been a ton of these rubber keychains, and there are, as far as I can tell, three designs for their "dedicated" Sonic-branded ones: Shadow (allegedly), Metal Sonic, and inexplicably, Sonic the Werehog from Unleashed. That's a pretty clear theme of dark counterparts to Sonic, which is far more thought than I've come to expect from these, though the fact that a theme exists at all is maybe even more confusing in this context? They all have a little trinket of the Sonic Heroes logo attached, and also a strap that features Sonic X's instead.

Shadow was the first to catch my eye, and it took me a decently long time to even figure out he was supposed to be Shadow, on account of He Is Blue. (Or purple, depending on the toy. The color of the rubber is fully inconsistent.) His highlights are missing, so the only red is now his eyes, which make him look like an inhuman thirst for blood is the only thing he knows. Ironically, Metal is actually relatively on-model compared to the other two except for the fact that his eyes are just completely dead and black, where Shadow's scary Terminator eyes would've been perfect.

The Werehog is apparently where all of the black rubber for Shadow went (they could have just traded), and they have used it to craft an evil version of those pine tree air fresheners you dangle from your rearview mirror. Sonic's not a stranger to being drawn shaped like that from head-on--the UK's Sonic the Comic did it constantly--but it never gets any less weird to look at. The Werehog's ears ARE shaped like that, but they've been simplified into devil horns, making this feel even more like the manufacturers invented a bizarre OC if you don't know exactly what you're looking at. I'm mostly just baffled they went for such a deep cut with this one, although I guess I have seen official Werehog plushes around recently. That's what makes looking out for these fun—there's no logic behind any of it. You never know what you'll find.

But while these three complete the "set", they are not alone here.

Hey this is the worst thing I've ever laid eyes on, I think?

At a glance this is... some sort of pink Sonic. The moment you inspect it closer this visage begins to fall apart and reveal itself to be something deep in the uncanny valley, some sort of shapeshifter pretending to be Sonic but unable to emulate the blue of his fur, therefore opting to instead make the best of the fleshy tones that come naturally to it. The abnormally tiny shoes throw the entire thing's proportions completely out of balance, apparently the single thing that had been standing in the way of the arms feeling unnervingly overlong.

The muzzle is where this all really falls apart. It's... bad! The fact that his nose has not been colored in black and is instead the exact same skintone as everything else makes it look jarringly human, like this is some child from a newspaper comic that has made zero pop cultural impact outside of being another "that one with the weird-looking animal kid". Almost as bad is the mouth, which is both too wide and inexplicably raised from the rest of the rubber instead of sunken, like mouths are supposed to be. Like, I get if they couldn't do an asymmetrical design like the classic sidemouth with the tools they have here, but it could stand to be a little smaller, maybe? At least the quills in the back are better-molded than on those other ones. You take the little things.

Instead of the identifiable Sonic branding as on the ones before, this one is just accompanied by a generic cartoon glove and a strap that proclaims "LUCKY", because they presumably knew there was no way they could feasibly pass this doppelgänger off as Sonic. There is a solid chance that LUCKY is the manufacturer here, or that it is otherwise an ironic name for this creature, because I'm pretty sure this thing is some sort of omen. Nothing bad has happened to me, it just seems like the type of item that would curse anyone who touches it in some nebulous way.