If you watched NBA Countdown on Sunday before the Thunder v Rockets game, you noticed recently retired Lakers great Kobe “Bean” Bryant on set. Bean debuted his latest post retirement venture ‘Canvas Street.’ ESPN’s Baxter Holmes wrote at length about Bean’s ambitious project.
This is a really interesting concept from Bean and yesterday’s initial installment was part Sesame Street, part Bean inner musing (pun intended). Bean drew influences from existing platforms and even talked to his daughters about how the conversations should go. Bryant said:
The key is to see the potential. When I go into ESPN and say, ‘Well, it’s a puppet and so forth,’ they kind of look at you like, ‘What?’ So when I went in and said, ‘I want 10 minutes,’ They were like, ‘Hold on now. That’s kind of crazy.’ I said, ‘Listen, I have to have these 10 minutes. Trust me.
The first thing I thought of was ‘Sesame Street,’ ‘Canvas Street.’ So I wrote a jingle for ‘Canvas Street.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa, no — street?’ It can be bigger: ‘Canvas City.’ We can have different parts of the world — the downtown portion represents something, this represents something. Then once that came to me, then it became very easy for me to start populating the world and the rules of it. The world-building part came pretty quickly once the idea set in.
Bean uses a puppet named ‘Little Mamba’ to make the basketball concepts he is attempting to get across more accessible. For Bean he draws from all elements of his basketball journey and life experience to tell a story of greatness, and how to achieve greatness.
Watching this video one can’t help but think this is so Kobe. Not in a negative way but in the most true to self version of Kobe as possible. This is a singularly focused, hyper competitive, savant, that only understands one thing. Success.
The first version of ‘Canvas Street’ debuted during the NBA’s Christmas broadcast and we saw part 2 “The Musecage” on Sunday. Part 2 focused on the various muses (both light and dark) that inspire us. No official word on the rest of the release but we anticipate seeing more in the playoffs.
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