Meet the announcers…Yogi and Riko. Or Rikoandyogi. They’ll accompany us through the upcoming madness.
Announcers are one of the great things about sportsball fiction in general. It’s hard to imagine a more natural way to provide exposition than a couple of guys that get paid for never shutting up and take pride in providing as massive a flood of information as possible, never mind the information’s intrinsic value or lack thereof. In any other genre, this would be almost disturbingly blatant exposition…in sportsball fiction, it’s just part of the natural flow of the thing.
Obviously, Yogi is inspired by Yogi Berra via Yogi Bear, while Riko is inspired by Riko Kumabukuro of Exeshield 21.
The fact that they aren’t two separate beings, but just two heads on one alien body, is inspired by…well, in this fictional universe there’s a filmmaker, named Luke Georgas. He’s the genius behind the War Stars franchise. And in that franchise’s third installment, The Menacing Phantom, he laid out this vision that even in a galaxy far, far away, the announcing for all of those alien sport events would follow the dichotomy of play-by-play announcer and color commentator pairs. And, being all alien and stuff, what would be more obvious than hiring a two-headed alien for that sort of stuff? Well, I could think of many things, but Luke Georgas couldn’t, and he had the money. Just one more moment in his career where he came up with something that left people wondering whether it was the result of a stroke of genius, or just a stroke. To this moment, I pay my humble respects.
More on Monday.