Disney and Pixar have been waiting all year for Funday night.
Tonight, when the Philadelphia Eagles visit the Los Angeles Chargers, it will be Jalen Hurts against Justin Herbert at 8:15 p.m. ET/5:15 PT on ABC and ESPN. For the kiddos, it’ll Mike vs. Sulley on ESPN2 (no Manningcast this week), Disney+, Disney Channel and Disney XD. (Although let’s face it, East coast children should be watching this thing on-demand in the coming days.)
Monsters , the third-annual Funday Football game, will feature the Monsters, Inc. characters playing ball on a brand new floor, the Cheer Floor (pictured above), in their Monstropolis-set factory. If all goes well, Monsters Funday Football will perfectly mimic , just with one fewer eyeball — Mike Wazoski’s — and a lot more fur (James P. Sullivan’s, primarily).
Each year “a lot of” different IP gets discussed for Funday Football, Michael “Spike” Szykowny, ESPN vice president of graphics Innovation, told The Hollywood Reporter. This year, Monsters, Inc. (2001) just felt like the right nostalgia play. (When asked if the selection should be considered a backdoor way into a third theatrical film, Szykowny said: “We don’t get too deep into what [Pixar] has planned in the future.”)
There is also a “practical consideration” to the selection, David “Sparky” Sparrgrove, senior creative director for ESPN’s Animation team, added. Monsters (generally) have legs and arms, so they’re in — Cars and Finding Nemo are out.
“The motion-tracking is to an actual person,” Sparrgrove told THR. “Fish can’t play football.”
Writing that down. Fish…can’t…play…football.
The inaugural Funday Football took place in 2023 from Andy’s room in Toy Story. It was a big, bold swing — one that did not exactly go off without a hitch.
As I wrote about the unique alt(ernative) (tele)cast in my IndieWire days, just getting into the Toy Story Funday Football stream was a chore. Things only got worse from there — for a while at least.
“Ball-tracking was the first noticeable challenge and the most consistent issue throughout the game,” this genius IndieWire editor wrote. “At times, the football would just appear on random spots of the carpet (field) or slide around the playing surface on its own. Sometimes The Claw, playing the role of umpire in Andy’s room, never even spotted the ball at the line of scrimmage.”
“Catches were occasionally presented as drops, and bounces were apparently not trackable — the football would just plug into the area rug,” the handsome devil continued. “Kicking wasn’t great either, as punt height was not properly depicted, and due to the thickness of Andy’s alphabet-blocks-as-goalposts setup, the results of field goals/PATs were unclear from a visual standpoint.”
Camera angles were poor in the early going, and “at its glitchiest, the toy players vanished and the live stream cut to some random high or low angle of Andy’s empty bedroom,” the television expert of our generation wrote.
I’ll stop.
“In the control room, we prepare for everything. So we were prepared for [glitching]. But…it was really our first major sort of attempt at this with football. When it happened, you would have thought the control room is like everybody’s yelling and screaming, ‘What the fuck?!?’” Szykowny recalled in our Zoom conversation last week. “But it got really quiet, and everybody just went about their job of fixing it.”
It’s true: Toy Story Funday Football got better as it went on (well, minus one hallucinogenic drug reference courtesy of then-MNF analyst Booger McFarland).
Szykowny says he thought they were going to get “crucified” online for the early glitching. But that’s not what he read.
“They were like, ‘Hey, they’re trying something new! There wasn’t almost any bad, which is crazy,” Szykowny, clearly not an IndieWire reader, continued. “They’re like, ‘Once they got it up and rocking, it was awesome!’ And because we were trying something so breakthrough, they gave us a pass.”
Szykowny says he doesn’t even really remember what technically went wrong, but it “might have been the tracking data stopped coming in.”
Back then, the beloved IP characters didn’t actually play the football. Instead, they hung around while generic animated football players donning Jacksonville Jaguars and Atlanta Falcons gear followed the motions of the real NFL players — or in the first half of the game, they tried to follow their motions.
Buzz Lightyear might have made a good Trevor Lawrence, but at the time, Pixar was not OK with what could theoretically happen via the mimicking technology.
“If the Jaguars quarterback runs in the end zone and starts twerking, we don’t want Woody twerking in the end zone, right?” Szykowny says. “We can’t control that. So at the time, we just couldn’t get them comfortable.”
Despite his dancing in an Adidas commercial (alongside new weapon Travis Hunter), Lawrence is not that much of a twerking threat.
Technically, technologically, they can control moments like that — the live-to-sim delay is about 90 seconds.
Everyone is much more comfortable with the concept now.
“It’s chaos, but it’s controlled, creative chaos,” Szykowny said.
On Monday night, Mike (Billy Crystal in the movies) will play for the Philadelphia Eagles and Sulley (John Goodman) for the Los Angeles Chargers — not for any other reason really than Mike is green and Sulley is predominantly blue, the primary colors of the competing teams. The main characters will rotate positions when and where their star power is needed.
“That way it gives us flexibility to really put [characters] in where it’s the most exciting or the most eye catching,” Sparrgrove said.
I believe that’s called “main character energy” these days, and it’s an on-the-fly edit Szykowny and Sparrgrove had pretty much hammered out by the end of The Simpsons Funday Football (2024), when Bart Simpson (Joe Burrow) hit sister Lisa Simpson (Jamar Chase) on an out route to beat dad Homer (DaRon Bland) into the end zone to win. The kids giving Homer Simpson fits was perfect canonically.
Even better than the OK to use the models, this time, Szykowny and Sparrgrove got the voices — the real voices: Crystal and Goodman — to record 25-30 minutes of V.O. for new animations. Check out just a small sample of what they compiled in the videos below.
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