Hot on the heels of their ambitious Simpsons Funday Football NFL alternate broadcast, ESPN is gearing up for their next one involving animation. That will be Dunk The Halls, the first real-time animated NBA game.
This will be an alternate broadcast (on ESPN2, Disney+ and ESPN+) for the Christmas Day game between the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks. It will follow the Christmas Day parade on ABC, often featuring Disney characters, and will see the NBA players rendered in 3D, as well as Disney characters, including Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald and Daisy Duck, Goofy, Pluto, Chip and Dale, and more. It will be set in the Magic Kingdom Park at Disney World. And on Wednesday, ESPN put out a new trailer promoting this, as well as the image seen at top of what players will look like in this animation.
As with that Simpsons NFL altcast, this sees ESPN and their own animation team partnering with Sony-owned Beyond Sports, with the real-time animation involving Sony’s Hawk-Eye technology. As Beyond Sports CEO Sander Schouten told Sports Business Journal‘s Joe Lemire last month, in comments that echoed many of those made by various execs on the Simpsons altcast, this is another effort to try and capture a younger audience that may not normally watch entire sports games:
“Working with the NBA in creating the first alternate broadcast for basketball is a great start for us as a company. It’s another league that sees merit in this idea.
…“If you get them before they turn 14, you have a chance to get them for life, for your sport, and that’s still a thing at hand right now that a lot of kids don’t engage with sports anymore, which for leagues, is obviously a future problem if you don’t do anything about it.”
Like that Simpsons broadcast (which was based on a storyline of a Homer Simpson hot dog dream, eventually revealed as a Scott Van Pelt hot dog dream), this will have a narrative throughline. In this case, it will be about Mickey writing a letter to Santa, wishing for the NBA to come to Main Street. There will be Disney character elements throughout, including characters giving pregame and halftime speeches and decorating a tree, and Santa will operate the SkyCam while his elves work the other cameras.
An interesting note on the animation front is that this will mark the first animated alternate broadcast where players aren’t wearing helmets. This has been done in the NFL (with Toy Story and then The Simpsons from ESPN/Disney, and with SpongeBob Squarepants and other properties from CBS/Nickelodeon, albeit without direct animation of players in those cases) and the NHL (Big City Greens from ESPN/Disney, MultiVersus from WBD), but all of those leagues have players’ features somewhat obscured by helmets. So there’s a new animation challenge here. And we’ll see how well that works out.