The Jordan-fronted live-action/cartoon hybrid is 30 years old – and with its R Kelly soundtrack, it feels it. Cue Seinfeld’s Wayne Knight to rescue it for a second time
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his 30th anniversary rerelease brings us the strangest piece of 90s pop-cultural detritus imaginable, at once surreally baffling and very dated – not least in its resounding soundtrack use of I Believe I Can Fly by R Kelly, the now disgraced singer currently serving a 20-year prison term for child sexual abuse. Space Jam is the live-action/cartoon hybrid and nakedly commercial brand partnership of NBA superstar Michael Jordan and the Warner Bros stable of Looney Tunes characters like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd; this feature was developed from TV ads in which Jordan was paired with the hyperactive rabbit.
The idea is that an evil race of animated space aliens have captured the Looney Tunes squad and propose to enslave them, but sportingly agree not to if Bugs and the gang can defeat them at basketball. These villains use their evil mojo to give themselves an unfair advantage, stealing basketball skills from other live-action NBA stars such as Charles Barkley, before turning them into humanoids. So the Looney Tunes heroes and heroines approach Jordan (who has now swapped basketball for baseball, a sport at which he turns out to be no good at all) and ask for his help. And so Space Jam semi-accidentally conforms to the classic underdog sports template: the classy player, fallen on hard times, has to coach a bunch of lovable losers.
