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ESPN unveils latest animated altcast
Tonight's Monday Night Football broadcast saw a notable announcement from ESPN and the NFL. That would be that ESPN will presenting an animated alternate broadcast for a Monday Night Football game for the third-straight season, this time the Philadelphia Eagles-Los Angeles Chargers game on Dec. 8. The broadcast, which will air on ESPN2, Disney+, Disney Channel and Disney XD (alongside the traditional game broadcast on ESPN and ABC) will be themed around Disney/Pixar's Monsters Inc. world, following previous NFL versions based on the Toy Story and The Simpsons franchises. It's part of an expanded agreement between ESPN and Sony's Beyond Sports (a key partner on these telecasts) announced Monday, which will see ESPN also do animated altcasts for NBA, WNBA, and NHL games across the 2025-26 seasons. Here's more on it from a release:
Every Eagles and Chargers player will appear as a motion-enabled, animated version of themselves brought to life through NFL Next Gen Stats, Sony’s Beyond Sports, and Sony’s Hawk-Eye Innovations optical tracking, which have been utilized throughout each iteration of Funday Football. Using the player tracking data, Beyond Sports’ virtual recreation engine animates gameplay in real time within Monstropolis that mirrors the live action from SoFi Stadium.
...“Each iteration of Funday Football has pushed the boundary of what’s possible in sports technology. By blending real-time NFL data and tracking with cutting-edge animation, we’re transforming the way fans experience an NFL game,” said Michael “Spike” Szykowny, ESPN VP, Graphics Innovation. “Our continued innovation with partners like the NFL, Beyond Sports and Disney+ showcases how technology can turn a live game into a fully immersive world, giving fans an additional way to consume sports.”
...Adored monsters Mike Wazowski and James P. “Sulley” Sullivan will make their football debut, joining Jalen Hurts and the Eagles and Justin Herbert and the Chargers, respectively. The action will unfold on the Cheer Floor – a reimagined version of the film’s famed Scare Floor – and will be adorned with a full-length football field filled with thousands of cheering monsters. Continuing a hallmark of every Funday Football presentation, this edition’s setting builds on previous imaginative worlds – following Andy’s bedroom in Toy Story Funday Football and Atom’s Stadium in Springfield from The Simpsons Funday Football.
While Mike and Sulley will mostly leave the game execution to the professionals, they will sub in for key offensive and defensive moments, similarly to how Bart and Homer only joined the action for significant plays in their game – which included Homer throwing a touchdown pass for the Cowboys. During the game Mike & the Eagles and Sulley and the Chargers will compete for Cheer Canisters – a rebrand of the classic Scream Canisters – storing monster cheers instead of screams. The night will end with not only a game winner but also a Cheer Champion.
These animated altcasts from ESPN and other companies have been quite impressive, and they're growing more and more ambitious. I wrote a review of the Simpsons one at Awful Announcing last December, particularly with an eye to how it expanded on previous altcasts by plugging key characters into key plays and animating the broadcasters. For more details on how and why they pulled that off, I spoke to several key executives from these companies on a conference call ahead of the broadcast. ESPN VP (production) Phil Orlins had a key quote there on why they do these altcasts despite all the work it takes:
“I think this is the most alternate of the alternate broadcasts, if that makes any sense at all. Most of what we’re doing is finding a different way to reach fans of a game. To me, this is the true alternative because we are really—we’re not just treating the game, or wrapping it with an alteration. We’re actually recreating the game in a truly alternative universe.
“By design, when we do that, we’re now explicitly pursuing the interest of fans who may not want to watch the game in the conventional manner."
And that's the real key here. This broadcast, like other animated altcasts, will presumably draw many fewer viewers than the main game feed on ESPN and ABC. But it's intended to bring in a much wider audience, especially including kids and families who might not watch MNF every week, and who might discover they like what they see and will stick around for non-animated games. That's part of why ESPN, Beyond Sports, and the NFL are some of the many organizations so high on these animated broadcasts, and it also doesn't hurt that this provides a platform for technology experiments that might someday wind up in more conventional broadcasts. We'll see how this one compares to the lineup of animated altcasts `so far.
