Playground Spirits

Making a short about playground safety shouldn’t be difficult. Take turns on the slide and don’t throw rocks at the wiener kid who spends recess looking at things with a magnifying glass, that about covers it. AND YET!

Playground Spirits attempts to teach lessons by inventing a kind of metaphysical realm that frankly, is too complex to tackle in an eight-minute Encyclopedia Britannica short. The Grandmaster of the Park has assigned guardianship of the playground to several spirits. These spirits are grade school children who are dressed as the awful Ghost of Christmas Past from Muppet Christmas Carol. They have to deal with Axl, a rebellious spirit who lives in a hole in the ground and has a nasty habit of falling to his sha-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na knees.

Because of Axl, some boys show up to the playground and start roughhousing. It quickly escalates into horseplay, and the spirits have to intervene before it turns into all-out grab-ass. Axl watches all of this from his hole in the ground that the producers actually made a real-life boy climb into. It seems like it’d be a lot easier to just poorly animate a sentient swing set, but what the hell do we know, we’ve only riffed about two thousand of these things!

Written by: Mike Nelson and Conor Lastowka