Published , by Lucas White
Published , by Lucas White
Sonic the Hedgehog is a movie star now. Sega’s cartoon mascot has always been popular, but the amount of Walmart shelf space the little blue gremlin occupies these days is unmatched. But today’s Sonic merchandise is clean and sterile, with high-resolution vectors from Sega’s marketing department interchangeably plastered on everything from fruit snacks to cereal boxes. Back in the 90s and 2000s, things were far less controlled. And things got weird, lemme tell ya. I had a couple favorites I already knew about, but when I dove into the history of Sonic-branded snacks and other edibles, I found things I wish I could wipe from my memories. Since that’s impossible, I’ve opted for the second-best coping mechanism; sharing the burden with an audience!
You’ve seen these before. Everyone knows about the funny ice cream bars with the bubblegum eyeballs. But they’re timeless for a reason. Heck, the Sonic one even has a plushie you can buy these days, as the ice cream itself becomes a little harder to find. At a glance, these character-shaped ice cream bars are cute and innocent, but the true charm comes from the gumballs, cursed to never settle in the ice cream where they’re actually supposed to be. It’s a meme at this point, but for a good reason. This is iconic food horror, symbolizing the absurd value of irony.
This product is so gross it’s impossible to find solid evidence of it even existing. That is, aside from a couple of incredibly blurry, off-colored, Silent Hill texture-ass photographs I found on a fan wiki. It’s like a bigfoot photo but of something that actually existed and is twice as scary. HP, a UK-based foods brand that was swallowed up by Heinz (presumably to save humanity from its obvious degeneracy), used to sell canned slop comprising baked beans and sausage. I want to gag just thinking about it. To be fair, the USA has its own sordid history of child-poisoning canned food, but at least we had the decency to come up with marketable fake words like Spaghetti-Os to hide behind.
I’ve never been to the UK, but from my outsider’s perspective it seems like truly cursed land. Daddies Ketchup? The idea of squeezing tomato paste out of a tube that doubles as Sonic the Hedgehog’s distorted cranium is bad enough, but I have to call it Daddy too? No thanks, absolutely not, never in a million years.
The best part about this one is that when I looked up pâté on Wikipedia to get those symbols right, I learned that “forcemeat” is a real word that people use professionally. Anyway, here’s some packaged forcemeat sold in Spain that was tragically wrapped up in the marketing campaign for Sonic Boom, a property so far down the Sonic the Hedgehog food chain Sega had to resort to, well, this. Again, this is another product I’m looking at from a cultural outsider’s perspective, but I doubt in ten years anyone will be fondly associating Sonic the Hedgehog with spreadable, minced tuna and other assorted meats. Just a hunch. Pretty sure the plot of Sonic 2 was about preventing something like this.
This one kind of stretches the criteria, but I think it’s actually cool so I gave it a spot. Segasonic Popcorn Shop was an interactive kiosk that not only got you some popcorn in a cool Sonic and Tails bucket, but there was a little game you could play while it popped. The game just involved spinning a crank while Eggman tried to murder Sonic with a sledgehammer, but it’s better than sitting there and waiting. These machines were actually supported until 2017, and a couple years earlier than that the game was dumped and is playable with MAME. So if you’re curious, you can check out this particularly novel piece of edible Sonic history for yourself.
The rest of Sonic’s snack history is largely made up of sensible things, like candy and energy drinks with “don’t give this to children” hidden on the packaging. But thanks to the wonders of video game licensing when the medium wasn’t cool yet (or times when things were simply kind of desperate), these items were brought to life for us to self-inflict psychic damage with by imagining what consuming them might’ve been like. If you can actually stop yourself from doing that, please tell me how that works so I can try it myself. It’s practically a reflex over here.