The Knuckles Show is hilarious and the cast says it’s all thanks to Jim Carrey
Knuckles, Paramount Plus’ spinoff series of the Sonic the Hedgehog films, could have been a shameless IP cash-in. And the premiere is not far away! Following the events of Sonic the Hedgehog 2we see Sonic and Miles ‘Tails’ Prower living an idyllic life in Montana, helping their new red echidna friend master life on Earth. Without the budget for a big action spectacle, it is mainly a children’s sitcom with the Sonic gang – until that is no longer the case. Over the next five episodes, Knuckles (voiced again by Idris Elba) joins dim-witted Green Hills sheriff Wade Whipple (Adam Pally) on a road trip to Nevada, where they both hope to find meaning in the world. The result is basically Tommy Boy for Sega lovers. They’re bananas.
Knuckles deviates from the Sonic movie blueprint via pure demographically transcendent gags that range from cartoon pratfalls to hallucinatory dream ballets to Michael Bolton singles. There are Men in Black types hunting down the echidna warrior for his super-powered spines, and a few by-the-book fights showcasing Knuckles’ high-energy moveset, but despite the title, Pally is the star of this show. As Wade attempts to reconnect with his father, “Pistol” Pete Whipple (Cary Elwes), at a major bowling tournament, he and his new sidekick navigate a rowdy Shabbat dinner and avoid a Tiger King-esque bounty hunter (played by The Mighty Evil‘s Julian Barratt), and hang out at a bar in the Reno life. Pally is electrocuted, exploded, punched in the face, slammed into cage bars and dragged across multiple highways.
The Tommy Boy invocation goes beyond the road trip format; the Happy endings And Mindy Project actor goes all out on Chris Farley – of all things! – a television show based on the Sonic video games.
“That’s such a great compliment,” Pally says when I embarrass him with this compliment during a recent phone conversation. “There isn’t a Farley move I haven’t made with my family or a Mike Myers reference that I haven’t made to my cousins, so I think I know all those things and love them so much… It It’s so ingrained in who I am. It’s probably annoying to people that I refer to those things so often.”
Pally attributes the show’s free-for-all approach to someone who doesn’t actually appear in it Knuckles: Jim Carrey. He believes that the actor’s performance as Dr. Robotnik has set such a tone Sonic 1 And 2 that anything was possible in the spin-off. “Knowing Jim Carrey’s achievements and working with him on the first two, I couldn’t fail, you know? You just let that freedom soar.” Pally adds that Carrey’s “fingerprints are not just in this series, but probably in my entire career.”
Pally’s co-star, Scott Mescudi (aka Kid Cudi), agreed Knuckles on exactly the same wavelength. His character, Agent Mason, is one of the suits looking to take out Knuckles with a well-placed power glove punch to the muzzle. But to match the tone of the show, his thoughts drifted back to when he was watching Jim Carrey In living color.
“I really wanted to embody his weirdness, but in an Agent Mason way,” says Mescudi. “One of the things people don’t know about me is that I’m very crazy. That’s a very big part of me. (…) I do a lot of dramas, I do a lot of serious things. So it’s a really nice break to just have a bit of fun and be silly.
There’s still a lot of precision involved when “fooling around” means acting against a 10-foot-tall CG echidna. Mescudi says it took a fair amount of training to be able to film a simple action scene – from choreography to guys fighting in Knuckles gloves on set, and then repeating it all without any counterpart so that the VFX team could do it all later could fill – and that it was unlike anything he had ever done. Working on Knuckles it wasn’t even an assignment to talk to the tennis ball; there was a Knuckles puppeteer on set who was in every scene, giving Mescudi and Pally a physical presence to work off of for all the comedy bits.
Pally honors the writers, all of whom understood the brief and wrote to its strengths. It is unclear to the actor whether a Knuckles If it weren’t for Pally’s Jewish heritage, the Sonic character would have broken challah bread with Stockard Channing on a TV show on a quiet Friday night, but the team took full advantage.
“It’s all so organic,” Pally says of the comedy. “And it’s also just fun to hear Elba say ‘matzah ball’.”