A writer adored the basketball-Looney Tunes mash-up as a boy. Watching the movie again after his father died, he felt the movie resonate in a surprisingly deeper way.
When I was 10, I thought the coolest person in the world was Michael Jordan. The second-coolest person in the world was my dad. He played in an amateur men's soccer league; I preferred basketball, so MJ got the edge. Like a lot of kids who grew up in the '90s, I revered the seemingly unbeatable Chicago Bulls, and I was devastated when, on October 6, 1993, Jordan announced that he would be retiring from the NBA to play minor league baseball with the Birmingham Barons. I liked baseball even less than I liked soccer.
Jordan's triumphant return to basketball in March 1995 was a moment of intense relief and exhilaration for me; and when the Bulls won their fourth championship, in the summer of 1996, my enthusiasm for Jordan reached a fever pitch. So when Space Jam debuted that autumn, I could not have been more excited. Michael Jordan teaming up with Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes in a feature film about a high-stakes basketball game? It was as if they had scanned my brain and made a movie of my innermost fantasies. I begged my dad to take me to see it, and the minute it was over, I begged him to take me to see it again.
He was not especially impressed with Space Jam, but it was everything I dreamed it would be. First, it was hilarious. The Nerdlucks, a cabal of short, wormlike aliens who smack one another around like the Three Stooges, had me in stitches; my friends and I impersonated their screechy, helium-pitched voices for months, to gales of approving schoolyard laughter. Jordan's bumbling, nebbish assistant Stan — played by Wayne Knight, whom I knew as the guy who gets smeared by a dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park, another childhood favourite — was hysterically funny. And of course the Looney Tunes cracked me up. When the Tasmanian Devil spins around a basketball court and cleans it single-handedly in a matter of seconds, declaring it "lemony fresh" — that seemed like the funniest thing I had ever heard in my life.
What I loved most about Space Jam was the candid glimpse it seemed to offer of Jordan's life off the court. I had seen him in action, and in interviews as well as in commercials. But Space Jam showed me a family side of Jordan. Here was the star talking to his wife. Here was Jordan watching TV with his kids. And here was a flashback of a young Jordan, shooting hoops in the backyard, talking about his hopes and aspirations with his own dad.
