The popular ESPN radio talk show Mike and Mike in the Morning has been reinvented as a series of animated shorts titled Off–Mikes. The approximately one-minute long shorts created at ANIMAX, Culver City, Calif., are running on ESPN.com and will total 10 episodes; one airs each Tuesday on the site. The animation is built around real broadcasts and with its large listening audience, these online shorts have a built-in following.
The animated versions of Mike and Mike–Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic–have been created in the likeness of the real on-air talents, the latter of which is fodder for all of the fat jokes in the episodes. Although head of production at ANIMAX Tim Jones had never met the duo, he and his team used videos as references.
In addition to the Mikes, a myriad of other characters enter into this animated world. For example, their family members and producers make appearances as do oddities like cavemen in the episode “Caddyhack.”
The animation is based on excerpts from original radio broadcasts. In the case of “Caddyhack,” Greenberg explains that Golic has been injured in a golfing accident. He continually makes fun of his friend with someone else in the studio while discussing the matter. Greenberg and his friend joke that Golic seems more likely to garner an injury while feasting at a buffet table. Then, they postulate that while Golic is having surgery on his hip, the surgeons might find small people in his stomach that have perhaps been nesting there since the Paleolithic era. During that reference, animated cavemen dance around a fire in his belly.
The diversity of locations in each episode created a challenge for the animation team. In “Caddyhack,” for example, the action moves from the studio, to the golf course, to an operating room and then inside Golic’s stomach. From a production standpoint a lot of work is required to create the different backgrounds and various characters each week, Jones related. He estimates that each one-minute show could have 15 different locations and 12 new characters.
Another unique feature of the project is the task of working with existing dialogue. The process begins with producers from the talk show choosing funny bits from broadcasts that they believe would work for Off–Mikes. From those selections, Jones and his team narrow down the choices and begin storyboarding ideas. “Story-wise, that’s pretty much it, the dialogue is locked, so the real challenge is to come up with something visually in animation that’s dynamic, that tells a story that really captures the imagination and stays true to the source audio,” Jones explained.
The ANIMAX team includes the aforementioned Jones, producer; Michael Bellavia, executive producer; Allan Rosson, animation supervisor/character designer/animator; Marina Petrova and Max Semyak, production managers; Ed Frayna, character designer and storyboard artist; David Croy, character designer; Jerry Richardson, background designer; Andres Calzada, background designer and storyboard artist; Nassos Vakalis and Michael Davis, storyboard artists; Alexander Abromov, Irina Kuzminskaya, Natasha Lysenko and Alexander Savchenko, animators; and Tim Hedrick, writer.
