Monday Night Football Getting The Simpsons Treatment For Special Livestream
It's all the rage to offer some kind of alternative broadcast for sporting events, especially football games. Maybe you have the Manning brothers crack-wise, perhaps you transform all the players into toys and have them play in Andy's room, or maybe you shoot slime cannons after every touchdown and let Patrick Star rag on Russell Wilson.
On Dec. 9, we're going to be getting another one and this time it will involve characters from the longest-running American scripted primetime television series, The Simpsons.
That game will be between the Dallas Cowboys and Cincinnati Bengals, and according to ESPN, Homer will be "aligned" with the Cowboys. Fitting given Homer said in the Season 8 episode "You Only Move Twice" (a personal favorite of mine) that his dream is to own the Dallas Cowboys.
As for Bart, he'll be with the Bengals.
Meanwhile, Marge and Lisa will conduct interviews, while Maggie handles skycap duties, with other characters making appearances as well.
The game itself will use Sony's Hawk-Eye Innovations' optical tracking with the game taking place at Atoms Stadium, instead of AT&T Stadium with the stream available on Disney+, ESPN+, and NFL+.
As a massive Simpsons fan, I love this idea. I'm easy to please on this front: just shoehorn some good references in there, maybe have a deep-cut character or two make an appearance, and I'm happy.
As more and more of these broadcasts come along, I think they're just going to get smoother and smoother. If you think about it, it takes a ton of computing power to track players and then animate them in real-time, and it's only going to get better the more it's done.
All I know is that on December 9, at the very least, I'll be taking a peak at what should be a perfectly cromulent alternate broadcast.