I grew up reading about Superman and Batman, but not Spider-Man and Captain America. Anyone who has ever picked up a comic book will tell you there’s a big difference.
The Man of Steel and the Caped Crusader are DC Comics. As for Spidey and the Captain — or “Capsicle,” as Tony Stark refers to him in “Avengers: Endgame” — those dudes do their crime-fighting for the Marvel Comics stable.
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Which brings us to the NFL on Fox.
I’m the type of sports television viewer who is mainly interested in the game. I don’t need to be weighed down with graphics, I don’t need uncomfortable 20-second interviews with the head coach at the end of the first half, especially if the head coach is Bill Belichick and his we get his answering-machine outgoing message about doing what’s best for the team. And heaven help us, does anyone need a one-shot of that fancy, city-on-a-hill 50-yard-line suite every time the owner’s team has scored a touchdown?
But I am no get-off-my-lawn guy. In that spirit, allow me to applaud Fox for the comic-book, superhero-type graphics the network has been using this season for NFL players. Surely you’ve noticed them. Are they a little corny? Maybe. And when they first caught my eye I wasn’t sure if it took manned-trip-to-the-moon technology to come up with them or if they were drawn on a Dunkin’ napkin. What matters is that they are crisp, clever and, dare I say it, fun.
Man oh man, they are also kind: Every player, regardless of age or body type, has a Joe College look about him. This is particularly true of Tom Brady, the 43-year-old quarterback of the playoff-bound Tampa Bay Buccaneers. As re-imagined by Fox, he is the 24-year-old Tom Brady of Super Bowl XXXVI, marching the Patriots up the field in the game’s final seconds rather than taking a knee, as back-in-the-day Fox analyst John Madden had suggested.
The Fox NFL Superhero Project, which is what I’m calling it because this is the NFL and everything is very important and therefore should have an important-sounding title, was led by Gary Hartley, the network’s executive vice president, graphics. Hartley, 62, was also behind the creation of Cleatus, the futuristic, jacked-up robot that has become as much a part of Fox Sports as Joe Buck, only not as well-paid. I reached out to Hartley to talk about those Fox superhero graphics, but I also challenged him with a tricky question about Cleatus: How would his robot fare in a steel cage match against the robot from “Lost in Space,” Robby from “Forbidden Planet,” and Gort from “The Day the Earth Stood Still?” (The original, starring Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal, not that claptrap 2008 remake starring Keanu Reeves, which I’ll admit had a much more formidable Gort but, again, no. It’s a lousy movie.)
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“And Iron Giant,” Hartley told me, adding the robot from the 1999 animated film.
“We were re-branding the NFL one season, and my son had given me, when he was smaller, this sketch drawing of a kind of cowboy superhero football player robot,” he said. “That’s the best way to describe it. And it was in my desk.”
Fox Sports had been using animated characters since the 1990s. Now there would be a robot, initially designed in-house and then sent to an outside vendor for refinement.
“The idea was, OK, let’s create a character that’s synonymous with the NFL on Fox but not branded as the NFL on Fox so we can use it as an interactive tool that was more fun than a logo,” Hartley said. “We’ve had a lot of fun with him but his personality profile now is that he’s a little bit more indicative of the core value of the Fox Sports brand instead of just some of the wacky stuff we were doing early on.
“He’s been a fun character to have access to and be able share with advertisers,” he said. “He’s an adjunct to the brand. I’m just happy he’s hung around so long.”
Cleatus is old school by now, having debuted in 2005. The superhero graphics are in their first full season in the NFL, although Fox used an earlier version last February in Super Bowl LIV, and then planned a major rollout for the 2020 season that would have included images of every player in the NFL.
But then came the pandemic.
The Fox NFL Superhero Project, as originally conceived, would have required photographing more than 2,000 players — “We had a whole spreadsheet and we were ready to execute it,” Hartley said— but everything was very quickly shut down.
Instead, Fox segued to a scaled-down Plan B in which offensive skill players and top defensive players were photographed. It worked out to between 10 and 15 players from each team.
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But it wasn’t a simple case of photographing the players and then having an artist apply a nice trace job. Hartley wanted different looks, different attitudes.
“The intent is a superhero-style illustration of players,” said Hartley. “So muscles are exaggerated, things like that.”
According to Hartley, the idea for the comic-book superhero look came from Eric Shanks, CEO and Executive Producer of Fox Sports, who had been mulling the plan with Brad Zager, head of production and operations. Hartley was in the control room one day during a rehearsal when Shanks leaned over and offered a suggestion about spicing up photographs of players.
“He said, ‘Look, these guys are superheroes, really, if you think about it. And we should depict them that way,’” said Hartley. “That was a year-and-a-half ago.”
Fox played around with the idea in-house, running photos of players through an app, but, Hartley said, “It just didn’t get there. It wasn’t expressive enough. It almost simplified the player too much.”
They went ahead and used some initial designs for Super Bowl LIV and then went back to the drawing board. Fox went outside, enlisting Los Angeles-based Engine Room, which does visual effects and graphics for the motion picture industry. Engine Room recruited a pair of models — they may have been former college players, Hartley said — who donned uniforms and were then photographed.
“We did the test shoot and lit them in a way that would give the illustrators more information,” Hartley said. “And then we experimented with different poses that we liked. We had a whole PDF that we put together that we were going to use as a bible as we shot each individual team, and there were types of poses we were looking for — very emotive, very expressive, kind of superhero graphic novel style.”
Those initial poses were but a baby step.
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In a normal year, television networks have access to photograph players during the preseason and keep them on file for future use. Since very little about 2020 was normal, an arrangement was worked out in which the teams supplied images for all to share. Circumstances being what they were, given safety protocols from state to state and city to city, and the hoops that had to be jumped through just to get players into the building, some teams, one of them being the Philadelphia Eagles, didn’t photograph their players at all. Networks had to rely on photos from previous seasons. Had undrafted Patriots receiver Jakobi Meyers thrown one of his two trick-play touchdown passes during a Fox gamecast (NBC and CBS did the honors), you probably would have seen a superhero image inspired by a photo of him from his quarterbacking days at Arabia Mountain High School in Georgia.
“Some teams were being hyper-cautious, as they should be,” Hartley said. “We were dealing with this during the summer … so we had limited imagery to work with, compared with what we expect. That was a bit of a challenge.
“We just worked with whatever resources we could get our hands on.”
Harley was skeptical at first — “skeptical in air quotes,” he said — but then it all came together during Super Bowl LIV with football players being recast as comic book superheroes. Now, after a full season and entering the first full postseason of using them, it’s not just Superman Cam Newton who’s getting the superhero treatment.
And, yes, Hartley has a favorite: Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott.
“He has a super emotive, leaning-forward, flexing kind of pose,” Hartley said. “Every time I see it, I love it.
“And then, on the opposite end of that, would be (Green Bay Packers quarterback) Aaron Rodgers, who basically just has his arms crossed, which kind of cracked me up.”
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The reception has been such that Fox plans to expand the use of superhero graphics, not just in football — and they will appear again this weekend when the network begins its NFL playoffs broadcasts — but on its other sports platforms.
“My hope moving forward is that we have the opportunity to go in and get with the teams and bring players in almost like a car wash and shoot next, next, next, next,” Hartley said. “And the NFL is working with us to get that done.”
Here’s hoping they limit the superhero treatment to the players, and not the owner’s box. It’s enough that we already have Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft as Marcus Aurelius and Claudius. We don’t need them reimagined as Daredevil and The Flash.
(Top photo: Courtesy Fox Sports)
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