Knuckles, the Ugandan Feminist Professional Epic-Theme haver of the Sonic franchise has been confirmed for an upcoming TV series starring Idris Elba, who will be playing the character in the upcoming sequel to Sonic The Hedgehog (2020).
I’m not even going to pretend to be unbiased for this piece, I fawned over the Sonic Heroes character sections of the game manual and fan-boyed for Knuckles because he was Martial-Artist and I was always on a Bruce Lee or Jean Claude Van-Damme film bender every other week!
The series will be dropping around 2023 exclusively on Paramount+, alongside a Star Trek series, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film and even another cinematic crack at the world of Dungeons and Dragons… Okay, really? DnD? Don’t get me wrong, I love me some roleplaying, but the whole appeal is that you and your mates get to take part in your own story running on the most powerful graphics processor in the world: Your Imagination! Isn’t that right Michael?
You Already Had Second Movie – “I know, but what about third movie”? Haruki Satomi (SEGA CEO) expressed his delight at the news of a third Sonic the Hedgehog film already being announced for development, so I imagine he and the folks at Paramount are pretty confident in the success for the sequel. Fingers crossed this doesn’t turn into a ‘Dark Universe’ debacle where everyone makes promises they can’t keep and purely rely on the test of time to conveniently hope everyone forgets while being too busy drooling over the next Marvel film!
A Socio-Historical Explanation of Knuckles In Meme Culture:
First off is the relatively pedestrian stuff: Knuckles is a sometimes-friend, sometimes-enemy and mostly-frenemy to Sonic the Hedgehog across much of the series.
Cut to some nebulous time in 2016 when YouTuber VirtuallyVain roleplayed as an African drug lord in a Call of Duty letsplay video, the breakout mock phrase from that video being “follow me, I know the way”
Not long after that, YouTuber Gregzilla released a sonic game review that featured an… Artistically peculiar-looking version of Knuckles lovingly dubbed “Fuckles”.
A popular pastime for Call of Duty players in the early days of the internet was to smush in sound clips of African soldiers and battle cries, something VirtuallyVain was playing off at the time. Then comes the game VR Chat, a DeviantArt artist by tidiestflyer made a 3D model of ‘Fuckles’ for the game and ey presto- Now you’ve got a jokey funtime trolling community that consists of a sea of ‘Fuckles’ madly ad-libing about “the way”, based on VirtuallyVain’s own pastiche and 2000s Ugandan action B-movies like Who Killed Captain Alex.
As is the case with most things on the internet, the original meaning of “the way” naturally expanded to mean literally anything the user desires it too! The original context was “follow me, I know the way” to win in a shooty bang-bang game, or in the case of Captain Alex, “he knows the way… of using a gun”. Nowadays, “the way” or “the wae” is a sort of hilariously abstract generalized idea of an ideal mindset, goal or purpose.
I’d do a deep-dive into the Ugandan Knuckles “Kwin”/”Queen” joke, but that’d require me to get even more NSFW than I have been lately, a brother can’t live on flippant sex jokes immature asides alone!
Product Poems:
WW3, 2o22! Numerical spoonerism!
Gran Turismo 7. Vrewm. Shooty shooty bang-bang? Doom
