Old Ball's creators unpack his journey to All-Star Weekend originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
Do you know ball? Then you likely know Old Ball, the ascendant animatronic viral sensation who's been sweeping the nation.
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Conceived less than a year ago by Emmy-nominated Funny or Die alums Ben Bayouth, Adam Aseraf and Christian Heuer, the refreshingly retro talking basketball has been making the media rounds of late. Bayouth constructed and now operates and voices Old Ball, while Heuer and Aseraf serve as co-writers and producers for Old Ball's various adventures.
Together, the trio collaborates under the banner of Benched Studios.
"We've known each other for 10 years-plus, and have worked on a bunch of different stuff together throughout the years," Heuer tells The Sporting News. "Ben's the Jim Henson-level genius that's behind the fabrication of Old Ball, and the design of it. I've known about Ben's superpower, obviously, since I met him, and I've always wanted to do some sort of animatronic puppet-in-the-real-world idea or concept or show. It just kind of came to us one day, like, 'What if we did a basketball?'
"We're obviously fans of basketball. We feel like there's something familiar about a basketball, rather than just creating an alien creature or something, we could actually insert this into a world that already exists. And we did some research, and we just couldn't believe that nobody had quite done something like this. We just got super, super fired up. So we put our heads together and built old ball and we honestly just started super small. We started filming videos in Ben's old home studio," Heuer reveals. "We started taking Old Ball on the street, and just from there it was electric and just blew up."
Old Ball's New Rise
It's only been a matter of months since Old Ball made his debut, but he's already graduated to the big time.
Last week, Old Ball made a splash in Los Angeles while celebrating All-Star Weekend at Intuit Dome, the deluxe new homecourt of the L.A. Clippers.
Old Ball has already accrued over 437,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 247,000 followers on TikTok.
Two-time All-Star Chicago Bulls center Joakim Noah was apparently smitten with Old Ball from the jump.
"[Noah] just was so taken by it," Aseraf says. "And he was just like, 'This is my guy. Can I have him?' I'm like, 'You can't have him. It's not an apple that we brought to All-Star Weekend!' But yeah, it's really cool to see."
A big element of Old Ball's leveling up to the point where he's being coveted by the 2014 Defensive Player of the Year has been an openness to change from his creators.
"At first, we made him and we were like, 'It's gonna be ESPN meets Jim Henson. He's going to have hot takes, he's this grumpy Old Ball, and [he] sits at the desk and just fires off these sort of grumpy takes, right? And then, we took him out on the street, and we're like, 'Oh, there's also a man on the street version of this,'" Aseraf adds. "And then we started pranking people, we [realized], 'Oh, there's a pranking version of this, too.' It's kind of the gift that keeps on giving, because it just feels like all of these formats seem to be working for Old Ball. So we're just having fun with it as we go along. And he just hosted at All-Star Weekend. It's funny, because people just have him on their lap, like a lap dog. He's like a lap dog that talks."
Finding Old Ball's voice and personality has been a process — and knowing how to establish fluidity in that process has allowed his creators to discover new wrinkles in their broader formula.
"It was like any character that we've created before. You look at the puppet and you're like, 'Oh okay, what would be surprising? What would be fresh? But also, what does the voice want to be?' We sort of carved out a general personality that we wanted for him, and then as we went out into the street and Ben started improvising as him, and we saw what was working and what wasn't, it's been this sort of progressive shape," Aseraf observes. "When you find something surprising about him, we'll follow that lead too and just add more dimension to him."
Behind the Seams of Old Ball
From all appearances, Old Ball is seamless — that is to say, there is no external wiring that needs to be plugged in somewhere, Bayouth isn't puppeteering him directly.
Rather, a network of intricate animatronics are fully contained within the ball itself, and are being remote-controlled by Bayouth on site. The eyebrows, eyelids, eyeballs (which can move independently of each other), and mouth (lips, jaws, and now a new smile) are all fully articulated and remarkably expressive.
"Sometimes with puppets, some parts of it have to fit on the outside, or it's just the face and you can take the hair off around the back [and] you can access, but with a character like this, being full 360 is really integral to the experience of the person who's interacting with him," Bayouth says. "I think the all-inclusive ball that has everything built inside of it that is seamless — that moves and talks and can be passed around — is something that doesn't feel, for some reason, attainable to some people who don't know how the animatronics work."
That's not to say that other methods wouldn't be doable. But the wireless approach allows for maximal viral reactions, in the Old Ball team's estimation. The fact that he is a physical, self-contained animatronic also helps Old Ball's creators and the people with whom he interacts on-site lean into the cheerfully semi-retro element of the whole operation.
"There's a nostalgia feeling to Old Ball, to where you're like, 'Wait a second, did this exist? Was this around when we were kids?' We like that vibe to it. And just again, that it's old school meets new school," Heuer says. "Obviously there's the remote that Ben uses... but there are some new elements to it. It's '80s, '90s technology."
Specifically, Old Ball harkens back to a somewhat magical time for the NBA: when the Magic Johnson/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar/James Worthy Los Angeles Lakers and the Michael Jordan/Scottie Pippen Chicago Bulls were running the league.
"I think it's a throwback to these eras that we just have a lot of reverence for," Aseraf posits. "There's certain times in certain sports where it just felt like everything was clicking... Basketball has it with that '90s, late '80s era of Jordan and the sunsetting of the Showtime [Lakers] era. We just wanted to encapsulate that — like with Little Penny, there's something about that time, that feels pulpy and vibrant, that I think people enjoy. Old Ball is kind of a reflection of that."
Finessing the character's off-the-cuff expressions and vocalizations has offered up its own unique set of challenges.
"You really have to be tuned into, as I'm performing the character, the voice of the character — how the tone and the voice sounds — the comedy of what's actually being said, the smarts of being accurate to the sport and also performing the actual robotics of it all," Bayouth reveals. "It's a marriage of many different things that I'm juggling at the same time."
A Ball-Verse on the Horizon
So what's next for Old Ball? Some siblings, from the sounds of things!
"What we've really realized is Old Ball, and what we're calling 'The Ball-verse,' is kind of this infinite creative well," Heuer indicates. "We realize, we want to try to make— this is going to sound grandiose — our version of the 'sports Muppets.' We'd love to do a ball for every sport, and have a show where the balls are together, that's fun, and has heart. But then each of the characters would exist in the sport, like Old Ball has been materializing with basketball. Again, it's a big vision, and it's just one day at a time, but it feels like we kind of have an open runway, and it's been so fun to see how this is working."
Specifically, to coincide with the World Cup, a talking animatronic soccer ball is the next critter on the horizon.
"We made a soccer ball that we want to put out pretty soon that we want to start hyping up for the World Cup," Heuer reveals. "The tides of media have changed so much, and a lot of times it feels destitute with AI slop and all this stuff. We're kind of like, 'Man, this is part of a new chapter of entertainment, where this could really go anywhere.' We could have a short-form travel show on YouTube, but then we could have a prank movie on Netflix. Who knows where this could go, but we're just really excited."
When it comes to, say, a narrative feature film, there's a specific — and, yes, retro — tone the Benched team wants to capture.
"It would be nice to make a movie and to continue that '90s nostalgia, a Small Soldiers-type movie. These fun, FX-heavy movies that are all-ages, four-quadrant film-type thing I think would be super fun to do," Bayouth allows. "Helps fill in some of the gaps for people who are just wondering, and want to know, 'Where did he come from? What happened?'"
Small Soldiers director Joe Dante has a knack for cultivating family-friendly chaos with wonderfully lifelike puppet creations. To wit, he also helmed the two Gremlins films, Explorers, Matinee, Piranha, and The Howling.
Beyond spending time with Bayouth, Aseraf and Heuer, The Sporting News recently had a chance to catch up with Old Ball himself and talk shop about all things All-Star Weekend.
But that's another story.