If you know ball, odds are good you already know Old Ball. A wise-cracking, surprisingly emotive animatronic basketball, Old Ball has exploded across the NBA world through a variety of viral moments.
Created by Emmy-nominated Funny Or Die alums Ben Bayouth, Christian Heuer and Adam Aseraf, Old Ball has already exploded in the online basketball world. In February, Old Ball officially cemented his status as a bona fide rising basketball force when he held court at the 2026 All-Star Game in the LA Clippers’ home arena, Intuit Dome.
As of this writing, the animatronic boasts 438,000-plus followers on Instagram and over 251K followers on TikTok.
A Peek Behind the Ball
Bleacher Nation recently unpacked the origins, ascent, and planned future of Old Ball with Bayouth, Heuer and Aseraf. Together, the trio has formed a new collective, Benched Studios, to produce Old Ball’s adventures and other projects.
“First and foremost, we’re good friends. We’ve known each other for 10 years-plus, and have worked on a bunch of different stuff together throughout the years,” Heuer says. “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 super-power since I’ve met him, and I’ve always wanted to do some sort of animatronic puppet-in-the-real-world idea… We feel like there’s something familiar about a basketball. Rather than creating just an alien creature or something, we could actually insert this into a world that already exists.”
There’s one particular, very classic era to which Old Ball is intended to directly harken back: the late 1980s and ’90s. That terrain is, of course, much appreciated by the Bulls faithful.
“Old Ball has this feeling of late-’80s, ’90s. And I think it’s a throwback to these eras that we just have a lot of reverence for. There’s certain times in certain sports where it just felt like everything was clicking,” Aseraf suggests. “Basketball has it with that ’90s, late-’80s era of Jordan, [the] sunsetting of the Showtime era. We just wanted to encapsulate that… There’s something about that time that feels pulpy and vibrant that I think people enjoy. And so, Old Ball is kind of a reflection of that.”
Per the official Old Ball mythos, Old Ball hails from that period (although, in reality, he was created last year). In Old Ball lore, the character had been trapped in a shed for the last 30 years, until being “re-discovered” in 2025.
While some people who encounter Old Ball in the wild are turned off by his look or attitude, a certain 2014 Chicago Bulls Defensive Player of the Year center was entranced at Intuit Dome this year.
“But then you have Joakim Noah, who just was so taken by it. 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!'” Aseraf reveals.
Noah, who like Old Ball is an infamously big and playful personality, makes sense as a great on-air foil for the character. Hopefully they can interact for years to come.
Caylor Arnold-USA TODAY SportsCultivating a fully seamless puppet has been imperative to the creature’s success thus far, notes Bayouth — who constructed, operates and voices the character.
“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 on 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 notes. “And we wanted to make sure that they could just full-on hold it and look at it and it would talk no matter what.”
For such a small creation, Old Ball has a surprising depth of controlled movements. His eyebrows, eyelids, eyeballs, lips, and jaw are all articulated — and Bayouth recently gave Old Ball a grin for extra emotional flexibility.
Bayouth breaks down the high-wire act of performing the character in real-time for his viral sketches.
“It also takes a chunk of hours and time to understand how to not only perform the character with a remote control, but to be able to flex into those emotions really quickly on the fly without kind of getting lost,” Bayouth adds. “You really have to be tuned into, as I’m performing the character, the voice of the character — how the tone and the voice sound — 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 also credits Aseraf, who helps riff with Bayouth during Old Ball’s largely improved encounters, with possessing “a ridiculous encyclopedic wealth of NBA knowledge.”
“That’s why we’re like a double-headed kind of dragon sometimes when we go out [for Old Ball’s various taped conversations]” Aseraf explains. “Ben’s dealing with so much, that I’ll be just whispering in his ear — where things could go, where they can’t — but most of the time he jumps off the cliff and is hang-gliding on his own.”
So what’s next for Old Ball? Apparently, a talking basketball is just the beginning of Blended Studios’ plans for world domination…
“What we’ve really realized is this Old Ball, and what we’re calling the Ball-verse, is kind of this infinite creative well,” Heuer indicates. “We realized we want to try to make — this is going to sound grandiose but — our version of it, but the sports Muppets. We’ve 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 within the sport like Old Ball has been materializing with basketball.”
Which sport is next?
“We made a soccer ball that we want to put out pretty soon to start hyping up for the World Cup,” Heuer says. “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, we could have a prank movie on Netflix or whatever. Who knows where this could go? We’re just really excited.”
On Saturday, the Ball-verse was officially unveiled via Old Ball’s social media.
Bleacher Nation, as a devout cinephile, has advocated for an Old Ball movie. Benched Studios has a particular piece of Joe Dante-helmed, animatronic-heavy 1998 family cinema in mind as a point of reference.
“It would be nice to make a movie and to continue that ’90s nostalgia,” Beyouth posits. “Like a Small Soldiers-type movie: these fun, effects movies that are all-ages, four-quadrant film type-thing I think would be super, super fun to do, that helps fill in some of the gaps for people who are just wondering and want to know, ‘Where did he come from?'”
Screen it in IMAX and save us a ticket, please.
Old Ball Publicity Still Courtesy Anderson Group Public RelationsOld Ball Tells All
After chopping it up with the creative team behind him, Bleacher Nation also had the opportunity to sit down with the ball himself for a revealing conversation. Given our Chicago Bulls’ brutal current 11-game losing skid, talk naturally turned to the halcyon days of the NBA: the 1990s.
Bleacher Nation: Old Ball, what was your favorite moment of All-Star Weekend? Did you like the new All-Star game tournament format?
Old Ball: “Loved the new format. Ty Lue and Ballmer must have found the reboot button on Kawhi because that guy was automatic. My favorite moment was housing a bacon-wrapped hot dog outside Intuit Dome. My least favorite moment was discovering I am not built for street meat at 2 a.m.”
You’re not alone there. How did you feel about this year’s Slam Dunk Contest?
“Look, Gary Payton Sr. once told me there’s guys who dunk on people and guys who CREATE dunks. Gordon, LaVine, McClung – those are creators. I think we gotta get more creative with the dunks. Give me a Superman over a 7-footer. Give me a 360 windmill over a bonfire. Hang glide from the rafters and crater the Earth with your dunk supremacy.”
Would you have been comfortable being dunked? There were a lot of misses this year. It would probably not be ideal to have been Jase Richardson’s ball.
“Dunked? I watched the warmups and started updating my will. I need two pumps and a pep talk just to stay inflated.”
There’s been a lot of chatter recently that All-Star Weekend is washed and needs a change. What would you alter about the format?
“I actually liked the format this year. Felt like those guys were playing hard. I think it’s all about having that one dude that doesn’t want to lose. This year, it was Wemby. He set the tone. You got in the lane with the Frenchman, you were gettin’ smeared into Creme Brulé. “
I’ve read in other interviews that you had a shot at the pros in the ’90s, and subsequently were in a shed for three decades. What do you miss most about ’90s basketball? What do you miss most about the shed?
“How about the mid-range jump shot? How about a 130-point game being a rarity? But I digress, these cats today have game – you can’t hate on that. As far as the shed, I miss those cold winter nights where I had nothing to entertain me except a rogue cob web the wind blew onto my face that wouldn’t fall off for months. Oh wait, I don’t miss that at all. Nah, dude. My shed days are over.”
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