Pablo Sanchez and the Backyard Kids have many more adventures in their future.

Playground Productions, which has been reviving the beloved video game franchise since acquiring the rights a few years ago, will develop 20, 11-minute episodes of Backyard Sports: The Animated Series, the team revealed at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday.

And, they’ve got an all-star cast returning after lending their voices to January’s special animated short that adapted the beloved video game series for the first time.

The series is based on Backyard Baseball — the full-scale revamp of the beloved 2D arcade-style classic that has captivated kids and adults since 1997. The newly rebooted game launched on July 9 for Steam for Mac and PC, with Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation versions arriving soon.

The voice cast includes Tiffany Haddish as Kiesha Phillips, Donald Faison as Dante Robinson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Dmitri Petrovich, Arturo Castro as Pablo Sanchez, Uktarsh Ambudkar as Achmed Khan, Deborah Baker Jr. as Kimmy Eckman, Michael Vlamis as Tony Delvecchio, Ashleigh Crystal Hairston as Sunny Day, Will Neff as Mr. Clanky, Vincent Tong as Kenny Kawaguchi, Joey Rudman as Marky Dubois, and Playground’s CEO Lindsay Barnett as Vinnie.

Playground Productions Chief Product Office Chris Waters will serve as showrunner, who executive produced the special earlier this year with Barnett — a former teacher who went in search of the rights to the video game franchise after struggling to find video games that would appeal to her young students. 

Earlier this year, Playground Productions released a short animated special episode titled “Sticky Situation, which brought the beloved franchise back to life with new content for the first time in well over a decade. In it, the iconic Backyard kids must help team superstar Stephanie ‘Bubbles’ Morgan find her lucky bubble gum with just 30 minutes to game time.

It premiered on YouTube before heading to Prime Video in March. No word yet on where these new episodes will live. The franchise is being revived independent from any major studios.

Juston Gordon-Montgomery serves as Supervising Director, Adam Aseraf and Sarah Nevada Smith will serve as Head Writers and Co-EPs. Waters and Barnett will produce alongside Ari Pinchot and Stuart Avi Savitsky with animation services by Lighthouse Studios.

“I am beyond thrilled to announce our series today,” Barnett said in a statement. “The Backyard Sports characters have inspired imaginations for generations, and their stories have always felt bigger than the game itself. As Backyard Baseball expands with the new game on Steam and soon consoles, bringing these characters into new forms of storytelling feels like a natural extension of the Backyard universe.”

Playground Productions also teases there’s more to come from Backyard Sports. The company also teased a “Backyardiverse” is in the works to create “a connected world where sports, storytelling, and culture all come together.”

Following Saudi Arabia’s controversial debut comedy festival last year, Weird Al Yankovic is discussing his decision not to join the star-studded lineup.

The 5x Grammy-winning parody musician recently revealed that he turned down “seven figures” to perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, explaining it would have made him “feel icky” to accept Saudi money for his comedic services.

“I was invited to the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which is something that I obviously did not want to do,” he told Pennsylvania’s Tribune-Review. “They offered me, I’m not going to say how much, but it was seven figures to do one show, which is way more than I’ve ever been offered in my life to do a show.”

Yankovic continued, “But I just couldn’t be part of that. I’m not dissing anybody that took the money because I’m sure everybody that went there got a lot of money. I’m sure they had their own reasons and justifications for doing it. But I’m doing enough that I don’t need to take any amount of money if it makes me feel icky, and that kind of did.”

After revealing he turned down a “nice pile of money” to appear in an AI ad, Yankovic quipped, “I wish people would offer me things that I didn’t feel bad about accepting.”

Other comedians have previously called out their peers who agreed to perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which ran Sept. 26 to Oct. 9, noting Saudi officials’ roles in 9/11 and the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as well as the human rights abuses committed by Saudi minister of entertainment, Turki Al-Sheikh, who is behind the festival.

Deadline exclusively announced the initial Riyadh Comedy Festival lineup last July, which ultimately included Kevin Hart, Louis C.K., Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Pete Davidson, Hannibal Buress, Jack Whitehall, Zarna Garg, Gabriel Iglesias, Jim Jefferies, Jo Koy, Bobby Lee, Jeff Ross, Andrew Santino, Tom Segura, Chris Tucker and more.

Film crews on Hollywood and local productions shooting in Ontario are being urged to mask up as fast-moving wildfires sweep across the province’s far north and southwest, blanketing southern Ontario — and at times the U.S. Eastern Seaboard — in thick smoke.

So far, however, the provincial film sector has largely weathered what is shaping up to be Ontario’s worst-ever summer wildfire season.

Production hubs in northern Ontario cities like Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay are feeling the effects most acutely, with film crews sharing hotels with evacuees from neighboring communities. A massive blaze covering some 3,200 square kilometers (1,235 square miles) north of Thunder Bay in Wabakimi Provincial Park has been of particular concern for firefighters. As of Wednesday, around 146 wildfires remained active across the province.

“While Thunder Bay has been affected by the wildfires in several ways, the active fires remain approximately 150 to 250 kilometers from the city and at the moment we aren’t in danger of being evacuated,” a spokesperson for Thunder Bay, which is a two hour flight from Toronto, told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement.

Unlike the 2025 wildfires in and around Los Angeles that directly impacted Hollywood movie and TV production, the forest fires in Ontario and the ongoing devastation is mostly contained in sparsely-populated northern and southwestern regions of the province. That’s left fire crews to tamp down or attempt to put out destructive wildfires that have destroyed some communities in the province and led to the evacuation of others.

Even so, the distant spread of wildfire smoke has the province urging film crews to limit outdoor filming when air quality is poor. In addition, the Transport Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources departments have asked film and TV productions not to use drones during filmmaking as they may interfere with firefighting aircraft, including water bombers and helicopters.

In Sudbury, which is only an hour flight from Toronto, city officials tell THR forest fires have not impacted filming in the region, and local shoots are under no specific forest fire-related restrictions when cameras roll in the city.  

At the same time, the city adds in a statement sent to THR: “Typically, safety-related decisions of this nature are left to the discretion of the production team. We would recommend that they follow applicable public health guidance regarding air quality.”

Local soundstage and location shooting in Ontario by the major studios and streamers in recent years has become a major business for the province. So no cancellations or major disruption evident from the current spate of wildfires in the province has eased concerns over the long-term recovery of the Ontario production sector after major disruptions from the pandemic and the 2023 Hollywood strikes.