Monkey Tennis

Monkey Tennis was a scrapped animated series that was created by an unidentified client and co-created by Kevin Saunders and The Digital Arsonists in 1997, with characters that were designed by Jamie Hewlett. Gorillaz were the subject of a lawsuit filed by the co-creator Kevin Saunders and another anonymous unidentified client who was the main creator of the project.

Regardless of the lawsuit, Monkey Tennis was actually not even a band, but rather a multimedia franchise based mainly around a Television series and a ringtone service. Hewlett has had ideas for cartoon bands as far back as the early 1990s, with The Family Johnson Johnson predating even Monkey Tennis, being conceptualized by Hewlett in 1991, and another project called The Sour Grapes being conceptualized by Hewlett in 1995.

Background
In 2012, Kevin Saunders released pictures on his blog of a project that was created by him and a partner in 1997-1999. These pictures were revealed to be previously unseen drawings by Jamie Hewlett made for a multimedia project called Monkey Tennis. In an effort to find more information about the project, Gorillaz-Unofficial conducted an interview with Saunders in 2013 and asked him questions about the nature of the project. Kevin Saunders claimed that Gorillaz is based on a project that he and a client had created a long time ago with Jamie Hewlett, and that the client who came up with the idea sued Damon and Jamie after Gorillaz’ creation. The curator behind the project had allegedly met Hewlett and told him about the project he was working on in his and Damon's flat, with Damon allegedly being present at the meeting.

Monkey Tennis are the subject of an extensive article in the magazine The Face and the newspaper The Sunday Times. They are also briefly mentioned in an October 1999 issue of the magazine The Event. The magazine mention the Monkey Tennis project in an old article about Hewlett, saying “His latest venture is Monkey Tennis, a slightly perverse account of a teenage boy and his misfit friends. lt will be gracing our television screens later this year.”

Concept
Monkey Tennis was to be a multimedia project that would manifest itself through a TV show, ringtones, films, comic books, video games, web content, and music. The main characters of the Monkey Tennis franchise would have consisted of Base the Instigator, Hosebeast, Hutch, and Multi-Flyby. Music and ringtones from this project would have been released via Skint Records, and the animation was to be produced by Flick Films, with several web companies being interested in the project.

User 2-J of Gorillaz-Unofficial made a statement on the message boards saying that “The nature of the Monkey Tennis project, what it purported to be, is not completely clear. The images mention them appearing in "screens" and through platforms. From another source, I heard that it was just something that had to do with the personalization of ringtones or answering messages, very popular at that time”.

Trivia

 * This project was briefly referenced in Gorillaz’ autobiography Rise of The Ogre, where they were referred to by the nickname “The Doppelgangerz”, a band that sued Gorillaz and would inspire the concept behind the "Rock the House" music video.


 * The name Monkey Tennis is a reference to the first episode of "I am Alan Partride", As the titular character, Alan Partridge, has dinner with a BBC executive. Alan deperatley pitches show titles to the executive, one of them being "Monkey Tennis".