Space Jam

Joe Pytka’s 1996 film opens in 1973 with a boy promising his father he will reach the NBA, then finds Michael Jordan gone to baseball and stakes the Looney Tunes’ freedom on one game. The cartoon rescue and the comeback story barely meet until tip-off, and the emotional weight is assumed rather than dramatised: a viewer who does not already carry the 1993 retirement and the baseball detour finds a hole. The other issue is technical: Jordan was shot inside a 360 degree green screen room, with NBA players and Groundlings improvisers in green suits standing where the cartoon characters would later be drawn, which is why his reactions play to nothing. It grew out of Nike’s Hare Jordan commercial with Bugs Bunny, also directed by Pytka. Tony Cervone and Bruce W. Smith led the animation across eighteen studios. Art director Bill Perkins says they had eight months for fifty two minutes of animation; animator Neil Boyle says the script was rewritten daily during the shoot. Warner Bros. built Jordan a gym on the lot, court trucked in from Long Beach State. A good fit if you want eighty seven minutes built around one game and will supply Jordan’s career yourself. Not for anyone chasing the timing of the shorts, since the gags answer to a scoreboard.