Cartoon Network Football
Eduviges Gearlds
The Big Game XXVI: Tom vs. Jerry was the first in a series of four Super Bowl spoofs that aired yearly on Cartoon Network from 1998-2001.[1] Although the special was numbered as being the twenty-sixth annual of its kind, this was only to give the illusion of it having been a longtime tradition like the event that inspired it.
There would be a "pre-game" marathon of cartoons featuring the characters being pitted against one another, interspersed with tongue-in-cheek studio coverage by Len Dawson, Nick Buoniconti, Cris Collinsworth, and Jerry Glanville.
The "games" themselves, held at Chuck Jones Stadium, consisted of cartoon clips with football sound effects and commentary by Pat Summerall and John Madden. There would even be an ersatz halftime show complete with fake commercials. Each Big Game's results would generally be what one would expect considering the track records of the characters involved (in the first one, Jerry was the winner). However, likely because the producers were conscious of how predictable each previous Big Game had been, the final special had a twist ending where Daffy won because Bugs failed to show up.
The last three Big Game specials (Sylvester vs. Tweety, Wile E. Coyote vs. Roadrunner, and Bugs vs. Daffy respectively) are all readily available on YouTube, but strangely, until 2021, the first one was nowhere to be found. Before being uploaded to YouTube, some clips could be seen in retrospectives during other Big Game.
The Big Game was an annual parody of the sports finals broadcasted by Cartoon Network (under the Cartoon Network Sports banner), which the network's cartoon characters were pitted against each other (using clips of the program where the characters came from, edited as a football game), being completed with live-action commentaries, fake commercials and a halftime show. It airs on each Saturday in January and it repeated on Super Bowl Sunday between 1998 and 2001.
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