Young Sheldon’s Minecraft Promo Campaign Proves the Character Isn’t Done With Us Yet

It seems that the Minecraft film has partnered with Young Sheldon in syndication on TBS, providing a “word of the day” during each airing of the show on weeknights. Winners can get money or tickets to see the film in theaters, with a grand prize of $5,000 being given out. It would be a pretty standard movie tie-in competition if it wasn’t so out of left field.

The real question is why this even exists. There is little to no connection between Young Sheldon and Minecraft, a fact made painfully obvious by the attempts to edit together this commercial. The entire thing seems to be desperately trying to combine two things that don’t want to fit together, especially the forced opening scene from Young Sheldon with Sheldon and his Meemaw (Annie Potts). In fact, the series takes place in the early ’90s, long before Minecraft even existed.

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The only thin string of connectivity one could pull from these two things is that Sheldon is a nerd who plays video games and Minecraft is, indeed, a video game. Even then the connection is so thin given Minecraft‘s ubiquity in culture that it’s hard to understand. Most likely, this is just some misguided attempt at corporate synergy as Minecraft, Young Sheldon, and TBS are all under Warner Bros. ownership in one way or another, with the film coming from WB Pictures, the series coming from WB Television, and TBS owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. Some marketing executive clearly saw an overlap in audiences and decided to strike while the iron was luke warm.

What then can we take from this bit of cross-promotional marketing? Well, to start, it’s probably not a great sign for the movie itself that it’s tying in with a canceled series that’s in syndication on cable. However, probably more key, is that Young Sheldon, and thus the character of Sheldon, is still, somehow, a thing that people care about. If that’s the case, it can’t be too long before we see CBS take a shot at yet another spin-off. Old Sheldon sound good to anyone?