Backyard Sports! Could Become A Modern Peanuts

Peanuts has been an institution for decades, and Backyard Baseball!'s new animated special could give this generation their own answer to Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Backyard Sports was a series of sports games released in the 90s and early 2000s for the PC. These titles featured a recurring cast of young players and kid versions of famous athletes.

Serving as a good introduction to sports games for younger players, Backyard Sports also benefited from an undeniable sense of fun charm that feels reminiscent of Charlie Brown and his friends. That's why it's the perfect source material for an animated special that, if it can grow, could become something special.

Backyard Sports: The Animated Special Tees Up A Fun Take On The Peanuts Formula

Backyard Sports!'s "A Sticky Situation" is a goofy animated short that positions new versions of some of the Backyard Sports' mainstays into a modern answer to Peanuts. Characters like Stephanie, Kiesha, Wheelie, Achmed, and Dmitri are fairly straightforward archetypes, but with enough colorful and childish charm to be entertaining.

The 11-minute short is a moral story about a kid learning to believe in themselves instead of luck, the sort of universal theme that appears in many cartoons aimed at families. The sense of humor is fairly innocent but consistently silly, with a good execution of the game's light art style in the transition to animation.

The cast, packed with comedy veterans like Ego Nwodim and Tiffany Haddish, have fun with the light style, bringing a real sense of fun to the short. It's similar to how Peanuts approaches its cast of characters, defining them through one primary trait but then fleshing them out through personality, interactions, and growth.

The series even reimagines series mainstay Pablo Sanchez into a stand-in for the Snoopy role, a largely dialogue-free and perpetually cool observer of the main kid in crisis. It's all light-hearted and sweet, a perfect little story for kids that uses the mold established by adaptations of Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts comic strip to great effect.

Backyard Sports Could Become Something Special

Similar to the way that Peanuts is designed to be a certain kind of nostalgic for any era of childhood, there's a timeless quality to the Backyard Sports brand. Even as it unavoidably bears some lingering touches of the 90s era where it spawned. There was an embrace of sports as a collective youth experience, as something everyone could play.

The potential is vast, thanks to the source material. The Backyard Sports video game series adapted plenty of different types of games while retaining the same general cast of characters. Taking those honed personalities into animation makes perfect sense and is an ideal way to set up the concept as a recurring series of specials.

Similar to Peanuts in previous generations, Backyard Sports! would make for a really charming way to teach life lessons in animation. It could bounce off major events like the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup by timing specials that adapt winter games or soccer. They could tie into the professional leagues for specials tied directly to specific players or teams.

They could even fully replicate what the Peanuts did and create holiday specials or longer shorts. All the while, the quietly very diverse and distinct cast of characters could genuinely make an attempt at becoming a generation's standard bearer for a series of family-friendly animated specials.

That diverse cast would be ideal now, given the tensions that flare up in youth sports in modern-day culture. Backyard Sports! shows a world where any kid can play and be a part of the experience, teaching moral lessons and having fun doing it. It's something Peanuts codified that Backyard Sports! should play with.

When the original Peanuts animated specials like It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired, the Peanuts strip had been running for 15 years. Those specials appealed to older fans who'd grown up with the original as well as a new generation of kids.

Backyard Sports! scratches that same itch, appealing to any millennial who played those games while retaining enough charm to be fun for modern kids. "A Sticky Situation" is a great little showcase of how Backyard Sports! could become a true peer to Peanuts, and this special could be the start of something special.