Last week, my co-editor, who is wont to puckishly noting how often he is right about everything, wrote—in an otherwise excellent piece on the forthcoming Looney Tunes revival—something so recklessly, ridiculously wrong about the magnificent Bugs-Bunny-romp-turned-Nike-sneaker-commercial Space Jam that I could not help but write a somewhat lazy, but certainly spirited, rebuttal. Let’s break it down (emphasis added):
If there’s one ongoing complaint I’ve always had with the Looney Tunes projects released in the last few decades, from Space Jam to 2015’s New Looney Tunes, it’s that none of them ever felt bold or original enough while still remaining true to the characters. In retrospect, the Michael Jordan vehicle was a shameless cash grab.
OK, let’s be clear. He is not entirely wrong here. The Michael Jordan vehicle was a shameless cash grab. But to say that a film that cast a post-basketball Michael Jordan as a leading man, Larry Bird and Bill Murray as a comedy duo and his golf buddies, Wayne Knight as his MLB-assigned flunky, basically the entire cast of Looney Tunes as very much themselves (if a bit ’90s-ified), four of the finest basketball players of the 1990s (and also Shawn Bradley, probably because dude is hecka tall) as alien abductees, and, uh, oh yeah, ALIENS, isn’t “bold or original enough while still remaining true to the characters” is to spout some hardcore nonsense. That shit is original as hell.
In fact, I have proof. Because, really…how many movies are like Space Jam? Well, I got to thinking about that, and there are only really five major live-action/animation combination films I can think of, not counting CGI nonsense fests like Alvin and the Chipmunks and Garfield: The Movie. Space Jam is by far the most popular, while Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is by far the most accomplished. (Whether they share the same universe is still TBD.) Then there’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action, on which my saucepot co-editor is objectively correct: it really was “an unfunny slog that simultaneously made you feel crummy for Brendan Fraser.” There’s The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, which, like, no. And then there’s the fairly obscure early mess of a Brad Pitt vehicle Cool World, by the brilliant but often too-weird-and-pervy-for-his-own-good Ralph Bakshi. (I’ll let the late, great Roger Ebert sum that one up and leave it at that.)
So, five movies, and Space Jam was the third to be released. And of the five, it is a clear silver medalist. What the heck is Eric’s problem???
But that’s just the appeal to logic. Seeing as there’s really no ethical appeal to be made re: watching Space Jam, as it is indeed a shameless cash grab for Nike, Warner Bros., and I guess the MLB and NBA, I’ll just get right down to the appeal to passion: Eric, clearly you have not watched Space Jam as an adult (and, preferably, high). Certain joys are timeless. That you do not know this one brings me, like, Tolkienian elvish sorrow. Like, lonely grey light on Hugo Weaving’s longhaired temples sorrow.
Frankly, to sum up Space Jam solely as a shameless cash grab is to gravely miss the sheer batshit joy of that movie. OK, the Looney Tunes make a bunch of ’90s-centric jokes, but didn’t the Animaniacs, their spiritual successors, do the same on TV? Sure, Lola Bunny is the face that launched a thousand furries—but isn’t she fun? Yes, we’ve already basically covered the human cast, but look at that voice cast: Billy West! Dee Bradley Baker! And doing a decent job living up to Mel Blanc, too! Oh, and Danny goddamn DeVito! Plus, you get to watch Bill Murray suck his basketball and make a crack about icing his knees, and Daffy’s “Michael’s Secret Stuff” gag has so stayed with me that to this day I put that label on mason jars filled with weird semi-failed-experiment sauces I come up with while cooking. Plus, this film still makes every member of my family, which is not a sports-loving family, laugh consistently. As John Candy would put it in another absurd but delightful 1990s feel-good sports romp that cracks my family up, “I don’t care who you are — that’s lightning!”
That Michael Jordan arm-stretching final dunk, though? OK, fine. That was some bullshit.
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