INTERVIEW: Christy Karacas is back with sports-themed riff on anime

Image: Ballmastrz: 9009, created by Christy Karacas, features the voice of Natasha Lyonne. Image courtesy of Adult Swim / Provided by Adult Swim with permission.

The new Adult Swim cartoon Ballmastrz: 9009 features a motley variety of influences, including anime and sports-themed entertainment. Think Rollerball meets Bad News Bears meets One-Punch Man, and that image might approximate the new creation from Christy Karacas.

Karacas should be well known to fans of animated television. He was the creative force behind Superjail!, and now he is back with a fast-paced journey into a bizarre world of anime-inspired action.

“Well, after Superjail! I was just trying to think of a new show to do, talking to the network,” Karacas said in a recent phone interview. “I kind of knew I wanted it to be different than Superjail! I didn’t want to do the same thing, and I always liked anime. And at the time a lot of cool stuff was coming out. … I was seeing a lot of stuff like Kill la Kill and One-Punch Man and some of the newer anime, and I was like, oh, maybe it’ll be cool to do some kind of anime-inspired thing.”

Karacas then started to think about sports and the many comedic situations that come from a coach, players and a common goal. In many ways, a sports team’s dynamic shares the same genre tropes as a sitcom or animated show.

“You have a family dynamic, or you have a workplace dynamic,” he said. “Sport is such a perfect thing. You’ve got a team, the other teams. You have the captain, just a lot of things for comedy and conflict. I was like, maybe I’ll do a sports show, but I really don’t like sports or watch sports or know anything about sports. So I was like, oh, I’ll just make up some sport. I’ve always been a big fan of Rollerball and these kind of ’70s dystopian post-apocalyptic type movies. I’m like, I’ll just make up some sport. I didn’t know at first what it would be, but something very Dragon Ball Z where they just fight and try to score.”

Thus, Ballmastrz: 9009 was born. The quarter-hour comedy premieres tonight, April 8 at midnight.

Besides the evident humor in following a sports team, there is also the nonstop action that can fill the screen. Karacas’ riff on anime is certainly action-packed, hardly taking a second to breathe.

The show surrounds the exploits of Gaz Digzy, who is demoted to the worst team in the world, the Leptons. The only way to turn around her fortunes is to take this sad excuse of a team to the championship. Natasha Lyonne voices the main character.

“In anime, there’s a lot of crazy, nonsensical things that don’t make logical sense, but they’re just really cool to look at and watch,” he said. “There’s a lot of sports movies like Mighty Ducks and Bad News Bears and things like that. I’ve always been a fan of Bad News Bears. … Some washed-up loser has to come in and maybe help the team seems like a pretty standard trope, so the idea of Gaz being this mess up that gets demoted to this crappy team just seemed pretty much like a no-brainer.”

For Karacas, the animation and visuals were easier to accomplish compared to the other creative elements in the show. He has confidence in his sketching, drawing and ability to have fun riffing on anime.

“Sometimes you’ll just draw something and go, oh, this is a cool drawing,” he said. “The writing and the scoring and all that stuff was a lot more of a challenge to me because again a lot of the sports things I was familiar with it are films, so the structure of a film and the structure of a TV show is so different. A TV show doesn’t get resolved, or the show would be over. It’d be boring. The characters have to keep messing up and starting over again and stay the same character. Homer Simpson never gets smart. To learn his lesson in an episode, he’s always back to his old self in the end, in the next episode.”

He added: “The hard part for an 11-minute show was kind of figuring out how much is this action, how much is story. Does the game make sense? Are there rules? Also with this show, it’s kind of hard. I wanted the teams to have a lot of players, but usually a show like this doesn’t have a ton of main characters. The team has a bunch of characters. I wanted other teams, so it was kind of a little tricky to find the balance. How many characters are there? How do they act and talk and fit all this into 11 minutes? It’s messing around with it, and we found its legs and figured where it needs to be.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Ballmastrz: 9009 will premiere Sunday, April 8 at midnight on Adult Swim. Click here for more information.