Space Jam
We need to reexamine LeBron's legacy after this.
Listen, I know LeBron James has made it to the NBA finals ten times while winning four MVPs and making the All-Star team 17 times. I get that he is on pace to break the points record and finish top five in career assists. I’m aware he has done all of this with more hype than just about any high school athlete has ever seen while also juggling being one of the first superstars in the social media age. He has been in the spotlight for two decades and hasn’t had a single serious misstep (The Decision was harmless). All of that is very impressive, and all seemingly point to him being the best men’s basketball player of all time, but I got bad news for him after we factor in Space Jam.
Typically I am very against the idea of sequels, but I kinda got the idea of a Space Jam sequel. People have been clamoring for it since the original was such a big hit in 1997. Warner Bros planned to go ahead with ‘Skate Jam” in 2003 with Tony Hawk before Looney Tunes: Back in Action bombed at the box office and made execs shelve the skating film. Various other ideas were floated around, from Tiger Woods and Clint Eastwood to Jackie Chan to Jeff Gordon, but none of them ever came close to fruition. It feels like it has been hovering around LeBron for the last decade or so. As the comparisons to Michael Jordan picked up more steam with LeBron’s performance on the court, more people wanted to see what he could do off it. He even showed off some of his acting chops when he hosted SNL— something Michael Jordan also did. Warner Bros announced a sequel in 2014, but it wasn’t until 2018 that James became officially attached to the project. The project went through a handful of directors in the process, but Space Jam: A New Legacy finally came out on July 16, 2021.
I’ll be honest; the 25-year wait was not worth it. The original isn’t some outstanding piece of cinema or anything, but it is still head and shoulders better than LeBron’s version. It is far from a perfect movie, but it knows precisely what it is, and that’s a movie made for children that adults can enjoy. It is probably up for debate which one of Jordan and LeBron were bigger stats at the time of their respective movies. Both films alluded to the real lives of both stars and incorporated that into the movies, which is where Jordan had a significant advantage.
The original movie centered around MJ announcing his retirement from basketball to play baseball. When the Looney Toons needed to find someone to take down Swashbuckler and the Monstars, they went to Michael. He declined at first but ultimately came back when the Monstars bet that he couldn’t do it because he was a baseball player now, and if there’s one thing we should know about Michael Jordan, it’s that he never saw a bet he didn’t like. The movie ends with (spoilers) him coming back to play basketball after proving that he’s still got it against the Monstars.
The spin the new Space Jam took with their star was that he lived in Los Angeles now. They did an excellent job poking fun at LeBron, from the countless jokes about him changing teams and not listening to his coaches and needing a superteam to win.
The original mainly just joked about MJ being bad at baseball and that he was bald — disappointingly, no hairline jokes for LeBron. Beyond references here or there about LeBron moving to LA to make movies, the plot wasn’t improved much by his life. The most significant way his life improved the story was by how public his relationship with his kids is, but they didn’t even use his actual kids or even their names. I get that you want professional actors in something with a budget this big, but when you’re using the public knowledge of the real-life of his actual kids, the least you could do is use their names. Far from the biggest issue with the movie, but it is still a weird decision. They used the names of MJ’s actual kids in the original.
The actual plot of the second one was so much worse too. The idea of the aliens taking the talent of five NBA players in the original was so smart. It allowed for Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Mugsy Bogues, Larry Johnson, and Shawn Bradley to get some actual screen time and break up the toon world with clever scenes of them trying to figure out what’s wrong at a hospital, psychiatrist, and fortune teller. It is enough of them without taking the movie away from Michael. Having Larry Bird just there as one of his friends on the golf course was also a brilliant addition.
When we first got news of the sequel, pundits tried to predict what current players would fill the shoes of the greats (and Shawn Bradley) from the original. Honestly, surprised I could guess Damian Lillard and Anthony Davis before he got tried to the Lakers. I liked the addition of Nneka Ogwumike and Diana Taurasi, but the whole concept was different than the original. Instead of stealing their talents, the Goon Squad (an outstanding name that is 100 times better than Monstars, FWIW) was made up of computer-animated unique versions of each player.
I get that it made more sense to fit in with the video game of it all, but why not have the computer algorithm, with the dumbest name possible with Al-G Rhythm, steal their talents instead. They took out arguably the most fun plot point of the original and turned it into this weird combo that was somehow not for the majority of basketball fans or the majority of kids. It removed all the personalities that should have gotten a chance to shine, with Ogwumike, Taurasi, Thompson, Lillard, and Davis all trying to get their talent back.
I don’t know how to talk about the actual basketball game. On the one hand, this is a kid’s movie and decidedly not marketed toward me. However, on the other hand, the actual basketball took it down a few notches. The charm of the original is that, yes, it was ridiculous with all the antics and jokes, but it wasn’t done in a way that made it difficult to invest in and care about. The stakes were way too serious in the sequel. If LeBron and the Toon Squad lost, then LeBron and all his followers that got trapped in the game would be stuck there forever. Oh yeah, and the Toons would be permanently deleted. The only stakes in the original were that Jordan would be stuck on Moron Mountain forever signing autographs and playing basketball. The increased stakes made what was supposed to be a fun kid’s movie into something way too serious, especially when it is interrupted by the atrocious notorious P.I.G. rap. It feels weird to complain about the scoring in a game that included someone transitioning between fire and ice and a watch to freeze time, but it was bad and inconsistent, and Warner Bors can’t be let off the hook for it. Can someone please explain why the Toons had to do a training montage of learning how to play basketball, while also mentioning that they did this same thing 25 years earlier? Inconsistencies.
I have no idea who this movie was for, other than Warner Bros stockholders. This was supposed to be a fun nostalgia trip while recreating one of the most beloved basketball movies of all time with current players. Instead, it turned into a 120 minute commercial for Warner Bros. Sure, every major studio is going to try to shoehorn different mentions of their movies if they can, but this threw all subtlety out the window. The original did it cleverly by naturally bringing up all of Jordan’s endorsements in a scene that you would have missed if you didn’t know the connection. This one gave us a giant Nike Swoosh in the first 20 minutes. Using other W.B. properties could’ve been a cool way to advance the story and explore your universe to other things kids enjoy, but I don’t think the Casablanca scene won over a ton of eight-year-olds in the audience. That’s before we get to the bizarre crowd shots of everything from a nun from X-Rated The Devils to the Droogs from A Clockwork Orange, totally kid-friendly. Hilarious that they included those two films and a few other questionable characters while writing out the consent scene between LeBron and Pepe Le Pew.
If taking all the magic from the original out, somehow making the Looney Toons unlikable, and using it as an excuse to make a commercial wasn’t bad enough, THEY DIDN’T INCLUDE THE SONG. What are we even doing here???
The soundtrack as a whole was considerably worse than the original — we’re gonna ignore R Kelly being featured prominently on that one. It was dope hearing Aminé and Cordae featured on the soundtrack, but it lacked even a single memorable song. They had a chance to save this movie at least a little bit, and maybe it was a rights issue thing, but, shoot, get someone like SZA and Travis Scott or something to make a new version of it. I can’t believe I am saying this after everything he has accomplished in the last 20 years, but LeBron has to get to at least seven rings to pass Jordan now after this trainwreck.