The Sonic the Hedgehog Connection

Sonic the Hedgehog seems a most unlikely series to have a connection with either The Wild Wild West or Perry Mason, but for the former, it's there. To explain why, however, requires a bit of backstory.

I have almost always been fascinated by characters that don't have a great deal of screentime. This extended to the Sonic the Hedgehog series, where one of my points of interest was a character who only appeared in three older games: Fang the Sniper, localized as Nack the Weasel. I've never cared for how either the Archie or the Fleetway comic book series chose to handle him, preferring instead to make up my own characterization based solely on the scant information in the games. (I've always preferred the games in general over the comics.) This was before the days of highly developed characters in even platform games, so when considering the games as the only canon, Fang's personality is largely a blank canvas.

Fang is basically a treasure hunter or a bounty hunter or both. The Japanese name implies he may be an assassin, but the gun he carries around is a pop gun, little more than a toy. I chose to characterize him as a bounty hunter, which is a legally acceptable profession, and pit him against crooks. Fang himself was basically good, albeit mischievous, gruff, and unable to get along with his twin sister (the one element I brought over from the Archie comics).

I wrote many stories for him using the American name Nack. In later years, I've come to prefer the Fang name, since it fits better with the Sonic the Hedgehog tradition of naming characters based on a physical attribute of theirs. Semi-recently I tried writing for Fang again, this time by inserting him into the Sonic X television series and changing my personality for him a bit. While still a bounty hunter and mercenary, I believe I relied a little more on the Japanese version of his name and either made him an assassin or else made people think he was an assassin. I was going to have the story deal with the death of Mighty the Armadillo, a character that in reality disappeared during a copyright dispute, and his friends' determination to find out the truth. They believed that Fang did the deed, but I was going to have him reveal that he did not ... although he knew at least some of what really had happened. I never have finished that story, but I still might.

The way all of this connects with The Wild Wild West is that the basic way I characterized Fang is the same basic template I used for Snakes Tolliver when developing him more fully, especially during the years Snakes worked as a crooked gambler and crime boss. During that time, Snakes was mischievous, gruff, and basically good even though he'd deny it up and down. The details of their personality differ in most respects; Snakes would never be caught dead in a bounty hunter's position and Fang is not a coward by any stretch of the imagination. And Snakes has certainly been through far more trauma than Fang ever has. But both have a similar Southern speech pattern, both are still gruff, and both will do the right thing in the end, even if they'll deny the reason why they're doing it.