A Life Through Film #039: Space Jam

Everybody get up, it's time to reflect now

Release Date: 11/15/1996

Weeks at Number One: 1

Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!

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How do you define a 90s kid?

I first became aware of this term in the glory (?) days of Facebook around the turn of the 2010s, but was never clear on it. Its purpose, obviously, was millennial nostalgia, but it was unintentionally an indicator of the mini-generation gaps that permeate that larger group.

Does it refer to people who remember the 90s and its pop culture touchpoints? Or does one simply have to have been born in that decade to be considered part of the group? I was born smackdab in the middle of the 90s, but I barely remember it. Am I a 90s kid?

Is a 90s kid someone who can appreciate the difference between now and then with firsthand knowledge? Or should it apply to everyone from that final group of the 20th century, even if they don’t remember any moments from before the new Millennium and have to use hindsight to color their nostalgia?

A big part of this column so far has been grasping the differences between the 1990s and the 2020s through the older decade’s big movies. But one thing I’ve run into a few times now is that some movies would have been big hits regardless of when they were released.

If the concept is sound and well executed, the success of a movie tells you less about the time it was released and more about its universal appeal. Look at the continued success of the Mission: Impossible franchise nearly 30 years since it first hit theaters.

This week’s movie, more than any I’ve covered so far, is a perfect time capsule of 1990s pop culture. The humor, the celebrities, the technology, the music, and the fashion all come together blast directly at the nostalgia centers of 90s kids of any definition. It only could have worked in 1996. It’s so locked to the ‘90s that as time goes on, this film will lose its potency as fewer and fewer people recognize its cultural touchpoints. We final arrivals to the 20th century need to keep the torch burning for it, lest it be forgotten forever.

Come on and slam. Let’s talk about Space Jam.

Do I need to describe what Space Jam is to you? The animated/live-action sports comedy wasn’t the biggest release of 1996 in terms of box office and it certainly isn’t the most critically beloved movie of the year either. And yet it’s lived on as both a millennial touchpoint and merchandising juggernaut.

NBA star Michael Jordan teaming up with Looney Tunes characters to defeat aliens in a game of basketball is a story so many in my generation just accepted without pause, but the concept is legitimately batshit. What’s even more batshit is that it worked. Space Jam is held in high regard by so many, most of whom probably haven’t watched in two decades or more.

How did we end up with this? The alliance of a cartoon IP with decades of history and a generational basketball player/brand spokesman appropriately all began with a Super Bowl commercial.

In 1992, Nike aired the “Hare Jordan” ad during the big game, and it set the groundwork for its eventual film adaptation nicely. MJ and Bugs Bunny play basketball against some goons, winning through both sheer domination on the court and the use of classic Looney Tunes gags like dropping anvils on heads and Bugs dressing up like a lady.

The ad was a major success, which to me just seems like confirmation that people in the early ‘90s liked Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes. The marketing geniuses in Hollywood, however, realized that what it actually meant was that those two great tastes could make a lot of money when tasted together.

Space Jam, more than any other movie I may have ever seen, is a marketing tool first and a piece of creative artistry second. David Falk, Jordan’s personal attorney, approached Warner Bros. and convinced the studio that a feature film that combined MJ with the Looney Tunes would benefit everyone involved. Jordan would play himself as the studio stretched out that original Nike commercial to about 90 minutes. The basketball star would continue to elevate and diversify his brand, while the legacy cartoon franchise could see a boost in relevancy and popularity.

But did Looney Tunes really need Space Jam? Every quote given by people close to Jordan indicates that the animated brand needed a serious popularity boost by ‘96, but that’s just straight up not true. The classic shorts starring Bugs, Daffy, and the rest of the crew had been constantly in syndication on television since the 1950s, meaning multiple generations of kids had grown up with at least some familiarity with the characters.

The ‘90s had even seen a whole wave of new cartoon shows based on the franchise. Taz-mania (starring the Tasmanian Devil) and spin-off Tiny Toon Adventures had only recently finished airing after years of production by the time Space Jam came out, but were multi-season successes.

90s kids by any definition weren’t going to be learning about Bugs and company because they were standing next to Michael Jordan in a new movie. If anything, it was the basketball star who needed an image shakeup at the time.

I’m writing this assuming you know who Michael Jordan is. By the time Space Jam entered production in the summer of 1995, the basketball great had already had both career highs and questionable marks against his public perception. His Chicago Bulls had managed the Championship threepeat by 1993, and the US Olympic “Dream Team” that he was a prominent part of was already etched into the record books as the greatest collection of players ever assembled.

But around the same time that Jordan’s famous problem with gambling became more well known in 1993, his father, James Jordan, was murdered in a seemingly random carjacking in North Carolina. The timing of the two events was suspicious enough that rumors of the elder Jordan’s death being connected to his son’s gambling debts remain whispered to this day.

Two months after the death of his father, Michael Jordan announced his retirement from professional basketball. The now-former Bull would pursue a childhood baseball dream, leading to an unremarkable season with MLB minor league team the Birmingham Barons. Jordan returned to the Chicago Bulls in time for the start of the 1994-1995 season, but a failure to recapture the NBA Championship that season put doubts on whether His Airness still had it.

It was this version of Michael Jordan, still mourning the violent loss of his father and unsure if he was still the greatest basketball player alive, that showed up for principal photography on Space Jam.

Warner Bros. constructed a private basketball court and gym near the set so Jordan could continue to train for the start of the next season. They also hired Joe Pytka to direct. Pytka was mostly a commercial and music video guy who had been behind the original “Hare Jordan” ad, and he had worked with MJ on a number of other campaigns as well. Anything to make Michael more comfortable.

The script for the movie is credited to two different screenwriting duos: Leo Benvenuti & Steve Rudnick were mostly TV comedy writers from the ‘80s but had recently penned 1995’s Christmas hit The Santa Clause (Rudnick is also the uncredited screenwriter on The First Wives Club), while Timothy Harris & Herschel Weingrod were more familiar with writing features, having low-brow yet highly successful comedies Twins and Kindergarten Cop under their belts.¹ The director of those two movies, Ivan Reitman, was brought onto the Space Jam team as both producer and creative guidance.

Realistically, this choice was probably based on him making Ghostbusters [4.5/5], but I like the idea of him being trusted to guide Michael Jordan’s pivot to comedy after his success guiding Schwarzenegger’s.

The actual story of Space Jam is based on filling the gap between Jordan’s stints in the NBA. James Jordan appears in a flashback and his death is alluded to, though the violence of his passing is totally stripped away. MJ’s attempt at playing professional baseball is seen as a laughable lark, something equally as ridiculous as him needing to team up with the Looney Tunes to defeat a gang of aliens in a game of basketball. This story only works if you’re immediately familiar with the Michael Jordan timeline. Thankfully, in the mid 90s that described basically everyone on Earth.

The script and its fusion of live-action and animation necessitated an entirely new means of making movies that was frankly ahead of its time. Jordan would be filmed in an entirely green-screened set while actors in green morph suits would take up space around him so that he could look at someone when pretending to trade lines back and forth with Looney Tunes characters. Those characters would be drawn in the traditional hand drawn style with their designs and shading updated for the edgier 1990s, while backgrounds and non-character elements would be modeled using cutting edge computer graphics.

Shooting on a green screen set with only one or two actual actors has ultimately become how many big budget franchise features are shot, but in 1996 this was a wholly unique filmmaking strategy. Disney had made Who Framed Roger Rabbit [3/5], which fused hand drawn animation with live-action filmmaking, in 1988, but that had been done by drawing its animated characters over top of the real actors and sets.² Space Jam would be compositing together live-action, 2D animation, and computer graphics, which no one had ever done before.

The principal photography was done in only 6 weeks, during which time Jordan grew to hate making the movie. Acting against nobody is hard even for seasoned thespians, which MJ certainly wasn’t. Even though he was just playing himself, that’s already hard before you have to imagine the existence of the bulk of your co-stars.

On top of that, Warner Bros. executives kept interrupting filming by bringing in crowds of dignitaries and special guests, all of whom wanted the chance to shake Jordan’s hand. Halfway through filming, director and star both needed a private vent session.

“I thought you said this would be fucking fun,” Jordan said to Pytka.

Pytka, who had tried to get the studio to agree to a script punch-up from his friend Spike Lee, could only sigh and tell his leading man that it should have been.

The non-fun didn’t stop there. Once shooting wrapped up, the footage was shipped off to the new Warner Bros. Feature Animation team. Though the goal had been to make the movie entirely within the studio, Space Jam was due in a year, and that release date was not going to change. This was also Warner Bros. first animated attempt at competing with Renaissance-era Disney, so they couldn’t half-ass it. Space Jam would be a global effort.

Cartoon Brew has a great extended oral history focused on Space Jam’s animation that’s definitely worth a full read, but the gist of it is that some extremely talented artists and animators were given less than a year to create an entirely new kind of movie. 18 animation studios all around the world were contracted to help animate the 2D and 3D elements of the film. Coordination required expert organization and rapid, precise communication, of which Space Jam had neither. Team members were brought on, promoted, and fired in chaotic attempts to get a project that began life behind schedule back on track. There was no email to help expedite design choices, meaning inter-team questions had to be express mailed across the ocean.

The existence of this silly Looney Tunes basketball movie is, frankly, a miracle.

Those teams around the world pulled it off, and the film was released on time, a few months after Jordan and the Bulls managed to win another NBA title. The one-two punch of victory both on the court and at the box office fully rehabbed MJ’s public image.

Here’s the million dollar question though, as well as its twenty buck follow up inquiry.

Is Space Jam good?

Not really.

Is it fun?

Incredibly so.

Against all odds, Michael Jordan’s acting performance is far from the worst thing about Space Jam. Honestly, he isn’t bad, especially when he has actual human beings to play off of. His blank reactions to Looney Tunes antics, for which the camera always zooms in on him way too much, are always a bit awkward. But for what the script asks him to do, he’s mostly fine.

Wayne Knight, best known as Newman from Seinfeld, plays Stan, a goofy PR assistant to Jordan who’s one of the few fictional live action characters in the movie. Knight was the last comedian the studio wanted to pick for the role, but everyone else that Reitman had wanted (Chevy Chase and Michael J. Fox, namely) had turned the role down. I get that this is a thankless, slapstick role, but Knight kills it.

Stan is wonderstruck by his proximity to both MJ and the Looney Tunes but is hapless enough to be totally ignorant to how little they want him around. It’s an unselfish role that those bigger actors probably couldn’t have fully committed to like Knight does. It’s easily the best performance in the movie, and surprisingly memorable, given everything else about the movie.

When I asked my brother, a basketball mega fan, what he remembers most about Space Jam, evidently a throwaway joke from Knight about fixing a divot on a golf course has been stuck in his head for nearly 30 years now.

Mel Blanc, the voice acting legend behind many of the original Looney Tunes (including Bugs Bunny), passed away in 1989 at the age of 81, so Warner Bros. had to find new voice talent to fill his shoes. Rather than casting celebrities who may not have the vocal range required to perform multiple roles, the producers wisely opted to find dedicated voice actors to bring the characters to life.

These career voiceover artists aren’t super recognizable by name, but those in the know would recognize their talents anywhere. For example, Billy West took over as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, years before he voiced Fry on Futurama. This was also an early role for Dee Bradley Baker, who voiced Daffy Duck and the Tasmanian Devil; he’d later voice literally hundreds of characters in cartoons like Dexter’s Laboratory, Teen Titans, Spongebob SquarePants, and dozens of other shows and movies.

All the dedicated voice talent do great work, adding to the best part of Space Jam. I’ve loved the Looney Tunes since I was a kid watching syndicated reruns of their classic shorts, and these slight re-imaginings of the characters are great renditions of them. Their designs and coloring feel more cinematic than their original, simpler looks, and the 2D animation is both smooth and funny. By design, Bugs, Daffy, and the rest of the Tunes are playing the hits as a way to introduce themselves to a new generation of kids (and appeal to the nostalgia of their parents), but the animators do an incredible job executing on the comedy aspect of the visuals, especially given the quick turnaround time.

The new characters all fit with this design as well. The villainous Monstars (INCREDIBLE name) look suitably menacing. They remind me a bit of big, beefy comic book characters of the time. Their scene of transformation from diminutive extraterrestrials to giant basketball fiends after stealing the hooping ability of stars like Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing (all appearing as themselves in a few funny moments) looks awesome, reminiscent of the best moments from childhood action shows like Transformers or Power Rangers.

The Monstars look great but have next to no personality, a pair of traits that carries over to the more famous of the new Looney Tunes introduced in Space Jam. Lola Bunny was created solely to give Bugs Bunny, formerly a cross-dressing asexual icon, a romantic interest. Well, that and to get the adult audience horned up. The official production notes on the famously still-extant original Space Jam website straight up call her “gorgeous” and “curvaceous,” design notes highlighted by the animation. Which, you know, is weird, considering she’s a cartoon rabbit in a movie for children.

Unlike the existing Looney Tunes characters in Space Jam, Lola has basically no personality except “girl,” just one result of the movie’s atrocious script.

Not to blow your mind here, but the writing for Space Jam is frankly awful. Most of the comedic dialogue for the animated characters is fine, but the actual plotting and narrative elements leave a lot to be desired. The writers clearly had low expectations for Jordan’s acting ability, so he’s never given anything to even graze his teeth against, let alone sink them into.

The most famous athlete in the world doesn’t drive any part of the story for fear of having to actually develop his own character. There’s a scene early on where MJ’s up to bat during a baseball game and the opposing catcher, a fan of his, starts feeding him pitch info. Jordan doesn’t push back against this literal game fixing out of a sense of personal integrity. Instead he shrugs and still strikes out because, he jokes, he couldn’t help but swing.

Beyond his real-life choice to switch sports to baseball, there’s no point where Jordan dictates the plot through his decisions. All the other characters make those decisions for him; MJ’s just coasting through and doing what other people need of him.

The result is a protagonist so passive that it’s unclear why he even agrees to help the Looney Tunes, beyond the value of corporate synergy.

Not to be the jackass who ponders the narrative roads not taken in Space Jam, but the movie’s plot felt particularly thin to me. It felt like major subplots that should have been there just…weren’t.

For example, why was there no theme of fatherhood in this movie? Space Jam starts with a flashback of James Jordan and mini MJ talking about sports dreams under the night sky. We later see Michael and his own son both struggling with baseball, but after a brief conversation, the motif is totally dropped. MJ’s son is barely in the rest of the movie, while his late father is never mentioned again.

What if Michael and James had bonded over the Looney Tunes when the younger Jordan was just a boy, making his willingness to help them tied to the memories of his late father? What if Michael’s son had been a more active part of the story, creating a bond between him and his dad that maybe was hard to forge while MJ was an NBA star? What if Michael had struggled with basketball as a way to honor his father since James Jordan had always been more of a baseball fan?

Answering any of these questions would have required Michael Jordan to be a more emotive actor willing to plunge the depths of a still very recent, very real tragedy, so it was never going to happen. But you can feel the empty gaps in the story of Space Jam that a more fully formed script would have filled. The screenplay isn’t the only thing that suffered from limited resources though.

One of the big recurring motifs I’ve noticed about movies from the mid ‘90s is an enthusiasm for computer graphics that outsized the then-current capabilities of the tech. Studios were eager to incorporate ambitious CGI effects into their movies because audiences were eager to see them. Unfortunately, a lot of this early CG doesn’t hold up on rewatch, and Space Jam is a major offender on that front.

Your mileage may vary on how much this will affect your enjoyment of the movie (it may even add to the nostalgia factor), but the CG elements here are ugly ugly ugly. 3D backgrounds like the Looney Tunes gym, non-character elements like the Monstars’ ship, even simple objects like the basketball that every non-MJ character needs to be given all look terrible.

And Space Jam is just so proud of it all, too. The animators shoved so much CGI into this thing, despite the time crunch. There’s an extended gag where Jordan gets turned into a basketball that may be the worst computer effect I’ve ever seen in a movie. I see something like that and try to put myself back in the mindset of when I was a kid watching Space Jam, but the ugliness of the effects keep me from it.

I can’t be too upset, knowing the movie’s production history. One calendar year is an insanely compressed timeline for all the animation and compositing required for a movie like this, and the fact that Space Jam exists at all is a technical miracle. A technical miracle that frequently looks awful, but still.

I know I’m griping a lot here, but I just want to add one more disappointment, albeit a small one. Danny DeVito voices the main villain of the movie, Mr. Thwackhammer, and he does a noticeably bad job. I’m usually thrilled when DeVito shows up in a movie, even if it’s a small part (no pun intended). But you could absolutely tell that his appearance here as a monstrous alien capitalist was a halfhearted favor to Reitman and nothing else. His character’s plan to force the Looney Tunes to work as mascots for his soulless theme park is also laughable, considering by 1996 the characters had been strolling around Six Flags parks for about a decade.

So is Space Jam bad? It’s a poorly plotted movie with weak character writing, terrible 3D effects, and a central performance that needs to be graded on a heavy curve. And yet, I had a blast watching it again. It’s been a solid two decades at least since the last time I got up and slammed, but Space Jam has revealed itself as a powerful tool for reminiscence. The gags, animation, and incredibly nostalgic 6-times platinum soundtrack all directly triggered the part of my brain that remembers bright summer days and the excitement of a new childhood toy.

This nostalgia is an aftershock from its targeting of my generation upon its release. If you never watched this movie as a kid, or perhaps you weren’t born between 1985 and 1999, you may not appreciate its power as a tool created explicitly to wring money from parents.

Space Jam has rapid editing, a short runtime, bright colors, recognizable cartoon characters, and stupid jokes. Today, we would call this kind of movie “brainrot.” Back in 1996, it inspired a merchandising empire that is valued today at nearly $10 billion. Years later, animation studios like Dreamworks and Illumination would recognize the value in this confluence of animation, slapstick, and pop culture references to forge towering IPs targeted at kids. For better or worse, we don’t get any Minions without the success of Space Jam.

I don’t recommend Space Jam if you’re looking for a good movie. I’m honestly not sure how much children today would like it, since it relies so heavily on a built-in understanding of who Michael Jordan is and the general arc of his career up through 1995. But if you enjoyed this movie as a kid, your nostalgia for it will overpower your sinking unease that it’s bad, actually. You shouldn’t bask in the good ol’ days forever (spoiler alert: they were good because you were a child), but we millennials and elder zoomers are maybe the last people on Earth who can earnestly enjoy the content of Space Jam. That’s worth protecting.

Future generations will look back on this movie and dismiss it for their own lack of understanding. We will hear that Seal cover of “Fly Like an Eagle” and understand the whole package completely.

If you can believe it, critics in 1996 did not love Space Jam. A 44% on Rotten Tomatoes is better than I expected, but most critics saw through the veneer of bright colors and cartoons to recognize the corporate slop at the core of the film.

Lisa Schwarzbaum from Entertainment Weekly hated the movie, feeling like a maroon for watching it and calling the flick “mediocrity disguised as entertainment, [and] greed promoted as synergy.” Some old fuddy duddies saw the vision though. Roger Ebert absolutely loved it, giving it nearly full marks and claiming it was “a happy marriage of good ideas…delightful, a family movie in the best sense.”

Space Jam could have been a truly abysmal film and it probably would have still dominated its first weekend at the box office. As acclaimed and hyped as it was in its day, Ransom was an R-rated thriller without much replay value. Meanwhile, this movie features Michael Jordan playing basketball with Bugs Bunny while rap music plays, and your kids are screaming at the top of their lungs to go see it over and over again.

In a frankly strong weekend at the box office, Space Jam walked away with almost $28 million en route to a total domestic pull of $90 million. This nearly made it the first non-Disney animated feature to gross $100 million at the box office. But I guess you, 33-year-old reading this right now, didn’t love the Looney Tunes enough to help them break a record. Shucks.

That domestic gross barely broke even with the production budget of $80 million (all that compositing and animation was NOT cheap), but thankfully the international release stepped in to boost those numbers a bit. It turns out one of the most famous athletes in the planet starring in a movie with a beloved, slapstick-heavy cartoon brand has worldwide appeal. Incredibly, Space Jam made $250 million with the international box office accounted for. The movie was only the 18th highest grossing movie of 1996 domestically, but 7th highest grossing internationally.

On top of that, the video games, toys, birthday party gear, backpacks, clothing, and infinite other pieces of merchandise kept the Space Jam brand visible for decades, as childhood fandom turned to ironic appreciation turned to nostalgic adoration.

That kind of money almost guarantees a sequel, but MJ was done with acting. Despite how lucrative a payday Space Jam 2 would be, he was tired of performing in green screen rooms against characters that weren’t there. As time went on, ideas were shopped around the NBA and Warner Bros about a sequel that used more up-to-date basketball stars. Shaq and Dwight Howard were each considered at separate points, but the project never got off the ground.

Ultimately, it would take the only player near the caliber of Jordan at his peak to get the Space Jam sequel made. It’ll take years and years, but eventually I’ll get to talk about this franchise again.

Honest question here: should we respect Space Jam?

It was conceived as a synergistic marketing tool for adjacent, convenient brands with no consideration made towards artistic integrity. And yet, it’s hard not to be impressed. Its concept is so boldly commercial, and yet there enough good jokes from the Looney Tunes to almost forgive its other narrative shortfalls. It also pioneered new animation techniques that would prove to be wildly important to the medium as a whole.

But on the other hand, come on. What are we even doing here? If everyone my age collectively looked back at Space Jam with a regretful groan, that would be totally valid. We’re adults now. We like adult things, like investing in our 401k and living in a constant state of anxiety. That movie we loved as a kid with the cartoon characters and basketball has no place in our lives any more.

Joe Pytka has given plenty of interviews in the years since Space Jam, and he’s shockingly frank about it. He was hired to shepherd his friend Michael Jordan to a decent performance, but also had to protect him from myriad studio politics and shenanigans. He has repeatedly said he doesn’t get why Space Jam has lingered on in the public eye, with his highest praise for his most well-known feature being that it’s “a nice little film for Saturdays.”

And yet, despite everything, it’s more than that. I was seated at a table of friends and acquaintances around my age last month, and when I told them that I was reviewing Space Jam, every single one of them lit up.

Immediately I was suggested that I examine the movie’s strangely pro-union slant, its history as a meme, its soundtrack, and more. Despite the fact that this is more marketing tool than movie, people who grew up on this movie have penchant for absolutely loving it. You may have never read my column before but are clicking in because, holy shit, Space Jam!

Is it possible that the lingering effect of this movie over my generation is the result of it being light brainwashing? Is it sad that we still care about Space Jam, ostensibly a feature length toy commercial? Possibly. Yet I still feel weirdly protective of Space Jam. It’s the cinematic version of a box of old toys that you keep in your parents’ attic. You know you don’t really need them anymore, but you keep them around anyway for the occasional trip down memory lane. Besides, maybe your own kids will want them.

As a 90s kid of any definition, I’ll stand by Space Jam, even if, like the kids who first adored it nearly 30 years ago, it ages more and more with every passing year.

Rating: 3/5

Works Cited

Next Week: Don’t get franchise fatigued just yet. We’re boldly going where this column has never gone before as we dive into the world of Star Trek: First Contact.

See you then!

-Will

1. Director Joe Pytka also made heavy changes to the script, but WGA rules prevented him from being credited.

2. Reitman went to Robert Zemeckis, director of Roger Rabbit, for advice on how to make a movie that fused live-action and animation. Zemeckis told him to not even try it, claiming that Roger Rabbit had nearly killed him.