The ESPN+/Disney+ Simpsons Funday Football animated alternate broadcast for Monday Night Football a few weeks back drew discussion for a lot of things, but some of its most noteworthy moments came from when NFL players were replaced with characters from The Simpsons. ESPN is set to do the animated replacement again on their Dunk The Halls Disney animation altcast for the San Antonio Spurs-New York Knicks Christmas Day game (ESPN2/Disney+/ESPN+), and on a conference call last week, they revealed just how and why they’re able to do that for key plays.

With that Simpsons altcast, the replacements sometimes came for plays that were obviously going to be important pre-snap, such as the final defensive play that saw all Homers against all Barts, or passing situations in the red zone.

“Spiderpig is the ball!?” 🤣

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— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) December 10, 2024

Ralph hit the TOE TAP on this TD pass from Bart 👀

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— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) December 10, 2024

At other times, though, there were swaps in more unusual situations. Those included a swap of Lisa Simpson in on what looked like a standard play a ways out, only for that to turn into a touchdown.

CHASE BROWN TOUCHDOWN

…EXCEPT IT’S LISA SIMPSON
pic.twitter.com/rSakc1QnRV

— Yardline Sports (@YardlineSports) December 10, 2024

ESPN was able to do that because the animation process involves a slight delay relative to live game action (of course, there’s a latency delay on any sort of broadcast, but this is slightly longer), letting them make those substitutions before the play is shown.

As with any sort of lag, there are notable potential challenges there; if the delay from the standard broadcast is too long, plenty of viewers will get spoiled versus those watching the regular feed. There are also new challenges for a broadcast team that’s calling the game and that has the information that a character sub might lead to (may have already led to) something big.

But ESPN’s team pulled this off well on the Simpsons broadcast. There, the lag wasn’t incredible relative to the standard broadcast, making the game still feel live, and permitting social conversation between those watching the altcast and the main feed. And the character swaps led to some of the most-discussed and most-praised moments on the altcast, and that’s part of how they’re going to be used again on this Christmas Day Dunk The Halls NBA altcast, set on Main Street, USA at Disney World and featuring classic Disney animation characters such as Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Goofy.

On a Dunk The Halls conference call last week, ESPN vice-president (production) Phil Orlins and play-by-play voice Drew Carter explained to media (including AA) how this works, and what they’re planning to do with it for this game. To start with, Orlins said the character swaps were a new feature for the Simpsons one versus previous animated altcasts, and the feedback they got was a strong indication they should keep doing that.

“I think over the course of these telecasts, starting with the first Big City Greens and Toy Story, for various reasons, characters did not participate in the actual game play,” Orlins said. “We’ve seen a massive evolution of importance in using the central cartoon characters within the game itself. And the response to that has really been pretty obvious. The social response and the audience feedback for that has been very, very important.”

Orlins said the delay here is about the animation in general (the non-swapped players are still animated), but it’s useful for them in subbing characters for key plays.

“We’ve just continued to sort of refine how we do that. Not to cheat the system a little bit, but because of the data, we work on a little bit of a delay, probably will be about a minute in this game, but those are the magical little things that allow us to put — to see Homer Simpson throw two touchdowns, but at the end of the game, when Ja’Marr Chase scores the winner, Homer is the defensive back who falls down and Lisa Simpson scores the touchdown from Bart.

So, we’re getting more sophisticated how to take advantage of that and create unique, surprising, and more memorable moments.”

Carter said on the play-by-play side, he is still essentially calling plays in real time, as he’s working off a game feed that’s time-synched to the animated broadcast.

“The screens I’m looking at are synced up with our broadcast,” he said. “I’m not watching the real-time feed that’s a minute ahead of ours. There is a stats monitor in the room, so I can cheat if I want, but I don’t do that because you want the calls to be organic. I’m seeing it as the viewer is seeing it.”

However, he said he does know something’s usually coming from a character sub, just not necessarily what exactly it will be.

“We did only put the Simpsons in the game when something huge was about to happen. I sort of winked at that during the game. I was like, ‘Oh, Lisa’s in the game. I wonder if something big is about to happen.’ If you’re paying attention, that’s when we did it. So, to answer your question, yes, I had a feeling that, when Lisa replaced Ja’Marr Chase and was being defended by her father, she was probably about to score.”

LISA BURNED HOMER FOR THE 40-YARD TD! 🔥

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— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) December 10, 2024

Orlins said if they could do real-time animation, they likely would, but given the delay currently required for the animation process, they might as well take advantage of it with the character subs.

“The essential reason for the delay is no matter how incredible this process is, they are processing data. That takes massive amounts of data, and running algorithms to interpret that data takes a certain amount of time. Then we can’t actually create the replay angles until that data gets processed. So, we slow everything down a little bit so we can create the replays and process the data.

“A derivative of that—I think, if we could do it in real-time, we probably would, but a derivative of that is we have a little lead time in knowing what is going on.”

On the technical side, Orlins said the control room winds up using a third different time feed that’s between the normal feed and the animated delay, as that helps them prepare for what they’re about to show on the animated feed.

“In the control room itself, we actually have two versions of the game, the real game playing one in real time, and then a second one we run about 20 seconds before the [animated] telecast. Because, actually, if it’s much more than that, it gets complicated to actually remember what play has happened and what the best camera angle is going to be to show that.”

He said the delay allows for those character swaps, but also for cool camera angles on players (substituted or not).

“Again, beyond what Drew referenced, the sort of inclination that generally Lisa came in for good moments, Homer came in for some good, some bad, but we are also taking advantage of that. If you really think about it closely, even just a non-Simpsons moment like CeeDee Lamb making a big play, he might go to the line of scrimmage with a third person view over his shoulder, looking back at the quarterback.

“And even as crazy as this sounds, even Moe made a great tackle at one key moment in the Simpsons game, and it was all shot from what appeared to be a SkyCam right over his linebacker position. Those are the kinds of things we do with the time latency.”

SWALLOWED UP BY MOE SZYSLAK pic.twitter.com/urHA1YhltN

— CJ Fogler 🫡 (@cjzero) December 10, 2024

“Spiderpig is the ball!?” 🤣

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— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) December 10, 2024

Carter said he thinks this may be even more difficult for the production and animation teams with this basketball game given the sport’s flow, but he has faith in them.

“I might be speaking out of turn here, but that’s a lot tougher in basketball than football. Football, the action is five, 10 seconds, and it stops. I don’t know how we’re going to do that in basketball. That’s why my job is the easy part.”

And Orlins tipped one potential character substitution fans might want to watch for Wednesday.

“It looks to me like Goofy and Jalen Brunson have a really good pick-and-roll at the elite level.”

[ESPN Press Room]