Copyright Deadline
EXCLUSIVE: After the Backyard Sports video games were revived last year, the beloved franchise has scored its first ever animated adaptation. Playground Productions, an upstart company run by former teacher Lindsay Barnett, secured the rights in an unusual way (see below) and is now launching an animated special with an all-star cast. Sticky Situation, a 2D animated special from the animation studio behind Rick and Morty and Bob’s Burgers: The Movie, features Tiffany Haddish as Kiesha Phillips and Arturo Castro as Pablo Sanchez. Here’s the logline: “It’s Opening Day at Steele Stadium. But team superstar Stephanie ‘Bubbles’ Morgan is in crisis. She’s lost her gotta-have-it, never-play-without-it lucky bubble gum! With just 30 minutes until game time, the Backyard kids embark on a wild mission to track it down and save their season.” Rounding out the team are Ego Nwodim as Stephanie Morgan and Jocinda Smith, Chris Mintz-Plasse as Dmitri Petrovich, Donald Faison as Dante Robinson, Ashleigh Crystal Hairson as Sunny Day, Adam Pally as Pete Wheeler, and Utkarsh Ambudkar as Achmed Khan. Playground Productions CEO Lindsay Barnett will be lending her voice for Vinnie and the Webber Twins, and Michael Vlamis will voice Tony Delvecchio. Produced by Lighthouse Studios, the 2D animated special was penned by Hey Arnold! writer Joe Purdy. Mike Roberts (Bojack Horseman, Final Space) directs, with music by Jonny Shorr. Playground Productions is independently financing the special with support from Dave & Buster’s. As a result, though there is no release date yet, the special will roll out both on the Backyard Sports YouTube channel as well as in Dave & Buster’s stores across the U.S. Barnett, formerly an elementary school teacher, secured the rights to the Backyard Sports franchise about a year and a half ago after struggling to find video games that would appeal to her young students. She tells Deadline that, during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, she began to wonder whatever happened to that beloved game she used to play during her own childhood, Backyard Baseball ’97. “Seeing a cast of 15 girls and 15 boys of equal playing ability is what drew me into the franchise, and the easy to pick-up-and-play game mechanics kept me coming back for more,” she said. “So, long story short, I hired a private investigator to track the rights down, and two and a half years later, started to bring the brand back.” That started with reviving the CD-ROM games that originated in the ’90s. However, there was one minor (read: major) problem. “We, unfortunately, do not have any source code,” Barnett explained. “So we thought the retro titles were completely gone, but we were able to reverse engineer and CD-ROM hack to make the original games playable on modern devices, and this ultimately allowed us to bring the IP back into the cultural conversation immediately after acquiring the rights.” So began the journey to revive the world of Pablo Sanchez and his team of backyard athletes. Barnett and Chris Waters, Chief Product Officer at Playground Productions, tell Deadline that they are adamant about retaining creative control over all elements of the franchise — from the games to products to any scripted content, like this animated special — which explains the desire to produce the special independently of any major studio. That doesn’t mean they didn’t come knocking, though. Turning down offers from some of the major studios and streamers is certainly a risk, but one they say is worth taking to maintain cohesion and foster their own creative vision for the franchise. “We really believe that it’s a multi-generational brand and that the whole family can enjoy together,” Waters tells Deadline. “One might be experiencing childhood and the other might be experiencing the memory of it, but that’s what makes Backyard really, really special to us.” In addition to Backyard Baseball, Barnett’s Playground Productions also owns the rights to the football, basketball, soccer and hockey iterations, opening the door for much more to come. Barnett and Waters say the Backyard Baseball animated special is just the beginning. The hope is that, in success, they can adapt the material further, perhaps into a scripted series. “We are really conscious of: How else can we story tell around these characters? Because they’re just such rich characters with so much fun, and we’re so lucky that nobody has story told with these characters before,” Barnett said. “Our millennial fans have been itching for storytelling, and now that they have kids, they’re like, ‘We want to have a program that we can watch with them and really enjoy, and we might even enjoy it more than them.’ So that is what we’re really excited to continue to create.”
