Yes, today marks the start of one of the biggest sporting events of the decade. Sadly, Ireland are not in it thank to Thierry Henry and his dirty tricks.
So it got me thinking about sport in cartoons and how it is represented. Since there are so many different types of cartoons and indeed countries from which they come, I figured there would be a wide variety to be had.
In cartoons, you can spot the opinion of the creator towards sport. For instance, Butch Hartman is known to have a disliking for jocks. Therefore, sport plays a mostly negative role in his cartoons. Similar opinions can be attributed to creators who I guess would be called geeks not much removed from myself (although I do play Gaelic football and love it).
Leaving out all the shows that don’t really feature sports, the ones that do are heavily influenced by their country of origin. For instance, American cartoons rely heavily on the likes of baseball (Peanuts) or American football (King of the Hill). Jacob Two Two, notable for being made based in Canada naturally has an episode centered around ice-hockey.
The same can be said for European cartoons. Those that do, use soccer as their main sport. Seeing as it is universally popular around the continent, this does not come as a surprise.
I guess the main exception to the rule is (surprise, surprise) Japan. Although sport can play a central part in some anime series (mainly through their school setting), there are plenty of quirky shows out there where the “sport” is all too often something completely different from what we would normally expect.
All that being said, cartoons that are centred around sport are not nearly as popular as you would expect. This is perhaps the result of design by committee.