Basketball: Mickey, Donald and Goofy instead of NBA stars for Christmas

It’s a nice technological feat that will brighten up Christmas Day for American basketball fans. On December 25, the meeting between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, counting for the NBA championship, will be broadcast simultaneously in an animated version, with Disney characters. An association between the entertainment group, the ESPN channel and the NBA created the “Dunk the Halls” event.

Thanks to “Beyond Sports” real-time viewing technology, combined with the optical tracking of the well-known “Hawk-Eye” in tennis, both Sony products, the match will be played live by the Disney heroes. They will reproduce in real time the movements of basketball players on the floor.

On the animated play area, we will find Mickey and Minnie, Donald and Daisy, Goofy, Pluto, Chip and Dale, as well as Santa Claus and a few elves. This will be a first for an NBA match, which the anime will play on the emblematic “Main Street, USA” of the Magic Kingdom park in Orlando.

The French Spurs star, Victor Wembanyama, does not yet know who will follow in his footsteps on the Disney floor, but we are delighted to see the outcome of this meeting. Other experiments have already taken place, in American football for example, with characters from Toy Story, but the result was average.