NEW YORK — To meet the brother creators of Game of Zones — the animated Game of Thrones-themed NBA parody you didn’t know you needed — is to understand the origin of the show’s smart perspective and quirky humor.
The show’s fifth season debuts Thursday, infused with the fraternal banter and cohesive vision one can only expect from close friends who grew up in the same house, share the same genes, finish each other’s sentences with alarming regularity and, in an extended conversation at Bleacher Report’s office last week, showed an inability to let any topic pass without a quip.
The Malamut brothers grew up in suburban Philadelphia with the requisite sporting allegiances, plus interests in art, puppets and voice mimicry. “We would always be goofing off in ways that lent itself to making cartoons,” older brother Adam, now 35, said.
He would often challenge younger brother Craig, now 28, to what they called “The Drawing Game.” Each would take a blank sheet of printer paper and pick a topic — say, a superhero named Banana Man — and get to drawing.
“We’d both do our versions of Banana Man,” Adam said, “and I’d show him how much better mine was every time.”
Adam was about 12 at the time, with seven years of accumulated advantage in knowledge and fine motor skills over 5-year-old Craig. (They also have a middle sister, Kate, who declined to engage in these farcical exhibitions.) “I’d be blown away,” Craig says now, “but then I’d copy his style and get better.”
“I was drawing before I could speak,” Adam added, before feeling the need to clarify his apocryphal statement. “I don’t know if that’s true. I’d have to ask my mom because I don’t have a memory from that age.”
From those early competitive artistic beginnings, the brothers now oversee a veritable mega-hit, with each episode drawing millions of views across all of Bleacher Report’s platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and B/R’s app. The first three seasons — entirely written, voiced, animated and produced by the brothers — had eight total episodes, but the fourth season last year and this fifth season have eight apiece thanks to the aid of professional animators and graphic designers.
Game of Zones has an ardent following not only among fans, but within the game itself. Warriors coach Steve Kerr fed the Malamuts inside jokes for the creation of a custom episode for the team. Rockets general manager Darryl Morey asked for a special episode he could use to open February’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, at which former president Barack Obama was the keynote speaker. Lakers guard Lonzo Ball and 76ers center Joel Embiid are among the players to have tweeted rave reviews of episodes in which they’ve been featured, The Process and Father of Balls.
This is the FUNNIEST THING I've ever seen. That is so goooooooood. TRUST THE MF PROCESS #TheProcess https://t.co/vRSUN9ySt8
— Joel Embiid (@JoelEmbiid) May 26, 2017
IM IN TEARS https://t.co/YAqKxCpkuz
— Lonzo Ball (@ZO2_) June 8, 2017
Having help producing the show has helped the Malamuts think bigger and better, with Adam noting how “incredibly talented” the artists are, while admitting that relinquishing some control of a personal creation isn’t easy. The brothers maintain an incredible attention to detail, still writing and overseeing everything, with Craig often guiding the animators on subtle human expressions by recording himself acting out the scenes.
The two are always reviewing TV shows they’ve seen and discussing potential flaws or holes in plots. For the recently released Netflix series Mindhunter, which takes place in the 1970s, the creators used CGI to remove all of the wheelchair ramps from the backgrounds of shots and replace them with stairs because the setting is more than a decade away from the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
“That’s the kind of detail that makes us go, ‘Oh wow, what else are the creators thinking about when they make these things?’” Craig said. “That’s a symbol for how much thought and care go into these things, and we try to put the same thought and care into our stuff.”
When an episode of their first joint effort, Sports Friends, featured a view of Aaron Rodgers’ house at night, Craig saw a rare chance to apply his educational expertise. (He has a master’s degree in astrophysics from Wesleyan.) “I published a paper in Astrophysical Journal at the same time I was working on Sports Friends,” Craig said evenly, as if to suggest that the feat is a normal juxtaposition of two related works.
“If we’re going to have a night sky,” Craig said, “I’m going to make the stars all accurate because if I have one thing I’m an expert in . . .”
“No one has ever commented,” Adam interrupted, “‘Wow, the stars are incredibly accurate.’”
“There’s a thing Neil deGrasse Tyson always does where he points out in movies where the stars aren’t accurate, so I’m just waiting for the day that he notices,” Craig said. “Orion’s Belt is in the Obama episode. Check it out, Neil.”
Asked if the show’s success has added pressure, Adam has a simple reply: “Yes.” Craig equivocates more, saying his confidence in their upcoming shows assuages his fear of strong fan expectations. Living up to the hype is no small matter, even though it’s pressure that began as self-imposed but became internet-perpetuating.
“I feel pressure that, in the world of medieval basketball, how do you keep pushing things forward? I have this constant, nagging fear — what if people get bored of it or stop liking? Or the novelty wears off?” Adam said. “I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure it’s always the best, not that there’s that much competition with basketball/medieval cartoons, but I act as though there are 10 other shows.”
No detail goes undiscovered. Viewers scour through episodes for every Easter egg and subtle joke, of which there are many. In the Obama episode, he’s riding a tan horse. In a clip of Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni’s office, the books all have pun titles such as “World and Metta World Peace” and “For Whom the Raja Bell Tolls.” The Malamuts often will ask Bleacher Report’s NBA writers for details about a player’s choice of attire or backstory.
“At every crossroads, when there’s an opportunity to root it in reality,” Craig said, “why not choose that option instead of something more generic?”
“They find everything,” Adam jabbed, “except for accurate skies.”
Adam started this animated journey after moving to Los Angeles post college at Emerson, where he worked writing and producing game shows and reality programs. He worked on illustrations at night and sold a cartoon to Yahoo called Sports Friends, recruiting Craig to help with background graphics. As Craig learned the trade, he grew into a larger share of the work. Their work was pretty good but fairly rudimentary in Sports Friends and early Game of Zones episodes.
“They’re just talking heads because it’s so hard to make anyone move,” Craig said.
“They’re very dialogue-heavy cartoons,” Adam added.
“The first episode [of Game of Zones], everyone’s like sitting in a chair or just standing still talking,” Craig said.
In those days, they adopted a principle gleaned from childhood Halloweens when their mother would advise, “Don’t get a pumpkin bigger than you can carry.”
“We would never write a scene that was bigger than we could carry, essentially,” Adam said before confessing with a laugh that he quickly became a spoiled brat who no longer remembers the painstaking work of animation. “Now, though, with a whole crew, we can be like, ‘Let’s do an island full of Van Gundys.’”
And then they will literally create an island full of Jeff van Gundy caricatures, an idea whose provenance is indicative of how the whole show’s content is devised — with a shrug and the question: how can we do an NBA version of this? In van Gundy’s case, an offhand comment about his resemblance to a monk resulted in his Game of Zones caricature chanting instead of speaking.
Game of Zones season 5 episode list
New episodes drop next Thursday, 4/12 pic.twitter.com/7trpiSkD55
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) April 5, 2018
In another instance, the brothers played off of a recurring plot device in Game of Thrones: the forming of alliances.
“It’s not like the Suns and Kings ever merged to fight the Spurs or the Warriors,” Adam said. “But, we’re like, what if?”
Episode two will feature the creation of the Sunkings. Episode seven will hinge on the excitement around the new NBA2K esports league. “What would a video game in medieval times even look like?” Adam asks.
When the Houston Rockets were accused of breaking into the Los Angeles Clippers’ locker room through a secret back entrance, with rumors of a decoy sent to the front door, the NBA world was abuzz. Most of those details were later debunked, so Game of Zones had the remedy.
“We extrapolate to the nth degree of what you wish those rumors really were,” Craig said.
“What if we go all in and give people the epic break-in story that they wished it was?” added Adam.
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Therein also lies their perpetual conundrum: how to be as topical as possible and as ambitious as possible, which can be mutually exclusive qualities on an animator’s schedule. They spent time planning in broad strokes over the summer and started thinking about ideas in December with a hiatus to write and executive produce an animated football show, Gridiron Heights.
For their release of an episode about Kyrie Irving’s move from the Cavaliers to the Celtics that was released at the All-Star Game, the original ending had Irving sticking a dagger down and declaring that there’d be a new king of the Eastern Conference.
“It probably wasn’t as dramatic in the actual situation of what happened — he got traded — but we like to make it like the fantasy of every NBA fan of how it went down,” Craig said.
A week before its air date, however, the Cavaliers overhauled their roster at the trade deadline and then blew out the Celtics by 22 points in Boston days later. In the middle of watching the Eagles’ Super Bowl victory parade on TV, the Malamuts got back to work, tacking on another scene drawn straight from Game of Thrones.
Fans of the HBO show will recall when Queen Cersei Lannister ordered the destruction of the Great Sept of Baelor, thereby eliminating her problems (along with slew of characters). In Game of Zones, LeBron James destroys a similar-looking structure housing the departed Cavaliers (Channing Frye, Dwyane Wade, Isaiah Thomas, Derrick Rose, Jae Crowder), all done with a so-called Woj bomb, a nod to the popular Twitter hashtag signaling yet another major scoop from ESPN writer Adrian Wojnarowski.
And so the show marches on, albeit with a little brotherly role reversal. Adam is the grandiose visionary who admits he gets bored of ideas too quickly whereas he said Craig has the steadier perspective.
“Even though he’s my little brother, he has better sensibilities for overseeing things,” Adam said. “It’s an interesting dynamic. If we need final say on something — I would never have said something like this when we started — but now, at this point, I trust his opinion more than mine.”