Cleatus is now firmly a young adult.
The popular FOX Sports mascot celebrated its 20th birthday during the 2025 NFL season, marking two decades of Cleatus making an appearance on televisions across the nation on NFL Sundays. As the robot has become a mainstay in FOX’s NFL coverage, FOX Sports executive vice president & creative director Gary Hartley’s mission to create an iconic animation in Cleatus has been fulfilled.
But the process of creating Cleatus wasn’t easy. In a recent video for NFL Films, Hartley explained the difficulty of trying to create a unique animation package for the NFL on FOX to help make the network’s NFL coverage stand out from its competitors.
“Animation packages for sports are flipping logos. Everything we came up with, I felt like we had seen before,” Hartley said.
As Hartley struggled to find something to make FOX Sports’ NFL coverage unique, he stumbled upon something that his son, Andrew, had drawn, which drew inspiration for the creation of Cleatus.
“I was kind of rummaging around in the box of kid stuff. It was a drawing I had in my desk. My son drew it. I think he was 8 or 9,” Hartley said. “He definitely had a vision, and I have a sense of memory of him presenting it as, ‘Hey, you should do this.’ I didn’t really react to it until I had to in a moment of panic. It was like, yeah, we could do this. Let’s design a bot. That really played to me because other networks, they had an eyeball, they had a peacock, they had a thing, you know?”
The drawing helped give birth to Cleatus, but it didn’t bring the robot to life just yet.
“A lot of the impetus of Cleatus for me was, ‘Look, we’ll have a thing,'” Hartley said. “We had kind of a prototype, but the technology that was available to us at that time was beyond the reality of what an in-house graphics department could do. But we did them anyway, and they were not good.”
So, Hartley brought the idea of Cleatus over to Blur Studio in order to get the creation over the finish line. The studio had built a reputation for building strong visual effects in a handful of movies, and that inspired Hartley for the vision he had for Blur Studio to create Cleatus.
“The entire kind of production philosophy was heavily influenced by movies,” Hartley said. “The original theme was influenced by the ‘Batman’ movie that had come out. Even Cleatus came from trying to get ahead of Michael Bay with the first ‘Transformers.’ It’s kind of in the zeitgeist. Then, they worked with us to storyboard.”
Luckily for Hartley, he had found a studio that was ready to bring his vision to life.
“FOX wanted a big 3D extravaganza,” Blur Studio co-founder and director Tim Miller said. “It just so happens that one of the things CG did well, almost from the beginning, was robots. We did some really out there ones. I think in the design brief, we really knew what it needed to be.”
Miller and Harley were able to settle on what they wanted Cleatus to look like. From there, all they had to do was determine how they wanted the robot to move.
“We had our own motion capture studio,” Miller said. “It’s really fun to do stunt guys where you can hit them. So, we had a whole bunch of pads, and I was a big believer in hitting like a linebacker. You get these great animation impacts because they’re real and they occasionally get hurt. But that’s what was interesting about it.
“His personality was really derived from players — the way they moved, the way they warm up. You become the master of the hidden trick like pulling something and sliding under it because you don’t want it to be stiff. You want it to be kinetic.”
And with that, Cleatus was officially born. Hartley helped give it a personality over the years, too. On one occasion, Cleatus had pom-poms, like a cheerleader. During a FOX broadcast, Cleatus wore a hula skirt and did a hula dance. When FOX broadcast a Sunday slate of NFL games on New Year’s Day one year, Cleatus was hungover after celebrating New Year’s Eve.
Of course, Cleatus still can’t legally drink. But when Cleatus turns 21 next NFL season, we’ll make sure to raise a toast to the robot and those who helped create him.
