I would like to preface this by stating that I do not know anything about basketball.
I will probably never understand the rage that causes grown men to leap to their feet, shake their fist at the TV and vow vengeance upon some guy who just dramatically threw himself on the floor for no apparent reason.
Growing up, my family did not watch basketball, so neither did I. By the time I was around 7 years old, I had determined that baseball was boring and to be shunned, football was to be tolerated because Packers and Eagles games meant we ordered pizza, and basketball did not matter whatsoever to my existence in this universe.
If I had grown up with Disney Channel or a brother, my experience with basketball might have been different. I might have watched Troy Bolton sing “Get’cha Head in the Game” and embraced that movie’s central presupposition that everyone thinks basketball is entirely incompatible with any other extracurricular pursuit. I might have chosen an NBA or college team to root for, following their wins and losses with at least the same detached interest with which I viewed football during those early years. But I learned about basketball from a 1996 movie about the Looney Tunes and Michael Jordan battling it out on the court against aliens from an outer-space theme park.
This was “Space Jam,” one of the first sports movies I ever watched and the sole reason I knew approximately three basketball players before downloading Twitter a few years ago and discovering that far too many people allow the sport far too much control over their own personal happiness.
The very first sports movie I ever watched might’ve actually been “Facing the Giants.” But “Space Jam” offers three things that “Giants” doesn’t: physical comedy (although an argument can be made, given the cartoon-style banana-peel slip on that field goal), Daffy Duck and what my sheltered childhood self saw as a connection with an adult world of sports, humor and clever references that I otherwise didn’t understand.
When my sister and I tried to agree on a movie from our flip-book of DVDs, the conversation would almost inevitably involve, “No, we’re not watching ‘Space Jam’!” from her at some point. Then, we’d decide to watch Narnia or a good old Barbie movie, and I’d bide my time until I could ask my dad to watch “Space Jam” yet again with me.
“Space Jam” occupies a strange space in the world of sports films and movies in general. First, there’s its unconventional medium (for a sports movie) of placing animated Looney Tunes characters in the real world and live-action human characters against an animated backdrop with cartoon physics applying to both. Then, there’s the fact that Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley and other 90s basketball stars feature in this movie, but to its credit, the film doesn’t hang too much on their acting abilities. If you had asked 8-year-old me who Michael Jordan was, I probably would’ve said “the guy from ‘Space Jam.’” To me, that was infinitely cooler than his being an NBA star.
If you are to some degree informed of Michael Jordan’s career (about which almost all of my information is based directly on “Space Jam” and what my dad has told me), you may know of his two-year retirement from professional basketball during which he played baseball, comparatively not well. The main plot of “Space Jam” picks up during this hiatus, with Jordan distressed by both his failure and the fictional personal assistant Stan who seems to exist in the film solely for physical comedy purposes. While golfing with Larry Bird and Bill Murray, Jordan falls through a golf hole into the animated Looney Tunes world. There, he trains the likes of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wiley Coyote, Tazmanian Devil and Foghorn Leghorn for a basketball showdown against five not-so-tiny aliens known as the Monstars who have stolen the talent from NBA players in hopes of enslaving the Looney Tunes for their taskmaster’s galactic theme park.
In other words, it’s everything you might expect from a live-action/animated sports comedy starring a bunch of famous sports people, featuring cutting-edge technology and created by a studio faced with competing against the juggernaut of the Disney Renaissance.
But as an 8-year-old, I did not care about all that. I thought Daffy Duck was hilarious, I loved the soundtrack, and I was thrilled to finally be able to say I knew things about basketball beyond there being a ball and a basket (thank you, James Naismith).
That’s why “Space Jam” holds up for me after a decade of sometimes multiple viewings a year when I can barely get through many other sports movies once. As a kid, it made me feel like I was in on the exclusive world of sports and adult-ness that I didn’t especially care about, but I liked feeling included.
Add to that a soundtrack that absolutely slaps, sometimes-crude but hilarious Looney Tunes humor and the completely bonkers premise of the whole plot, and you’ve got one of my favorite movies of all time.
And I haven’t even mentioned all the quotable lines. (“I found . . . the shorts.” “I did see Mitael Dowdan!” “Did you order Original Recipe or Extra Crispy?”)
“Space Jam’s” awareness of how bonkers it is only adds to the fun. “Just how did you get here, anyway?” Daffy Duck asks Bill Murray, who has randomly shown up to help the Tune Squad during the final game. “Producer’s a friend of mine, just had a teamster come and drop me off,” Murray shrugs.
More than 10 years since I first watched “Space Jam,” I still don’t know or care very much about basketball. I like filling out March Madness brackets, but I usually just check the scores afterwards and complain about how wrong I inevitably was. I signed up for intramural basketball on a whim and discovered that I still had much to learn about the mechanics of the game (especially how not to foul people—“Space Jam” did not give me much to go off on that).
About a year and a half ago, I flipped the channel on a hotel room TV in Nashville to a Miami Heat game because there wasn’t anything else on. I only remember the team because of their eye-hurting baby blue and pink uniforms for that game (not the standard ones). Feeling rather adult, as I was headed back to Jackson for the next semester of college, I decided to give it a shot (ahaha) and watch the game. And I actually kind of enjoyed it.
Maybe basketball isn’t so bad after all.
This summer, catch me in the movie theater on opening night for “Space Jam: A New Legacy” with a little more basketball knowledge than when I watched “Space Jam” and substantially more respect for people who enjoy the game, even when Daffy Duck isn’t playing.
