A game-ops preview with Danny Zollars

With a diverse and comprehensive game presentation that includes intricately designed hype videos (see: Black Parade, Dream On), jabs at division rivals (see: Eric Cartman) and comedic interludes during timeouts (see: Mean Tweets), the Kings, under Vice President, Game Presentation and Events Danny Zollars, have both pushed the envelope and have pulled their fans along by serving as the accompaniment to several exhilarating trips through the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

There are also some segments that haven’t worked as well – the “We are United” intro song, though created organically by Kings fans, wasn’t received well and was among the elements that ended up scrapped.

It’s a process of finding what works, and striding in that direction, as Zollars said.

“I think we have a good sense of what our fans like and what we want, so we’ve kind of kept the same feel. We’re going to have a lot more humor in it [this season], we’re going to bring a lot more social media into it, whether it’s showing more Instagram pictures, peoples’ tweets, that kind of stuff. We’re going to focus on those elements. We are going to continue to have some good humor with our players.

And that includes Drawing with Drew, which will serve as several of the roughly 80 new videos produced this season. Drawing with Drew will air, like Mean Tweets and This or That, during television timeouts.

“It’s Drew [Doughty] drawing pictures of things that we gave him the topic of, and Trevor Lewis trying to guess what they are. Other than that, we kind of stick to the same stuff. We have some of the key sponsors coming back with Dance Cams, and Kiss Cam will make a return this year into its regular slot. We’re going to update our opening videos all the time. We have new graphics, new headshots, new loops, all that fun stuff, and we’re just going to keep cruising.”

There will be five hype videos for the upcoming year: one that runs on opening night, one that debuts on October 9 and runs until Thanksgiving, a Holiday-themed video that will run until the New Year, and two videos spread over chunks of the 2016 portion of the schedule.

Interestingly, Zollars says that the influence on the team’s game presentation comes, in part, from late night television. “Mean Tweets” is a Jimmy Kimmel creation.

“We like to compare ourselves, we say, to the late night shows – the Jimmy Fallons, the Jimmy Kimmels, watch what happens live with Andy Cohen – they’re the best at game-ops, as opposed to comparing ourselves to other teams, because we know what we can do in-arena,” Zollars said. “We have an experienced staff. But finding those new, cutting edge things are what we’re seeing more on the late night shows.”

Earlier this week, I spoke with Zollars about the evolution of the club’s game presentation.

LA KINGS INSIDER: What guiding principles do you have as they relate to this being a Los Angeles team in a nice building that has won Stanley Cups in terms of the game operations?
DANNY ZOLLARS: I think we’ve gotten away a little bit from teasing the other teams, especially the other players. The South Park skits are going to come back, and Cartman, and all that. There’s a Cartman bobblehead coming out later this year, so you know there’s that demand for it. I think we’ll tease them through that aspect of it, and maybe be a little classier, I think you could say, and just kind of being above all that. Of course, we’re going to throw jabs where we can throw jabs that are lay-ups, but looking at other teams that are the classic teams in the league – the Torontos and the Bostons and the Rangers – they don’t necessarily do that as much, and that’s kind of how we carry ourselves as well. I think we focus more on the humor and the fun part of it, and just getting people up and doing different things.

LAKI: Do the players ever say what they like, what they don’t want, or to they not care? Do they just control the music for warm-ups?
DZ: The majority of the guys don’t care. Some guys just don’t like seeing themselves on the board. Even Luc will admit he didn’t like being on the videoboard while he was playing. With Quick, he’s the goalie, and he’s kind of the leader out there on those nights when he’s in goal, so he doesn’t want to see videos of himself while he’s playing. It’s distracting, and we completely understand. He’s great about doing the videos and having it so we have it in the can, and all the players are great. This year, a couple of the veteran guys said to our Kings Vision group that this was the most fun they’ve had shooting the different videos that we have, and we think we have a really good arsenal of player-funny-videos to run digitally and in-game all season long.

LAKI: Who comes to you for the songs that they want for the warm-ups, or do you pick the songs for the warm-ups?
DZ: The player warm-up mix started with Dustin Penner. He had a buddy Ryan who was a DJ, so Dustin asked if he could provide the music for the warm-ups. He has a DJ friend who’ll make the mixes for us and just send them to us. It doesn’t cost anything, and all the players liked it. So those seasons with him, Ryan would give us a new mix every six-to-eight weeks throughout the season, and he’d update them. He was just using the new stuff, EDM stuff, techno – whatever you want to call it. So then Dustin was no longer with our team, which lost access to Ryan, and so we just had our DJ Vick One – he had been to all the games, and he knew what we were looking for – it’s like we want this kind of sound, so starting last year, we had all of our own and had like five different ones throughout the season. When Vic is there – he’s only there about 20 games – he does it live, and if not, he’ll give a mix to Dieter, and we’ll play it that way.

LAKI: Will Jay Flats and Carrlyn have similar responsibilities this year?
DZ: Yeah, Jay and Carrlyn, similar positions. I think they have a good dynamic, they have a good chemistry, they’ll be back. Carrlyn’s continuing to improve, and Jay’s probably the best in the league as far as in-arena hosts from what we’ve seen, and the combination of them are far and away better than any I’ve seen, I think. … They’re just professionals. Jay is a professional warm-up guy mic host, and Carrlyn went from being on the ice crew and saying she wanted to do this, and us just kind of sprinkling her in here and there, and she’s just really taken it seriously and is super passionate about it and has improved dramatically over the last 12-18 months, so we’re excited for both of them and the season.

LAKI: Has Dieter Ruehle approached you with anything that he might be adding to his repertoire on organ, or is that a surprise at this point?
DZ: Not really. I mean, Dieter always has his pulse on what the crowd wants and what they need, and we’ll play a lot of the songs that you guys have always heard and everyone’s always heard. I’m sure he’ll stay up with what’s coming out and what’s new, that kind of thing. Music, we play a hundred-something songs a night. Nine-thousand people hate the one song, nine-thousand people love it. Five-thousand hate it, ten-thousand love it. It just depends on the song. We can never win with music, so we just kind of play what we think is best and [listen] to the feedback, and I think we have a pretty good gauge on it.

LAKI: How does a hype video or in-game video get produced? How does it get put together, and what’s the process of it getting OK’d?
DZ: We ended the season last year in a way that we didn’t want to end it. We thought coming off a Stanley Cup win and then not making the playoffs is a pretty big deal. We were able to run Black Parade at the last game of the season. We had it ready for playoffs. We were going to use that for overtime, and we started thinking about that in March. It was done, and it was ready for the playoffs because we needed to be ready that weekend. We had it, and we decided to play it [at the final game]. That one was quick, and kind of done, and the last hurrah of Black Parade, probably. With the one that we have for opening night this year, it ended, and I’m always just thinking of opening videos, and there’s always another opening video coming, so finding a song and what fits that. The song that we came up with that you’ll see on Wednesday night is perfect for the situation that we had where we failed, essentially, and didn’t make the playoffs. But we’ve turned it around, and the guys have been committed all summer, and they’ve gotten back, so what happened was we picked the song, and then we made a cut of it into that two-minute range, and we’ll see how it feels with the editors. Our own in-house editors – Jeff Lewis, Rob McPherson, these guys – and then from there, we say, ‘OK, here’s the cut of the song. Did we like it?’ We pass it around to Luc and to PR and to Cheese (Kelly Cheeseman) and all those guys, and everyone kind of gets the buy-in. ‘Yeah, we love, this is the song we want to go with.’ So now we’ve got the song, and we’ve got to come up with a concept. When I think about the song, this song in particular I picked, and this you can do this, so then we scheduled some shoots with the players to follow them as they worked out across the summer, so we have a lot of that footage in there as well, and then it’s just kind of putting it together. We went through five versions before we came to the final one which is pretty good. The first one was really rough, the second one we kind of added some sparkle to it, and … the way I kind of do it and like to do it is pick the song first and then work around it from there.