When ESPN floated the idea of creating an animated alternative broadcast for games, it was all about creating “magical moments in sports.” Instead of watching sports stars shooting hoops or scoring touchdowns, there was suddenly an option to see Mickey Mouse, Buzz Lightyear, Lisa Simpson or Mike Wazowski do the honors.
For Michael “Spike” Szykowny, ESPN vice president of edit, animation, graphics innovation and creative production, this project is his baby. The animated alt-casts bring a different audience to sports, Szykowny said during a panel at Disney’s D23 convention last weekend.
“We took a bunch of technologies like live player tracking — we can track what the players are doing in the game and make our animated characters do the same things,” Szykowny said. ESPN brought Disney IP into the project and combined it with face-tracking and motion-capture technology.
ESPN studio host Drew Carter has been a live animated commentator for every alt-cast. He said that for the first one, he had to wear a full motion-capture suit. But now, he only has to wear a virtual reality headset.
“It’s a technological feat to track these players in real time,” Jay Ward, creative director of franchise at Pixar, said during the panel in Anaheim, California.
The players on the field wear devices that generate tracking data for NFL Next Gen Stats and into Sony’s Beyond Sports engine and Sony’s Hawk-Eye Innovations optical tracking. These technologies are then used to create live animations, “rebuilding each throw, route, block, kick and tackle in real time,” Disney says.
The commentators’ booth calls are synced with their animated avatars via their VR headsets.
Ward said Pixar wanted to be involved because the animation studio “is all about technology, creativity and storytelling.”
During the Toy Story version of Funday Football, which aired in 2023, the main toys were all seen playing an NFL game in Andy’s room, with the real players as toy-scale versions of themselves.
Blocks were used for goalposts; the claw machine manned by the three-eyed aliens brought the ball down for kickoff; Slinky Dog was the 1st and 10 marker; and there was a Duke Caboom halftime show. Carter appeared as a Pixar-ified version of himself doing the commentary on-screen.
The second iteration of Funday Football featured the characters of Monsters, Inc., and the scene had to be animated from scratch because the movie is 25 years old.
Random players were picked to become Mike and Sulley playing on the field, while the other players were just animated versions of themselves, and Roz was a sideline reporter. All the original voice actors from the Pixar movie returned to help with the alt-cast, as did Carter.
Dunk the Halls, a Christmas NBA game played between Mickey and his closest friends in December last year, was next. It was animated to look as if it were being played on a perfect replica of Main Street, USA, at Walt Disney World, with the team even bringing in animators from Walt Disney Studios to get it right.
Disney Legend and iconic animator Eric Goldberg drew hundreds of sketches of what “bits” the characters could do during the game.
But there was a problem.
“The tracking was off at one point,” said Renée Johnson, creative director of Disney Character Voices. The referee was accidentally turned into a player who scored a 3-pointer, so they quickly turned the character into Stitch.
ESPN tried its hand at an NHL game next, choosing the Pixar film Inside Out, given that the main character plays hockey. The game was designed to look like it’s being played inside Riley’s mind while she’s sleeping, with the ESPN Beyond Sports animation team building out Hockey Island in three dimensions for the alt-cast setting. That game aired in March this year and used NHL positional data for the players and puck, along with Sony Hawk-Eye Innovations’ optical tracking.
And for a Simpsons-themed Funday Football session in December 2024, ESPN brought in the whole Simpsons writing team.
“There was a little bit of fear because these are three giant iconic brands: NFL, The Simpsons and Disney — how will they work together?” said Joel Cohen, a writer and co-executive producer of The Simpsons. “We’re very particular about how we want our characters to be portrayed and what jokes we want them to tell.”
The team came up with 8 minutes of original Simpsons animation with a storyline that carried throughout the game. Animating for a live event is something that the animation team never gets to do, so it was “a super fun vibe that we never get to experience,” Cohen said, adding that even creator Matt Groening came along.
The writers of The Simpsons were texting Disney and ESPN during the event — though the NFL said no to some of the jokes the writers came up with.
“There’s a 1-minute delay, so we can see what play happens to insert characters and push forward the storyline,” Szykowny said. “(Like) quickly put Bart as QB, Lisa as receiver as they score.”
ESPN has yet to announce its next animated alt-cast, but the animation x sports project isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. You can rewatch the alt-casts on YouTube, Disney Plus and ESPN Plus, but they’re much more impressive to witness live, simultaneously with a game.