Review: SpaceJam: A New Legacy (Malcolm D. Lee, 2021)
Fig 1. - SpaceJam: A New Legacy (Malcolm D. Lee, 2021).
To say that there is a lot going on in Space Jam: A New Legacy (Malcolm D. Lee, 2021) – the sort-of-anticipated follow-up to the 1996 live-action/animation sports comedy Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996) – would be something of an understatement. The bombastic first trailer for the sequel (released in April 2021) had already given audiences an indication as to the potentially chaotic tone of this new big-screen instalment. The film’s volley of allusions to Warner Brothers’ back catalogue, coupled with its abrasive citations of pop culture and entertainment media products, gave immediate clues as to the brash style that would structure the latest outing for the Looney Tunes gang (Fig. 1). The popular press at the time even speculated that Space Jam: A New Legacy’s intensified media literacy and torrent of animated character cameos placed it firmly in the slipstream of Hollywood’s growing intellectual property extravaganzas, occupying the same kind of intertextual terrain as The Lego Movie series (2014-2019), Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg, 2018) and, most pointedly, Walt Disney’s Ralph Breaks the Internet (Rich Moore, 2018). Yet with the 2-hour feature finally landing a theatrical release (and a simultaneous debut on HBO Max in the U.S.), it’s now become a lot clearer that what we are getting with Space Jam: A New Legacy is nothing short of a visual maelstrom of media products, platforms, brands, and technologies loosely tethered to a familiar underdog sports narrative featuring the great and the good of Warner Brothers animation and, of course, a bona fide NBA superstar. The outcome is an unruly mix of aesthetic styles, animated character designs, and mismatched wacky tones of which hoop dreams are, unfortunately, not quite made.
But let’s start with where Space Jam: A New Legacy is on much surer footing: namely, in its evocation of the twists and turns of the original. Switching out Michael Jordan for current basketball athlete-turned-actor Lebron James (who, like Jordan, plays a fictionalised version of himself), Malcolm D. Lee’s sequel adopts the narrative shape of its predecessor, particularly in its high-stakes “winner takes all” basketball game and an all-star combination of cartoon talent. Bugs Bunny himself even laments that the whole premise “sounds awfully familiar” (he’s not wrong). However, while emulating Space Jam’s playful coalition of Golden Age Warner Brothers characters (Bugs, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and many more), Space Jam: A New Legacy utilises Joe Pytka’s 1996 original as more than just a convenient blueprint; it also serves as an interesting narrative context for Lebron’s backstory. Space Jam: A New Legacy’s opening prologue, for example, begins in 1998 with a sequence where a thirteen-year-old Lebron (Stephen Kankole) is gearing up for a school basketball game. The 1998 setting feels particularly pointed in that it anchors the sequel (chronologically, at least) to the first Space Jam by tapping into the period of the late-1990s as one of the defining decades in NBA history, marked by the dominance of the Chicago Bulls that was powered by Jordan, leading, of course, to his starring in the original Space Jam. Space Jam: A New Legacy’s pre-credits sequence also evokes the era’s obsession with product tie-ins, merchandising, and animation’s importance to U.S. culture. After the young Lebron misses a final shot (costing his team a morale-boosting win), he suffers a mild dressing down from his coach for not “giving his all” thanks to his preoccupation with a Looney Tunes videogame (Fig. 2). A Space Jam backpack also sits proudly by Lebron’s feet (Fig. 3), hinting that young Lebron’s interest in basketball may even have been prompted by seeing the original Space Jam.
Fig. 2 - The young Lebron (Stephen Kankole) plays Looney Tunes on his GameBoy.
Fig. 3 – Lebron’s Space Jam backpack.
Following this teaser, and after an opening title montage that solidifies the real Lebron’s realisation as a “once-in-a-generation talent” (and, as the voiceover states, his evolution into the “complete package”), Space Jam: A New Legacy fast-forwards to the present day. Taking centre stage is the fractious relationship between the now-adult Lebron and his son, Dominic “Dom” James (Cedric Joe), who is similarly chastised by his father for prioritising videogames over basketball. Things properly get going when Lebron and his family are invited to the Warner Brothers studio at Burbank for a business meeting involving the harnessing of Lebron’s star image for dubious promotional means (Fig. 4), in what – oddly – becomes an unironic critique of exactly the kinds of IP anarchy and unoriginal media crossover that Space Jam: A New Legacy is itself guilty (“Batman vs. Lebron”, “Lebron of Thrones”, and “Lebron and the Chamber of Secrets” [Fig. 5] are just some of the potential products mooted by the Warner executives).
Fig. 4 - Lebron visits WB HQ at Burbank to witness the exploitation of his star image.
Fig. 5 - Harry Potter and the danger of the media crossover.
Events take a further right turn at Albuquerque when Lebron and his increasingly-resentful son are suddenly transported into the Warner Brothers Serververse, a complex cluster of computer servers and digital networks buried in the basement of the studio backlot. Once inside the WB mainframe, Lebron meets Don Cheadle who – cast as the evil computer A.I. named Al G. Rhythm (geddit?) – holds Lebron and Dom captive, challenging Lebron to a basketball game against his Goon Squad team of modified and monstrous avatars. Yet the game, as we soon learn, is more than just a game (aren’t they all?). For Lebron, it marks an opportunity to repair his troubled relationship with his son, particularly given his overbearing desire to shape his offspring into a future NBA star seemingly against his true passions. For Al G., it is a chance to control the Serververse’s virtual population and – like Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988) – rid the world of certain cartoons forever. For the filmmakers, the game provides the opportunity to pull together an increasingly rowdy audience of recognisable entertainment icons, ranging from stars of popular American television animation (The Flintstones, Scooby Doo), 1970s dystopian crime cinema (A Clockwork Orange), Stephen King horror IT (Pennywise is evidently a basketball fan), and everything in-between. As the clock ticks down to tip-off, the floodgates well and truly open as the global IPs cascade courtside – though their dominance of the crowd seemingly problematises the extent to which children are figured as the intended audience (Figs. 6 and 7). As Foghorn Leghorn proclaims, “How in the world did he get all these spectators here?”
Fig. 6 - The all-star crowd of Space Jam: A New Legacy.
Fig. 7 - Batman’s Penguin, The Matrix, Stephen King’s IT, Ken Russell’s The Devils and Scooby Doo.
That is not to say some of the references within Space Jam: A New Legacy aren’t managed a little more deftly, and the film is perhaps at its best when alluding to the aesthetic style and comedic gags of studio-era animation. When Lebron first arrives into the “Tune World” dimension of the Serververse, he lands slap bang in the middle of the Looney Tunes/Chuck Jones trilogy of shorts Rabbit Fire (1951), Rabbit Seasoning (1952) and Duck! Rabbit, Duck! (1953), defined by its famous “Duck Season” vs. “Rabbit Season” stand-off between Bugs, Daffy and Elmer Fudd (Figs. 8 and 9). Soon after, Lebron enters another animated world, this time familiar to audiences as that of Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner (complete with abrupt freeze-frames and faux-Latin monikers) (Fig. 10), before moving onto the Wild West saloon traditionally inhabited by the gunslinging Yosemite Sam.
Fig. 8 - Lebron arrives into the cel-animated world of the Looney Tunes “hunting trilogy”.
Fig. 9 - Rabbit Fire (Chuck Jones, 1951).
Fig. 10 - Lebron (Basketballous Superstarous) and Bugs (Classicus Toonious).
There’s a real pang of nostalgia in the film’s first half when watching cel-animated stars in their proper hand-drawn style, particularly given that, later, they undergo an uncanny (and entirely unnecessary) transformation from two-dimensional cartoons to CG performers (giving the film the worrying opportunity to define computer graphics as an expensive “upgrade”). Yet the turns to Warner Brothers’ back catalogue don’t stop there, and the wheels begin to come off as the film moves at its progressive breakneck speed. When Lebron and Bugs are first recruiting members for their supposed elite team, they trawl through the Warner archive, visiting superheroes in the “DC World” (featuring Daffy as Superman, who has designs on entering the “Justice League penthouse”), as well as intruding into WB films ranging from Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) to Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2018), and even television offerings like Rick & Morty (Justin Roiland & Dan Harmon, 2013-) and Game of Thrones (David Benioff & D. B. Weiss, 2011-2019). They even tap the Wonder Woman comics to find Lola Bunny (voiced by Zendaya) (Fig. 11). Warner Brothers have, of course, got form when it comes to tactics of reflexive homage. Anyone familiar with Golden Age American animation will remember how WB’s brand of animated anarchy involved the citation of live-action stars under contract with the studio, particularly in their parodies of the crime and gangster genres that featured stars like Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre (the former even making an appearance in Space Jam: A New Legacy thanks to Casablanca). The framing of such intertextual encounters in Space Jam: A New Legacy according to this notion of a Serververse therefore emerges as no accident. It is a storytelling device that points directly to the overwhelming influence of Hollywood’s recent cycle of multiverse narratives – that delight in the pleasure of convergent plotlines and fictional worlds – upon the film’s narrative organisation. Parallels to the colliding worlds of Spider-Man: Into SpiderVerse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018) are clear, as are the debts that Space Jam: A New Legacy pays to Marvel: WandaVision (Jac Schaeffer, 2021), Loki (Michael Waldron, 2021) and such upcoming features like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi, 2022), which demonstrate an increasing willingness to embrace the potential for forking paths, convergent timelines, and overlapping fictional realms.
Fig. 11 - Lebron and Bugs venture through Warners’ multimedia archive to assemble their “elite” squad, entering the worlds of Mad Max, Austin Powers, Casablanca, Wonder Woman, The Matrix and Rick & Morty.
Fig. 12 - “The computer’s Black”.
Amid the film’s callbacks and an amusing gag involving the name “Michael Jordan”, one of the most interesting elements of Space Jam: A New Legacy is the casting of Cheadle who, as Al G., doesn’t so much chew the scenery as swallow it whole. Despite its many flaws and unevenness of tone, it is nonetheless through the presence of Cheadle that Space Jam: A New Legacy has something potentially interesting to say about a durable history of white racial framing when it comes to the representation of virtual A.I. assistants. Numerous writers have identified the pervasive cultural “whiteness” of artificial intelligence, one that can be traced across Hollywood’s history where the design, appearance, and behaviour of humanoids, robots, and cyborgs have been conceptualised via a dominant white racial frame (see Dinerstein 2006; Cave and Dihal 2020). Indeed, the widespread racializing of virtual intelligence machines onscreen as overwhelmingly white led Richard Dyer to argue that the android conventionally functions “as a definition of whiteness” (1997, 213). Lebron’s remark to Dom, upon their arrival in the Serververse, that “The computer’s Black!” (Fig. 12), therefore acknowledges something of Al G.’s exceptionality. Although a seemingly throwaway line, this brief exchange establishes the subsequent attraction of Cheadle’s villainous Al G. Rhythm to an impressionable Dom in ways that move beyond his role as a surrogate father. As the film makes clear, there is something powerful and aspirational in the young Dom (as a budding videogame designer/programmer) seeing someone in control who looks and sounds like he does. It is troublesome, then, that Al G’s authoritative credentials are diluted by his status as underworld villain, which supports a durable representation of Blackness that pivots on the “persistent stereotyping of African Americans as criminal or threatening” (Oliver 2003, 4). This is seen particularly at the film’s climax, where Al G. becomes more physically excessive and imposing, with a greater proclivity for violence, too. Even his voice is modulated to become deeper (Figs. 13 and 14).
Fig. 13 - Al G is modified in ways that sustain his racialised villainy.
Fig. 14 - The modified Al G.
Space Jam: A New Legacy is ultimately many things, and while certainly enjoyable in its recollection of Hollywood’s animated history, it is far from a “Classicus Toonious.” The film suffers primarily due to a chaotic style that is difficult to get a handle on, with much of its human cast (particularly Sonequa Martin-Green as Lebron’s wife Kamiyah) underused at the expense of the old-school toons, who seem to be there just to generate the film’s occasional laughs. Even Lebron is shaky, not quite living up to his comedic turn in Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck (2015), though it is Cedric Joe’s performance as Dom that remains a real highlight. But, in truth, Space Jam: A New Legacy is much less than the sum of its parts: an incoherent whirlwind of virtual realities and Warner Bros’ commercial ventures (which is perhaps to be expected, given the original’s genesis as a 1992 Nike commercial) showing a terrifying possible future of corporate synergy, all of which makes for a rather confusing jumble of ideas, styles and tones. Holding up less of a mirror to the first Space Jam, Lee’s film may end up serving as a tipping point in reflecting the current “state-of-the-art” when it comes to Hollywood’s increasingly chaotic application of digital effects imagery, intertextual flavours and complex narrative strategies.
Oh – and the less said about that Notorious P.I.G. sequence, the better…
**Article published: July 23, 2021**
References
Cave, Stephen, and Kanta Dihal. 2020. “The Whiteness of AI.” Philosophy & Technology 33: 685–703.
Dinerstein, Joel. 2006. “Technology and Its Discontents: On the Verge of the Posthuman.” American Quarterly 58, no. 3: 569–595.
Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London and New York: Routledge.
Oliver, Mary Beth. 2003. “African American Men as “Criminal and Dangerous”: Implications of Media Portrayals of Crime on the “Criminalization” of African American Men.” Journal of African American Studies 7, no. 2: 3-18.
Biography
Christopher Holliday teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London, specializing in Hollywood cinema, animation history and contemporary digital media. He has published several book chapters and articles on digital technology and computer animation, including work in Animation Practice, Process & Production and animation: an interdisciplinary journal (where is also Associate Editor). He is the author of The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and co-editor of the collections Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, 2018) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2021). Christopher is currently researching the relationship between identity politics and digital technologies in popular cinema, and can also be found as the curator and creator of the website/blog/podcast www.fantasy-animation.org.