Knuckles Co-Creator Toby Ascher On Expanding Sonic Franchise, '90s Easter Eggs & More Game Characters

Summary Knuckles is taking on a new trainee with Adam Pally's Wade in his Paramount+ spinoff show.

Co-creator Toby Ascher opens up about the journey to creating the Sonic the Hedgehog show, including how they flipped the buddy-comedy formula from the original movie.

Ascher assures that the show maintains the quality and scale of the Sonic movies with engaging storytelling and the same VFX team as the upcoming third movie.

Everyone's favorite echidna is taking a new trainee under his wing in Knuckles. After making his debut in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Knuckles is taking the lead in the upcoming Paramount+ spinoff show as he struggles to adjust to his new life on Earth, namely lacking a purpose with no major enemies arising. When presented with the idea of training an unlikely warrior to keep the legacy of the Echidna Tribe alive, he turns his attention to Wade Whipple to turn him into a warrior.

Knuckles follows the duo as they embark on a road trip to Reno, Nevada, where Wade is looking to compete in a major bowling tournament and face off against his estranged father, 27-time bowling champion "Pistol" Pete Whipple. Along the way, the duo will come to learn more about one another's pasts and how they should use them to build happier lives in Green Hills. Knuckles and Wade will also find their journey marred by rogue G.U.N. operatives and a former Dr. Robotnik associate who look to acquire his power for nefarious means.

Related Why Knuckles Has Fire Powers In His Sonic Spinoff: New Ability Explained Knuckles shows off his new fire powers in his Paramount+ spinoff series, but this isn't the first time the character has used flames in his attacks.

Idris Elba and Adam Pally return to lead the ensemble Knuckles cast alongside fellow franchise vets Tika Sumpter as Maddie, Ben Schwartz as Sonic, Colleen O'Shaughnessey as Tails, and newcomers Cary Elwes as Wade's estranged father, Edi Patterson as his sister Wanda, Stockard Channing as his mother Wendy, Julian Barratt, Rory McCann, Scott Mescudi and Ellie Taylor. Serving as a bridge between the narratives of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and 3, the show acts as a nice expansion of the SEGA-based franchise.

Ahead of the show's premiere, Screen Rant interviewed co-creator and executive producer Toby Ascher about Knuckles, how the creative team landed on the spinoff's story, how they go about deciding which game characters to introduce to the franchise, the '90s Easter eggs included in the show and maintaining the quality of scale from the Sonic the Hedgehog movies.

Knuckles Was Almost Introduced In The Sonic Franchise Earlier

With the show giving the character the spotlight, Ascher reflected on the initial discussions of when Knuckles was to be introduced in the Sonic franchise, recalling how there were talks to bring him and Tails on for the first movie. Ultimately, the creative team decided to save him for the sequel, which then led to them realizing he would be perfect for his own story:

Toby Ascher: Well, I think one of the fun things about making the Sonic movies is that even going back to the first one, and the cameo that we had from Tails at the end, we knew there was this incredible cast of characters that we had. I think from the very beginning, even on Sonic 1, we talked about, "Should we put them all in the first movie?" We made the active decision to not do that, and to kind of slow play rolling them out. Specifically, because I think we wanted to make sure that we introduced each of the characters in an organic way, and got to tell a real story that lets you relate and really understand who that character was. So, we've been very lucky enough that we've had a plan going into the future since the first movie. We knew at the end of the first movie Tails would show up, and that he would be the basis for the second movie, and then at the end of Sonic 2, we teased Shadow and knew that he would be the basis going forward in Sonic 3. So, at the end of Sonic 2, after the success of that movie, we started talking a little bit about where we can take these characters, and what kind of stories we'd like to tell. One of the things that came out of that movie was that we just really thought Idris' performance, especially in the back half of that movie, was hilarious. We loved this sort of warrior who was misunderstanding all these key aspects of Earth. The scene where he plays baseball, we loved the scene where he's excited about ice cream, and we started asking ourselves, "Could we take some of the comedy that came from that, and build it into a character study just based on Knuckles?" That led to a conversation with Idris Elba, who really loved working on the movie and grew up a Knuckles fan, and especially doesn't always get the chance to do comedy in the way that he did in Sonic 2 and in the Knuckles series. He did a great run in The Office, which we loved, but is traditionally an action star. So, he was really excited about being able to do more Knuckles and tell sort of a bigger story centered on that character. Once Idris committed to doing it, we got really excited about where the possibilities for the show could go, and that's how the show was created.

Knuckles Will Flip The First Sonic Movie's Story In 1 Big Way

Since the Knuckles trailer's premiere, many have noted the similarities between the spinoff show's story and the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie's buddy-comedy formula. For Ascher, he acknowledges that the creative team did want to not only utilize this format but flip it by having it be centered around "two wildcards" and that led to "something special" with the show:

Toby Ascher: Well, I think we really liked the idea of telling a similar story to the first movie, in that that movie's about Sonic finding a family. With Knuckles, specifically, because one of our favorite things about the first movie was the buddy-comedy relationship between James Marsden and Sonic, that back-and-forth, we just had a lot of fun doing that with the two of them. What James provides in that movie is he's kind of the straight man to Sonic, who is this wildcard. The initial idea with Knuckles and Wade is how would a buddy comedy work if you had two kinds of crazy characters, two wildcards in a buddy comedy, and neither of them is necessarily the straight man. So, that was the impetus for how to build out the comedy. We knew from Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 how talented Adam Pally was, and that he was this incredible improviser, and this incredible physical comedian. We thought just the balance of putting him together with Idris, and specifically, this Drax-style fish-out-of-water comedy could create something special. I think that allowed us to probably take more chances comedically than we have in the past on the two Sonic movies. At least, for me, I think Knuckles is the most laugh-out-loud, funniest version of this franchise that we've had, and in a lot of ways reminds me of some of these '90s comedies that I grew up on, whether it's Happy Gilmore, or other things that live in that space. Ah, Kingpin, which is a movie that I love, and I feel like not a lot of people have seen, but I think is hilarious. It was the Farrelly brothers' follow-up to Dumb and Dumber. There's a really great Kingpin Easter egg in the show, which is in there for no reason other than we thought it was funny. There's a point where Wade and Knuckles are on the run, and they find out that they're fugitives from the law, and Wade comments that they're "Munson-ed out here in the middle of nowhere," which is a Kingpin reference to Woody Harrelson's character, Roy Monson. Which is a pretty deep-dive Easter egg. We just thought it was funny, so we threw it in there.

The Sonic Team Are Always Discussing Which Game Characters Could Be Introduced

While the show largely keeps the focus on Wade and Knuckles while introducing some new human characters, Knuckles does introduce Pachacamac, the chief of the Echidna tribe, voiced by Christopher Lloyd. When asked about whether other game characters were considered to be introduced in the spinoff, Ascher confirmed every game character is being discussed, though the creative team behind the franchise keeps one key thing in mind:

Toby Ascher: I think we talk a lot about how the different characters in the Sonic universe fit into the movie and television franchise. I think it's about trying to find the right spots for them as we move forward. I don't think there's a character in the Sonic world that isn't being discussed right now, and how they could fit in into the future, which is really exciting. One of the things that we really thought was great, and we continue to talk about a lot, is how the next entity in the franchise is affected from the last entity. For example, Sonic 1 happened, and there was this huge action sequence at the end of Sonic 1 in San Francisco, and half of San Francisco was destroyed. So, we really wanted to tell the story in Sonic 2 of the emergence of G.U.N., which is an organization that pretty much has been created because of the fact that Sonic ripped apart San Francisco, and there has to be a reaction in a grounded world to that. So, what came about in Knuckles, which is really interesting, is a further emergence of G.U.N. We sort of established in the first movie that Sonic was running around this planet, leaving quills everywhere, and now, Sonic and Knuckles have had this massive global fight in Sonic 2, and there's echidna quills and Sonic quills all over the place, they've dropped rings all over the place. So, we loved introducing this idea that G.U.N., post-Sonic 2, is going around, and they're grabbing these things, because these quills are really powerful. And these rings do things that are totally otherworldly, and that they're starting to experiment on them. That was one of the cool things that we really loved about the Knuckles show is we got to build this tech within the mythology of what we built in Sonic 1 and Sonic 2. Essentially, we created these mech fists that are quill-powered, that allows Kid Cudi to basically punch as hard as Knuckles. We have the ring gun, which allows the agents to shoot rings, and sort of capture people at their will. All of that was really interesting to us, because it helped us build out the mythology of what's happening after the movie. I think as we go forward in this franchise, it's usually the first question we ask as we're developing the movies is, if this event happened in the previous movie, what would be the consequences of that? How would the world change? And it's a really fun way to develop stories on our end, because it kind of creates something that is this really, in a lot of ways, grounded, ever-expanding world. And as someone who grew up as a fan of a lot of different franchises, and different pieces of IP, my favorite ones were always the ones where they kind of did that, which was the comic book Marvel Universe. An incident happens, and then the reaction to the incident is the next story. So, the fact that we get to do that kind of giant world building in the Sonic franchise is awesome.

Paramount Were Key In Ensuring Knuckles Retained The Scale & Quality Of The Sonic Movies

Custom Image by Grant Hermanns

Where some TV show expansions of a movie franchise can see a slight dip in quality with elements like visual effects due to budgetary differences, Ascher assures they "didn't cut any corners in the animation" for Knuckles. He largely credited this dedication to Paramount themselves, who, in conjunction with the co-creator and his team, had the goal "from the very beginning" that they wouldn't do anything "that reduced the quality of the product that we were making":

Toby Ascher: Well, it was Paramount [who said] that was the goal from the very beginning. We did not want to do anything that reduced the quality of the product that we were making. So, we actually shot Knuckles and Sonic 3 back to back, so it was two productions that really was one giant production. So, all the crew, all the directors led by the incredible Jeff Fowler, everyone who's involved in Sonic 3 was also involved in Knuckles. And that meant that the animation and the VFX looks exactly the same between Knuckles and Sonic 3. We kind of look at it as the ultimate Easter egg. Sonic 3, the video game, had the little Knuckles add-on, and this year, Sonic fans get to have both a Knuckles TV show and a Sonic 3, and the Knuckles TV show is kind of like a gift to our fans. It's a big giant, extra movie. From a technical standpoint, it actually has 300 more VFX shots than the first Sonic movie, so it's bigger in scope than Sonic 1. We didn't cut any corners in the animation at all, so it looks and feels like the movies in every way across the board. And we're incredibly proud that we were able to do that within the confines of television.

About Knuckles

Close

The new live-action event series follows Knuckles (Idris Elba) on a hilarious and action-packed journey of self-discovery as he agrees to train Wade (Adam Pally) as his protégé and teach him the ways of the Echidna warrior. The series takes place between the films SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2 and SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Check out our other Knuckles interview with star Adam Pally.

Knuckles begins streaming on Paramount+ on April 26.Source: Screen Rant Plus