“Come to New York, Gregg, an actual city with money, fame, nonobese people, pizza, halal carts, obese people,” Jackson says, pausing for a breath. “A park.”
The silly setup appears in the latest installment of “Spurs Special Forces,” a cartoon Web series that imagines Popovich and his players as a squad of commandos engaged in covert operations. As the episode careens to a climax, Popovich is freed from Jackson’s perverse grasp just in time to sign LaMarcus Aldridge.
Blending wry jokes, fantastical plot lines, subtle sight gags and highly specific NBA references, the show has become a darling within the thin demographic subcategory where Web-savvy basketball fans and quirky comedy aficionados intersect.
“It lives in the NBA Internet nerd realm and has very little appeal outside of that,” said Matt Hill, who produces every aspect of the show but does not provide the voices. “I expected maybe a total of a thousand people to watch, and if it was a few more people than that, I’d be happy.”
Instead, Hill’s first three episodes, released intermittently since the series debuted last January, have attracted more than 600,000 YouTube views in all.
Hill, 35, a comedy writer and economics professor in Los Angeles, does not lampoon the Spurs so much as he plays with their public personas, using them to carry out gag-laden five-minute stories. The animated version of Popovich is a wine-loving sophisticate. Tony Parker, who is French, is a suave ladies’ man. Tim Duncan is a pious Boy Scout type. Manu Ginobili is very Argentine.
“In 1996, a crack international commando unit was sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit,” a narrator says at the start of each installment. “These men promptly escaped and went undercover, hiding in plain sight as the most boring team in professional sports. They survive as soldiers of fortune — and on their million-dollar salaries.”
Among sports leagues, the NBA is a wellspring of humor, said Hill, a Lakers fan who no longer watches their games. The players’ personalities are easy to grasp on the court, and they are enhanced and reinforced through the news media and in advertisements. Fans, he said, seem to be younger, more liberal and savvier with technology than those of other leagues.
NBA fans online, for example, have championed the rapper Lil B, who claims to have placed curses upon Kevin Durant and James Harden, and embraced an enduring meme that involves pasting the crying face of Michael Jordan on photographs of beleaguered pop culture figures. Writers like Jason Concepcion and Shea Serrano, meanwhile, developed followings with their irreverent work on Grantland, the recently defunct sports and pop culture website.
Teams have begun to recognize this potential, too, with several exploring ways in recent months to create their own humorous content to promote players.
The Detroit Pistons, in a partnership with the online comedy studio Funny or Die, hired five writers this season to work on original material. They produce short videos and promote games on social media with images and animations. They persuaded guard Reggie Jackson to tweet during the live televised production of “The Wiz.”
“You have so many characters in the NBA — and I’m not trying to undermine the players as people, but they are that — and it’s easy to get invested in them,” said Jason Gallagher, one of the Pistons’ new comedy writers. “I think that has a lot do with why comedy works with the NBA.”
Duncan — perhaps because of his seemingly aloof disposition in games, his stubborn adherence to fundamentals and his sly sense of humor — has become an unlikely muse for comedy writers.
Gallagher, who also runs the basketball humor site BallerBall and who co-wrote “The Lockout: A Musical,” achieved one of his biggest successes last year with “I’m Using Chrome,” in which he parodied LeBron James’ essay “I’m Coming Home” and created a mock announcement from Duncan regarding his Web browser preferences. (Gallagher soon heard from Duncan’s lawyer, who asked him to post a disclaimer saying that Duncan had not written it.)
The Onion has embraced Duncan, too, running satirical headlines like “Tim Duncan Raving About Health Benefits of Standing Bench” and “Tim Duncan Urges Teammate to Be Patient With Frequent-Flier Miles.”
Wade Randolph, a comedy writer who does the voice of Duncan for “Spurs Special Forces,” said he felt compelled to make the character sound as innocent and naive as possible.
“I picture him as a child,” Randolph said. “I don’t know why.”
In the first episode, the Duncan character says earnestly, “I slam dunk when it’s necessary.”
In the second episode, Popovich puts his players on “indefinite rest” to overthrow the dictator of a small island nation. The Spurs quickly take control of the country — with “the largest margin of victory in a guerrilla war ever” — and Duncan becomes its new despot.
But after being persuaded to hold democratic elections, Duncan loses to a “more charismatic” candidate: a big piece of cardboard.
Hill, who had been making live-action comedy shorts for years, refers to his post teaching economics at UCLA as his job “for money.” He began the Spurs project as a way to learn animation when he left Los Angeles to take a short-lived teaching position at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.
“My main feedback from students was that they couldn’t believe I showed up on time to lecture every day,” he said.
Hill called his animation style “utilitarian.” With no background in drawing, he finds images of the players online and traces them in Adobe Photoshop. He then animates those figures in another program, After Effects, before finishing in film-editing software.
The voice actors are friends and acquaintances of Hill’s, many of whom he met through Channel 101, a monthly comedy-short screening series in Los Angeles.
“He’s a really smart guy making some really dumb stuff,” said Randall Park, an actor who appears on the television sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat” and performs the voices of Ginobili and Jackson. “That sounds like an insult, but I mean it in the best way.”
Hill delighted in seeing how his friends commandeered the players’ personalities. He thought Park’s version of Ginobili was an attempt to do “Scarface — but a nice Scarface.” Park said he had never heard Ginobili’s voice.
Park said he grew up with a friend from Argentina, “so I just tried to sound like his parents.” He added, “I’m 99 percent sure that it’s a horrible Manu Ginobili impersonation.”
Randolph and J.D. Ryznar, the voices of Duncan and Popovich, use barely modified versions of their normal speaking voices.
“I just love Wade Randolph’s Tim Duncan,” said Ryznar, who created the Web series “Yacht Rock.” “Wade Randolph is the whitest guy in the world. Like my Pop, his Tim Duncan is just him talking. It makes me laugh every time.”
David Futernick, who voices Parker, was the only one who researched his character in depth. He thought he had perfected Parker’s Americanized Frenchman aura before recording the first episode.
“But when we started to record, Matt was like, ‘Um, can you just do it more like a making-fun-of-French-people thing?’” said Futernick, an actor who appears in the television shows “Shameless” and “Transparent.”
Voice recordings have taken place in the actors’ cars, houses and offices and can take as little as 15 minutes. Randolph said he was “pretty drunk” while recording the second episode.
Hill has written and recorded the fourth episode, but he estimates the animation will not be finished for a few months as he juggles the show with his other responsibilities.
It has been, and will continue to be, a pet project that happens to be beloved by thousands of people, with no money involved — as far as anyone knows.
“There better not be any money,” Ryznar said. “Did someone tell you they got paid?”
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