What happens when ‘The Simpsons’ join ‘Monday Night Football’? Find out during Bengals-Cowboys

AP Sports Writer

Lisa Simpson once said during an episode of “The Simpsons:” What could be more exciting than the savage ballet that is pro football?

On Monday night, the entire Simpsons universe gets to experience it in a way not many could have imagined.

The prime-time matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and Dallas Cowboys will also take place at Springfield’s Atoms Stadium as part of “The Simpsons Funday Football” alternate broadcast.

The altcast will be streamed on ESPN+, Disney+, and NFL+ (on mobile devices). ESPN and ABC have the main broadcast, while ESPN2 will carry the final “ManningCast” of the regular season.

The replay will be available on Disney+ for 30 days. Globally, more than 145 countries will have access to either live or on replay.

“We’re such huge football fans, and the Simpsons audience and the football audience, I feel, are like the same audience of just American families and football. And the Simpsons are so much a part of the DNA of the American family and culture that for us to, like, mush them together in this crazy video game, it’s so fun,” said Matt Selman, executive producer of “The Simpsons.”

While the game is the focal point, the alternate broadcast, in some ways, will resemble a three-hour episode of “The Simpsons.” It starts with Homer eating too many hot dogs and having a dream while watching football.

Homer joins the Cowboys in the dream while Bart teams up with the Bengals. Lisa and Marge will be sideline reporters.

“That’s the beginning of the story, and the story continues through the entire game until Homer wakes up from his dream at the end of the game. It is like a complete story, and the NFL game will happen in between. It’s just going to be an amazing presentation with tons of surprises,” said Michael “Spike” Szykowny, ESPN’s VP of edit and animation.

This is the second year ESPN has done an alternate broadcast for an NFL game. It used the characters from “Toy Story” for last year’s Sunday morning game from London between the Atlanta Falcons and Jacksonville Jaguars.

“The Simpsons” has featured many sports-themed episodes during its 35 seasons. Even though “Homer at the Bat” remains the consensus favorite sports episode for many Simpsons fans, there have been football ones such as “Bart Star” and “Lisa The Greek.” There also was a Super Bowl-themed one after Fox’s broadcast of Super Bowl 33 between Denver and Atlanta in 1999.

Even though “The Simpsons” remains a staple on Fox’s prime-time schedule, it is part of the Disney family after their acquisition of 20th Century Fox in 2019. All 35 seasons are on Disney+.

The show’s creators have worked with ESPN and the NFL to make sure the look and sound is definitely Simpsonsesque.

The theme song is a mash-up of “The Simpsons” opening and “Monday Night Football’s” iconic “Heavy Action.”

There have also been pre-recorded skits and bits to use during the broadcast featuring Simpson’s legendary voices Hank Azaria, Nancy Cartwright, Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Yeardley Smith.

The telecast will be entirely animated, with the players’ movements in sync with what is happening in real-time on the field. That is done through player-tracking data enabled by the NFL’s Next Gen Stats system and Sony’s Beyond Sports Technology.

While Next Gen Stats tracks where players are on the field with a tracking chip in the shoulder pads, there is skeletal data tracking and limb tracking data — which uses 29 points per player — to get closer to the player’s movements.

The other data tracking will allow Beyond Sports and Disney to add special characters to the game. For example, there might be a play where Lisa catches the ball and goes 30 yards instead of Cincinnati’s Tee Higgins.

“Lisa is much smaller than the rest of the players. So, in real life, the ball would go over her head, but now, with data processing, we can take the ball and make it go exactly into her hands. So for the viewer, it still looks believable, and it all makes sense,” said Beyond Sports co-founder Nicolaas Westerhof.

The other major challenge is making “The Simpsons” two-dimensional cartoon characters into 3-D simulations. Szykowny and his team worked to make that a reality over the past couple of months.

“That’s a big leap of faith for them to say, hey, we trust you to make our characters 3-D and work with it. Our ESPN creative studio team has done a wonderful job,” Szykowny said.

Lisa, Krusty, Nelson, Milhouse and Ralph will be with Bart and the Bengals; while Carl, Barney, Lenny and Moe join up with with Homer and the Cowboys.

The broadcast will also feature ESPN personalities Stephen A. Smith, Peyton Manning and Eli Manning.

ESPN’s Drew Carter, Mina Kimes and Dan Orlovsky will call the game from Bristol, Connecticut, and also be animated. They will wear Meta Quest Pro headsets to experience the game from Springfield using VR technology.

For Kimes, being part of the broadcast and being an animated Simpsons character is a dream come true. She is a massive fan of the show and has a framed photo of Lisa Simpson — who she said is a personal hero and icon — as part of her backdrop when she makes appearances on ESPN NFL shows from her home in Los Angeles.

“I didn’t have any input, and I didn’t see anything beforehand, so I wasn’t sure if it would look like me, but it kind of does, which is very funny,” said Kimes, who drew Simpsons characters when she was a kid. “To see the actual staff turn me into one was a dream.”

Even though the Bengals (4-8) and Cowboys (5-7) have struggled this season, Selman thinks both teams have personalities that appeal to “The Simpsons” universe.

“We were just so lucky also that the Cowboys are sort of like a Homer Simpson-type team, American team, and Mike McCarthy might be a Homer-type guy, one might imagine,” he said. ”And then you have Joe Burrow on the other side who is a cool young, spiky-haired, blonde bad boy — he’s like Bart. And that fits our character archetypes so perfectly.

“If Homer is mad at Bart and has a hot dog dream while watching ’Monday Night Football’, and then it’s basically McCarthy versus Burrow, Homer versus Bart, and that’s the simple father versus son strangling — Homer strangling Bart dynamic that has been part of the show for 35 years. I don’t know if that would have worked as well if it was like Titans versus Jacksonville. We would have found something. We would have made it work.”

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