Thousands of Pokémon parodies have sprung up over the last 30 years, but it’s not often you find one as funny, cutting, and lovingly crafted as BALLS: The Monster-Catchin’ Musical Comédy. The truest sign of a good spoof is that it demonstrates an incredible amount of knowledge about the source material. You can’t half-ass a parody with gags that only cut the surface; you need something that the sickos will understand and appreciate. The show features 151 legally distinct monsters, as well as parodies of some of the long-held truths of the Pokémon universe that, when you think about them long enough, start to boggle the mind.
I managed to catch BALLS here in New York City and had a blast, and also chatted with its creative leads last year, and as someone who grew up having to watch a lot of these off-Broadway parodies like the Starkid shows online because I was never going to be able to fly out to see them, my big question was whether or not BALLS was going to make its way online for people who couldn’t see the show in NYC. Thankfully, it’s finally here, and it’s delightful.
If you’re not sold on the idea of a Pokémon parody musical, one of the big draws of the show is that Stuart Zagnit, the original voice actor behind Professor Oak, plays a starring role in the show. He plays the Professor, an homage to the character that made him a mainstay in millennial children’s hearts. However, the “bootleg” version on YouTube, edited by the show’s director and co-writer Brandon Zelman, also stars original Ash Ketchum voice actor Veronica Taylor as the audience-participant “10-year-old kid” character. Though the interactive elements of the show are pretty singular any night the show is on, and as a result capturing that part of the show’s DNA is pretty much impossible through any kind of recording, Zelman tells Kotaku that the biggest challenge with putting out a digital version of the show on YouTube was trying to ensure it didn’t step on Big Pikachu’s toes.
“We definitely wanted to avoid mentioning any monster-catchin’ franchises by name,” he says. “It was really goddamn funny redacting all mention of [Pokémon], and very in the spirit of the show. It actually helped with the edit, allowing me to mix multiple performances together without worrying about the continuity. And with all the BLEEPS, you can play BALLS from home, and insert whatever names tickle you.”
While some of the “changes” in the online version were made to cover the show’s ass, Zelman also took the opportunity to give the show a little more pizazz, in hopes of giving the digital version of the show something people wouldn’t get in-person.
“We knew that some of the show’s magic is the interactivity and the magic that you can only feel inside a theater,” Zelman says. “We figured that this film version should deliver something that could never exist on a stage. So we jam-packed the bootleg with hundreds and hundreds of new animations, cartoons and special effects, all hand-drawn, sketched, rendered and doodled by hand. VHS artifacts and low-poly pixel monsters for that ‘90s nostalgia. I put visuals to the monster attacks and frame-by-frame rotoscopes of transmogrifications. It was… a lot of hard work. And it was deeply worth it.”
The version of the show you can watch on YouTube is spliced together from 10 performances and over a dozen hours of footage shot across six months, and while visual continuity errors would probably irritate the average director, Zelman felt it was actually fitting for BALLS’ chaotic nature.
“The bootleg features footage from every single performance of BALLS, all woven together into one contiguous tapestry. Continuity be damned—we took our favorite moments and Frankensteined them into this, so you are really witnessing our favorite version of BALLS.”
Zelman says that the ‘Frankensteined’ nature of the online version of BALLS came together largely because the off-Broadway show didn’t have the budget for a full production team, so rather than give up on the prospect entirely, the team “embraced the hurdle,” filming everything with the Caveat theater’s built-in camera system, as well as giving cameras to audience members so they could shoot footage to be incorporated into the bootleg.
“I wasn’t sure if that would even be usable, but it was actually the perfect way to capture the first-person feeling of being at the show,” he says. “As you can imagine, blending all those cameras, plus synchronizing and mixing a horrifying amount of audio has left myself and Kurt Cruz (who plays the Pocket Pedia character in the show, and is sound editor on the bootleg) as a broken pile of bones and dreams.”
Welcome to Exp. Share, Kotaku ’s Pokémon column in which we dive deep to explore notable characters, urban legends, communities, and just plain weird quirks from throughout the Pokémon franchise.
“It feels incredible to have this show finally accessible to the world,” Zelman says. “Our goal has always been to bring this to as many people as possible and this is a major step on that adventure. In my experience, people appreciate good work, made by real human people who have put their heart and soul into something. They appreciate when they can see effort and commitment to something. That’s why Stuart got on board as the Professor. That’s why Veronica hosted our NYCC panel and [Serena voice actor] Haven Burton dressed as an evil turtle and attacked fans with a water-gatling gun, while [Clemont voice actor] Mike Liscio donned a fish puppet and blasted bubbles everywhere.”
Getting the show out to everyone was one goal, but Zelman says there’s still more BALLS to come. The team plans to put out a live album in the new year, and says if anyone wants to give them “money and microphones,” they’d be open to a professional studio recording further down the line. For now, with the show finally accessible to people who don’t live in NYC, Zelman says the team plans to “keep the balls rolling.”