SPACE JAM 1996
43%
Directed by Joe Pytka
Written by Leo Benvenuti, Steve Rudnick, Timothy Harris, Herschel Weingrod
Starring Michael Jordan, Wayne Knight, Theresa Randle, Bill Murray, Charles Barkley
Synopsis
This part-animated, part-live-action film sees the Looney Tunes recruiting Michael Jordan to help them win an intergalactic basketball match that will save them from enslavement on an alien planet. Bill Murray, for some reason, is along for the ride.
Why We Love It
Space Jam has lived the life of a film much older than its tender twenty-three years. It was a corporate union between the NBA and Warner Bros. that became a blockbuster that become a beloved VHS favorite and eventual cult classic—a nonsensical little slice of pure nineties for the kids who grew up on Acme antics and at one time or another just wanted to “be like Mike.” When those ’90s children became 2000s grown-ups, Space Jam went through its academic reassessment phase—some have called it a masterpiece, a crowd-pleasing yet subversive melding of genres, while the guys at Honest Trailers have quipped it is “the Citizen Kane of live-action-animated hybrid basketball movies.”
We are now somewhere in the backlash phase, where headlines like “Millennials are wrong: Space Jam is bad” and “Nostalgia Has Tricked Us Into Thinking Space Jam Wasn’t a Cynical Money Grab” are common. But with respect to the AV Club and HuffPost, which respectively published those two bubble-bursters, we’d like to kick off the backlash to the backlash, and we think we have a slam-dunk case.
First, all major family-targeted, animated, or partly animated movies are designed to sell toys and live for eternity on the home entertainment market. It’s about the money, not the art, even for Disney and those heart-breakers at Pixar. Warner Bros. tapping into our mid-nineties obsession with the NBA to make its moolah was cynical, yes, but it was undeniably smart. It was also indicative of why Space Jam is such a joy: the movie gives the audience exactly what it wants. That includes a surprisingly charming Michael Jordan bouncing and shooting and dunking a lot; a bunch of sassy Bugs Bunny one-liners (the inside jokes about royalties and Disney do fall a bit flat); and a blowout finale in which monsters do some seriously hokey on-court battling with Jordan and our Looney Tunes heroes. As a bonus, we get a multi-platinum soundtrack that features Seal, Monica, Coolio, and Salt-N-Pepa.
The movie also smartly refuses to give us the stuff we didn’t ask for: things like a compelling story arc or rounded characters or any of the parent-pleasing cleverness that would invade kids’ flicks in the 2000s. Its critics may ding it for lacking some of these elements, but the film’s simple fan-focused pleasures are why we’re still talking about it decades later. It spoke directly to the kids, and those kids haven’t forgotten it.
A LeBron James sequel is apparently in the works, with Black Panther director Ryan Coogler producing. Cynical cash-grab? You betcha. Will we be there opening night? Absolutely—sporting our finest new Air Jordans.