#they all also have very disconcerting mascot personas?????

[malaierba]

Found a blog that calls the Karamatsu + Ichimatsu + Jyushimatsu trio the "problematic trio" and wow, let's see, nudism, shits on tables, and can sustain a boner for hours while submerged in icy water at the mere mention of girls? They're so right lmfao

[segafunk]

Teddy Roosevelt, Eggman, and the Message of Classical Sonic

The origin of both Sonic the Hedgehog and Eggman was a character design contest for a mascot held by Sega of Japan, with the designs submitted to the approval of Sega of America on the perception that a game to compete with Mario on the new Sega Genesis would need to do well in the ‘States. Many of the characters resemble American more than Japanese animation influences from Max Fleischer to The Simpsons (images @ The Cutting Room Floor). One design is even a wolf in an American flag shirt brandishing his fists, a rather backhanded compliment to a country that emerged as the predominant global superpower while both the Japanese economy crashed and the Soviet Union collapsed not long before in 1991. In any of the possible characters selected for a mascot, there’s a kind of commentary to Americans about American culture, not least in its edginess and rebellion. Commentary on the selection of Sonic himself will have to wait for another day. But it’s important to note that among the entries is a character in his pajamas who impeccably resembles Eggman. Or put another way, both characters physically resemble the iconic 26th President of the United States of America, Theodore Roosevelt.

It’s important to realize in this context that if Sega of America had favored his design, there would probably have been a side-scroller starring the Roosevelt character given the adorable Teddy Bear treatment as the heroic lead. Roosevelt is indeed often regarded as a heroic figure American history, confronting the monopoly capitalism of robber barons in the Gilded Age with the avowed intention to give Americans a Square Deal. His design more resembled the features of Mario himself, while trying to sell kids and their parents on a blue punk rocker was a riskier decision. But what happened rather was that a very deliberate decision was made to take the same character, and make him the bad guy. In other words, why might one make the exercise seeing Roosevelt as emblematic of the bad guy in a narrative the Nostalgia Critic rightly observes has “an environmental message that’s… subtle”? Wasn’t it Teddy Roosevelt who enacted landmark conservation legislation like the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate National Monuments protected for posterity from extraction and development by industrialists?

Roosevelt exemplifies the paradox of the hunter and taxonomist who was very prolific in gunning down hundreds of animals, but within those experiences became interested in the politics of conservation to institute limits against relentless industrial extraction of resources. If Sonic and his friends are wild animals, it’s easy to see how they could become threatened by someone in his likeness. For Roosevelt, the experience of joining in the Westward expansion of America was pivotal both to his sense of identity and his political persona. Among other things, Roosevelt went to the Dakota Territory to participate in the massive boom in cattle ranching seeking fortune and solitude. The obverse of an enterprise ultimately linked to the industrialized slaughterhouses of Chicago was the mass extermination of the buffalo and corresponding mass starvation of indigenous peoples. Here at the 21st century, American cattle culture is often regarded as a major factor in global climate change because of the methane emissions they produce.

Roosevelt ultimately conceived of an America to become a massive expansionist imperial and industrial power, and acted toward what would come to be called the “American Century”. But in seeking to place limits upon this power, combined with his nephew Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, he engendered a powerful enduring hatred among political interests who sought no restrictions and no protections from its exercise. Among other things, this expresses itself in the continual efforts to scale back and repeal the elements of the New Deal and any remaining economic and ecological safety net in America, and in books with a conservative or libertarian bent sincerely arguing that both Roosevelts were fascist or communist dictators. In terms of “communism”, the actual belief of the Roosevelt Presidents was that only political reform could stave off radical revolution, so they are more accurately identified with the politics of progressivism or a noblesse oblige sensibility.

In terms of “fascism” in a broad sense, it was rather the case that the imperial expansionism of Italy, Germany and Austria, and Japan drew on precedents in American society and culture in seeking to have what Americans had, their understanding of what Made America Great. Consequently, when common themes can be found between the writings and declarations of Roosevelt with those of Hitler and the Nazi Party, this was not because the former was an exceptional figure, but because for better and for worse he articulated views common to American culture in the Gilded Age. Where Americans, Europeans, and Japanese invested in competitive cultural projects of imperialism and industrialization sound retrospectively like Nazis when they spoke on themes like Social Darwinism and eugenics prior to World War I, that is because the Nazis were steeped in such ideology and influences. Fascist movements flourished most in nations where there was a widespread feeling of being slighted or scapegoated by the new world order effected by the Treaty of Versailles, sufficient to build mass support to defy the League of Nations, and launch massive projects of empire building and effect systematic war crimes against colonized populations. Fascism as such did not arise until 1919, the very year Teddy Roosevelt died without achieving his ambition for a third term as President.

A more fruitful consideration would be the extent to which American democracy, with all its violence and injustice, whether codified into law or exerted in lawlessness lent de-facto toleration, has lent the scripts and justification for oppressive regimes. To look on America from the outside must be very disconcerting. The polarized two-party system routinely alternates Presidents, typically every 4-8 years, and with them national policy becomes most opposed to the things it most supported. Or else, continuities between parties where there should not be, such as building up a massive military-industrial complex from the Cold War onward in the teeth of the older conception that America should not maintain a standing army because the presence of such a force was a sure road to tyrannizing absolute monarchy. Still more blatant, the contradiction between a society that simultaneously declares an aim to make the world “safe for democracy”, as Woodrow Wilson said of America entering World War I and shaping the ensuing balance of power, and a society that has overthrown democratically elected leaders, installed fascist or military dictatorships, and supported the systematic atrocities they have carried out. The culture of Japan, having undergone radical transformations following American military interventions in 1853-1854 and from 1945-1952, has developed an acute sense of this Jekyll-and-Hyde conundrum constantly effecing their position of the world. It’s not unreasonable to assume that the Sonic Team under Yuji Naka, collaborating first with Sega of Japan on Sonic the Hedgehog and then with Sega of America on future sequels for the Sega Genesis, would want to include implicit commentary on this state of affairs in communicating to Americans and an Americanized international audience.

I propose that the link between Teddy Roosevelt and Eggman is that the face of the famous American President as the game antagonist is included because he symbolizes the cultural project of the American Century. Because the faces behind the office change so frequently, one face must be chosen who exemplifies the traits of a wider paradigm spanning between them. To show the first face in such a lineage can be particularly effective. When exactly the “American Century” began is a matter of historical debate, although most agree it to have been fully in effect after World War II when America assumed many of the roles that had been carried out by the British Empire in the “British Century.” However, as early as the turn of the 20th century, America had already made cultural decisions toward facilitating such a world-historic shift under the Presidency and punditry of Roosevelt.

The Westward expansionism of America after its Civil War not only brought a considerable number of European immigrants, but also aroused considerable envy contributing to the volatizing Scramble for Africa as the empires of Europe sought to claim their own frontiers at the expense of a stolen continent. Roosevelt not only participated in settler colonialism and its economic frontier, he also promoted it as a paradigm and way of life. It’s fair to say that if Buffalo Bill’s carnivalesque Wild West shows popularized Manifest Destiny to the masses in the field of entertainment, Roosevelt’s writings did the same in the field of intellect. Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” in the 1st United States Voluntary Cavalry were meant to give the impression of the extension of this paradigm into the Caribbean in the fight against the Spanish Empire, creating the impression of chivalric modern warfare waged by manly rugged Americans.

In this context, a major cultural rift opened among Americans in terms of whether America should define itself as an imperialist power or an anti-imperialist power facilitating decolonized self-determining nations. Roosevelt, along with his processor William McKinley, were distinctly on the side of American imperialism. This created certain cultural contradictions; how could Americans have been so outraged by reports of atrocities and concentration camps by the Spanish in Cuba, and then go on to carry out atrocities and institute concentration camps to claim the Philippines as a U.S. colony? It was this contradiction that brought Roosevelt to power, insofar as the radicalized steel worker Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo in 1901 spoke of “outrages committed by the American government in the Philippine islands.” (Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States p. xxviii)

The ensuing policies effected by Roosevelt involved both outright colonialism to assert naval dominance over the Pacific (even as he realized a catastrophic war with Japan became a virtual inevitability), and of neo-colonial military and economic presence in Latin America and the Caribbean, most famously in the political intrigue surrounding the creation of the Panama Canal. America was already asserting themselves as a diplomatic superpower, brokering the treaty in the Russo-Japanese War under Roosevelt, and then playing a major role in the Treaty of Versailles under Wilson. Teddy Roosevelt can also be seen as an early phenomenon of modern American pop culture, including the teddy bears prototypical of Sonic himself. By the 1920s, America became a cultural superpower, as people internationally consumed American pop culture like cinema and jazz records to assert a cosmopolitan sense of modernity against the stagnation and entrenchment of old world powers. The parallel sense of Japan as a cultural superpower around the turn of the 21st century involves a complex relationship to a hybridization of American forms and Japanese content, a globalized phenomenon in which Sega was a major player.

If the question is posed what the world looks like to Eggman, it must be said that the world looks like an unending number of frontiers, with living and dead carbon-based lifeforms to be extracted and exploited for his personal aggrandizement in the empire he is building. In effect, classical Sonic games position the player on the receiving end of Manifest Destiny, contrasting with the many computer games to relish in the ego-trip of empire-building. Even without conscious associations to any U.S. President, it’s easy to identify a certain anti-intellectualism wherein players as Sonic, embodying the nineties “cool pose” in his hip sneakers, revel in blowing up the arrogant ‘egghead’ in his hover ship time after time. There’s something familiar about him in a bad way. Blake J. Harris identifies Sonic with political and cultural shifts in the nineties away from the 12-year Reagan and Bush era (which also included a shift away from climate change denialism in policy): 

Sonic wouldn’t just become the face of the company but also would represent their spirit: the tiny underdog moved with manic speed, and no matter what obstacles stood in his way, he never ever stopped going. Sonic embodied not only the spirit of Sega of America’s employees but also the cultural zeitgeist of the early nineties. He had captured Kurt Cobain’s “whatever” attitude, Michael Jordan’s graceful arrogance, and Bill Clinton’s get-it-done demeanor. (Blake J. Harris, Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Nation p. 76)

In terms of the message of classical Sonic games, it’s helpful to consider the almost wordless story told by the level design, and the sequence of levels. Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic 2, Sonic 3, and Sonic & Knuckles all begin with an opening level filled with resplendent natural beauty encroached upon by a cyborg army that constitute an imminent threat to the homeland of Sonic and later Knuckles. Sonic 3 later evocatively has the lush tropical landscape Angel Island Zone set ablaze by a combat drone as an ecologically disastrous act of scorched earth warfare. Sonic the Hedgehog then brings players into the Marble Zone, another instance of Sega’s fascination with classical ruins, culture, and mythology that stand as a counterpoint to the way the game company aesthetically defined themselves with the public image of a hip nineties urbanism. In terms of these levels appearing throughout the four classical Sonic games that take the player through areas resembling Greek, Roman, and Egyptian ruins, the idea is a kind of gothic contemplation on the frailty of civilizations that would define themselves as eternal, what courses of actions might prolong or accelerate the collapse of a civilization. By repeatingly alternating these levels with chaotic metropolises filled with high-tech mad science emphasized by the jazz-funk music and weaponized cyborg animals, Sonic the Hedgehog applies this lesson to the present and near-future. Both the ecological and civilizational zones are threatened with collapse by Eggman’s aggressive Manifest Destiny paradigm.

Sonic 2 makes this subtext more explicit as it brings the player through levels suggestive of extractive enterprises devastating to the ecosystem inhabited by Sonic and his friends. Chemical Plant Zone is filled with massive pools of deadly toxic chemicals. Mystic Cave Zone has become the site of a large mine prone to collapses and hazards. Oil Ocean Zone and its music has a certain Middle Eastern feel in its music evocative of massive petro-states and the politics of hydrocarbon consumption so culturally contentious then as now. If the slogan “no blood for oil” appeared in the Gulf War just as it did in the Iraq War under two Bush presidencies, Sonic Mania evocatively has the oceans of oil burning like the huge oil fires in Kuwait during the former conflict when it remixes this level. This can’t be good in terms of carbon emissions and climate change, which is much the point. Sonic 2 introduces sites of Eggman’s military-industrial complex in zones like Wing Fortress Zone and Death Egg Zone, a weaponized space program akin to Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiatives to rain death from above. Takashi Murakami’s book Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture explores how Japanese pop culture has been haunted by the shadow of the nuclear bomb after World War II (itself a product of the nuclear arms race between Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler). So it is for the scramble for the chaos emeralds in the Sonic games, as collecting them all will grant either Eggman or Sonic with invincible power. The metaphor isn’t terribly subtle.

Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles (originally intended to be one game) introduce a colonial dimension on the Caribbean-like floating island, inhabited by the dreadlock-headed Knuckles the Echidna as he is manipulated into battling Sonic before eventually realizing Eggman is the true enemy to all he holds dear. There’s a great deal of lush tropical beauty here interspersed with the ruins of a mystical civilization from the bygone past constructed on the immense power of the Master Emerald that keeps the island flying (i.e. the sequence from Lava Reef Zone to Sky Sanctuary Zone). It’s quite easy to draw comparisons to Hayao Miyazaki’s anime film Castle in the Sky where a European-styled imperialist and his army receive their comeuppance on the floating ruins of a similar island. The environmentalism of Studio Ghibli films is widely acknowledged, but that of Sonic games is less so.

Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles continues many of the tendencies in level design discussed hitherto, now including the transformation of environments for worse or for better. The stage Carnival Night Zone, like Casino Night Zone in Sonic 2, imply a certain neon-drenched conspicuous consumption in tandem with the extractive enterprises shown, evocative of two Gilded Ages around the turn of the 20th and 21st century. America and Japan alike would recall the lavish décor of the yuppies exemplified by the architectural design of Donald Trump’s casinos, hotels, and resorts. The Trump Taj Mahal could easily fit in here. By the time of Sonic CD on the ill-fated Sega CD, the designers introduced the innovation of multidimensional time travel to show what the levels used to be, what Eggman has turned them into in the present, and two divergent possible futures in terms of their destruction or rejuvenation. This is, I think, an important imaginative exercise in an era of what Naomi Klein terms “disaster capitalism.”

In the context of the counterprotests to the Unite the Right rally in Charleston, Virginia, where so many torch-carrying Neo-Nazis and armed paramilitaries where in evidence, a young Asian man was photographed in a Sonic cap with a spraypainted shirt in which the blue hedgehog extends the middle finger as the text declares “Sonic Says NO To fascism and racism”. The image has since become a t-shirt sold on Redbubble. That interpretation is both plausible, and humorously riffs off the old “Sonic Says” segments on the cartoon Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. I have here tried to argue that what “Sonic Says NO” to is not only a neo-fascist politics to “Make America Great Again” by rejecting the international order effected after World War II in terms of paranoid ravings about other countries “laughing at us”, but also to institutionalized practices of systematic destruction rationalized more than a century ago in terms of Making America Great. On this view, Sonic would also get behind politics of environmentalism, antimilitarism, anticolonialism, and indigenous rights in the sense that we should too. Insofar as Teddy Roosevelt is implicated in a model of the American presidency that sustains ecological and economic devastation internationally to the peril of all, his face has been lent to Eggman as a video game antagonist exemplifying these qualities.