[ID: Anonymous ask, reading “the forbidden sonic song” the what? End ID.] 

Allow me to tell you a story. 

Once upon a time, it was the late 1990s. Sonic the Hedgehog had just begun, and was quickly rising in popularity. Thing is, SEGA really… didn’t know what canon they wanted to go with yet. They didn’t have much of a story for Sonic yet. So far they had:

• the actual games - very little story, a few contradicting canon points and relatively simple compared to later games 
• Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog - slapstick television show. basically if the roadrunner show had a baby with garfield & friends. very very little plot, mostly just sonic and tails being idiots and beating the shit outta robotnik in a very funny manner 
• Sonic the Hedgehog SATAM - absolutely GOD TIER writing and worldbuilding. amazing characters, respected the intelligence of the children watching and gave us a thrilling overarching plot. absolutely gobsmacked this did not become the actual sonic canon forever. #Rally4Sally
• the Archie Comics - um. the less said about these, the better 

So, in ~1995, Japan was like “Okay. Okay why don’t we try our hand at this? We’ve been making the games after all, we’ll try to do a story thing.” So they make a two-part pilot for a possible tv show. It’s released on VHS in 1996, and it doesn’t do great, so a whole series was never made. However, they smashed together the pilot into a “movie” in 1999 and released it in the US with an english dub. The full movie is now on YouTube, both the English and Japanese versions. 

The movie is… okay? It’s honestly pretty confusing and draws on absolutely nothing from previous Sonic canon except the characters, BUT the animation is absolutely gorgeous, especially on Metal Sonic. Very good watch if you’re down for just a fun little kids’ flick. 

What’s important, though, is that, at the beginning of the credits, a little bit from a song is played, which we assume was meant to be the theme of the show. It’s called “Look-A-Like”, and it’s always been sung in English despite it originating in Japanese. The lyrics don’t make much sense, but honestly my theory is that they were just like “What English words will sound fun to our target audience,” which is valid as all hell. 

The full song was never released. Ever. So we only got the bit of it from the credits. Which sucks cause it was catchy as all fuck. 

This lasted for over twenty years. Twenty years of only a little bit of this wild song. 

And then 2020 rolls around. 

Back in August, a group of online friends- whom I assume were bored during quarantine, like the rest of us- got together. One of them, known as illuminor, was watching the original Japanese dub and realized that the credits song was slightly different in that version than the English. From what his friend Mefiresu said:

In all variations available on the Internet we can hear the line «A short while ago, I was born» which then repeats twice, but in the movie the first time sounds as «A long time ago…», though we cannot hear the rest due to the dialogue of the characters.

illuminor managed to hit up a member of the OVA’s original crew, asking if they had the lyrics for the song. This crew member, absolute angel, instead sent the entire track. 

The full fucking track.

So now, after roughly twenty-five years… we have the forbidden Sonic song.

happy 2020