Warning: The below contains some spoilers for Knuckles Episode 4, now streaming on Paramount+.
Knuckles, the first spinoff project from the team behind the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, may have been different from what fans expected. For one, the real focus is Adam Pally’s Wade Whipple, who bonds with and is trained by the ferocious eponymous echidna voiced by Idris Elba. But aside from that, it’s written with an often purposefully over-the-top, slapstick sense of humor, one that pays homage to countless classic comedies of yore.
Nowhere is that more apparent than Episode 4, “The Flames of Disaster,” which sees Wade stolen away from his mother’s house as well as Knuckles himself. In a mostly solo adventure, Wade must escape from bounty hunter and former friend Jack Sinclair (Julian Barratt), and attempts to find his inner strength in… a dream sequence where he meets Chief Pachacamac. That then turns into a “low-budget rock opera,” complete with dancers in full costume and tons of props, that puts Wade in Knuckles’ shoes, giving him Elba’s speaking voice and the singing voice of none other than Michael Bolton. Oh, and it all takes place in a bowling alley, because of course it does.
It’s an episode that’s caught the attention of fans, with IGN’s own review calling it the best of the six installments of Season 1. It’s also, frankly, completely and utterly bizarre, as directed by The Lonely Island member Jorma Taccone. And, according to Taccone himself and executive producer Toby Ascher, yes, it was meant to be that insane.
In a recent interview with IGN, Ascher said the idea for “The Flames of Disaster” came from both a desire to keep the show from feeling “less than the movies,” without having to lean too heavily on constant action sequences.
“How do we have an episode where it isn’t Knuckles versus a giant mech, but could still be just as enjoyable?” Ascher said. “And ultimately we landed on this idea that, it might be really fun to retell the sort of Knuckles story from Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 through a weirdo hybrid of like, a school play and a rock opera.”
That idea, in turn, led Ascher to Taccone, given that the producer was a big fan of Taccone’s work on The Lonely Island and Popstar: Never Stop Stopping.
“When I originally talked to Toby and [producer Neal H. Moritz] about this, from jump, Toby had said, ‘Look, I’m a kid who was raised on Adult Swim. Let’s push the envelope. We want to make this show special and different and surprising,’ “ Taccone said in a separate interview with IGN.
From there, Taccone was “all in” just from one conversation, but couldn’t take on too many episodes given his own schedule. But he could fit in one – and he wanted to make it count:
“I came back to him, and I was like, ‘if you have a weird episode, I’m in.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ “
From that point on, Taccone says the team “never balked” at his wild ideas for the episode. Even his own wife, director Marielle Heller, pokes her head in during our Zoom interview, and Taccone shares that her reaction to it was, “I don’t even know what to say about that.”
And for what it’s worth, Pally was down for it all. He calls Taccone “a hero of mine,” “so it just felt like, I was like, plucked from my couch and put into a Lonely Island sketch for a week,” he tells IGN. “I just tried everyday to not take that for granted and do the best I could for Jorma.”
Plus, he got to wear that goofy Knuckles costume – even if he wasn’t allowed to keep it. “Because they know that, if they gave me that Knuckles costume, there would be like, a report, like: ‘Santa Monica Bank Held Up by Real-Life Knuckles,’ “ Pally jokes.
For Taccone, it was just about going bigger – and yes, Sonic fans, faster too.
“I just wanted to cram in more stuff, so it was really fun to be able to move at the speed that I don’t think you normally get to move at for a TV show,” Taccone shares. “We were almost shooting that (rock opera) part of it as a music video, just getting as many setups as you can. Because I wanted this to feel like, once you’re done with these 21 minutes, you immediately want to watch it again because you’re like, ‘Whoa, I missed some things.’ There’s a lot crammed in there.”
Bringing It to Lo-Fi Life
Cramming all that into a quick half-hour episode and on a TV budget, though, is another matter entirely. Plus, it’s also the installment that features the least on-screen time for Knuckles himself, and Taccone acknowledges that “the episode was primarily designed to sort of be able to save some money on the CG.” But, when asked if that aspect of the episode intimidated him, Taccone says he was drawn in by the challenge.
“Oh no, that’s how it was billed to me,” he says. “It was actually quite funny because it was the one where I was told, ‘You are doing the episode that is where we need to save a buck.’ But giving it those margins and being like, ‘We’re going to figure all this stuff out creatively,’ it just made it all that much more fun, honestly.”
Limitation, as they say, breeds creativity, and Ascher even says he’s a “big fan” of having to problem-solve around logistical issues. Can’t have flaming bowling balls? Put a guy in a costume of a flaming bowling ball, “which all just makes it more fun and lively in the way that I think feels appropriate to the episode,” Taccone says.
And while the whole thing is supposed to be pretty lo-fi by design, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of TLC put into the production. Taccone says that, between the costumes, puppets, pyrotechnics, choreography, and the sheer “appetite of how much we wanted to do,” the bowling alley sequence alone took four days to shoot.
Most of that shoot was done with practical effects, but Taccone reveals one part of it that wasn’t shot practically: a mini tribute to the Sonic the Hedgehog games, with Wade running through was looks like a video game level to collect gold rings as he sings. While they initially wanted to shoot that scene practically, they found that they just couldn’t make it work, so instead, they had Pally in front of a green screen and enlisted the assistance of a company called Vandivision to make the CG blend into the rest of the community theater vibes.
Taccone remembers how, even when Pally was walking, they made sure the ground was moving up and down, to make it all feel a little more “tactile.”
“We had to make those quick decisions of, we had all of that stuff built and then it just wasn’t working,” he says. “And you can either kill yourself to try to make this thing look half right or you can just quickly make the decision to be like… ‘This needs to going to look better and be more accurate to the tone of it.’ “
Funny enough, one of the wildest challenges of the episode didn’t even happen around the bowling alley, but in the opening sequence where Wade is dragged away from his mother’s house. The location where they shot the exteriors, Taccone says, was an active firing range, “so there was active gunfire going off while we were sort of scouting this area.”
”I was like, ‘That’s not going to be happening on the day, is it?’ And they were like, ‘No. I mean, maybe, because over there the Ukrainian Army’s training and we can’t really stop them,’ “ he remembers. “…And then as soon as we are actually shooting on the day, I was like, ‘There it is, just automatic gunfire going off.’ It was sort of the fun of that – it was such a crazy episode. Everyone’s appetite was so big of, ‘Let’s make this as big, cool and fast-paced and impactful stuff as possible.’ But then also being like, ‘And we’re shooting on an active firing range.’ “
Making the Music Happen (With a Little Help From Their Friends)
Of course, we’d be remiss to not talk about the music itself, for which Taccone enlisted his brother, Asa Taccone, and composer Matthew Compton, who are in the band Electric Guest together. But how’d they get Bolton to be the singing voice of Wade/Knuckles?
The short answer: he’s a friend. Taccone had worked with him previously on The Lonely Island/SNL Short sketch “Jack Sparrow,” which hilariously had Bolton passionately singing the plots of movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, Forrest Gump, Erin Brockovich, and Scarface. It’s there that Taccone built up some trust with the famous singer – albeit, a little unconventionally.
“When we first did ‘Jack Sparrow’ with him, the original verse that we wrote for him was horrifyingly curse word-laden and really offensive, really offensive,” Taccone laughs. “And Michael at one point, after he listened to it, he was like, ‘Guys, it’s really funny, but I got to meet next week with the Pope.’ He was really meeting with the Pope. He was like, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t say this.’ “
So, The Lonely Island pivoted, making the sketch much cleaner, but still very funny, which Taccone says convinced Bolton that they know what they’re doing: “So now when any of us come to him with a, ‘Hey, we need this,’ I think he’s very much like, ‘Got it, I’ll lend the pipes.’ “
The only wish Taccone didn’t get, he reveals, was having an image of Bolton’s floating head singing at one point. He thinks Bolton was on tour at the time, and they just couldn’t get a camera to him in time.
Still, all’s well that ends well. Taccone will stay in the Sonic the Hedgehog family, having been cast in the upcoming third movie, and Ascher’s just thrilled this bizarre musical exists within their cinematic universe.
“Now, in the Sonic canon, we have an episode of television where Wade goes through Knuckles’ journey in a Knuckles Halloween costume and everytime he speaks, it’s Idris Elba’s speaking voice. And everytime he sings, Michael Bolton is Knuckles’ singing voice,” Ascher says. “And that’s the most amazing thing in the world to me.”
IGN’s Jeffrey Vega contributed to this article.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
