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Space Jam: Everything wrong with 90's movies

posted 11 years ago by ComicNerd
44 replies | jump to latest

Space Jam is the quintessential 90's movie. As a story it's basically as bare bones as they get, Michael Jordan needs to play basketball with the Looney Tunes to save the world.

Space Jam should be used as an example of including everything wrong with movies in the 90's. Huge sports stars who can't act, blaring soundtrack from the latest hip hop and r&b stars, product placement and the attempts at making Bugs and crew up to date and hip.

It's a shining example of the corporate synergy and marketing of a product rather then an actual movie.

[–] HarlemEagle42 (16635) 4 years ago

Doug Walker, is that you?

[–] twinA (4827) 4 years ago

It's been awhile since I've seen his program 'Nostalgia Critic'. Last I heard of him, he had become very paranoid, reportedly, to where if anything came to be remotely different from his expectations, he'd have a field day picking all the elements apart. I don't find him as entertaining as he used to be but believe he can still turn the clock around. He needs to freshen up his act; it's gotten stale.

~~/o/

[–] HarlemEagle42 (16635) 4 years ago

Yeah his stuff is hit or miss now;mostly misses these days. I think the whole #ChangetheChannel thing got to him.

[–] twinA (4827) 4 years ago

A lot of it might have to do with streaming simply becoming more competitive compared to when he first began. He tries too hard to keep your attention nowadays.

~~/o/

[–] HarlemEagle42 (16635) 4 years ago

That's possible too.

[–] twinA (4827) 4 years ago

While the OP is correct on all assertions, in that this film is essentially a culture put out to market, or rather the market itself is the culture, the OP needs to consider the aspect of time.

The way a movie is seen at the time it is made is going to be a different experience later on because the film like Space Jam is topical, the epitome of 1990s pop culture.

In my opinion, the main criticism towards this movie is that it could have been more creative with what it had to work with, especially when compared to other animated productions such as 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?' and what was going on at DreamWorks, whose studio at the time, would be a more apt comparison for Space Jam. This all said, I love me some Space Jam!

~~/o/

[–] WilloughbyStain (194) 4 years ago

As a huge fan of the classic WB cartoons I found this very disappointing when it came out. In the UK we had just about heard of Michael Jordan, but our interest in Basketball was and is low to non-existent, so I don't think all the NBA stuff figured much in the marketing. I was expecting a full-on Looney Tunes romp, kind of felt I'd been gypped from the first scene of Michael Jordan as a kid, and it never quite recovered for me. I always kind of thought of this as "my Phantom Menace".

Now I understand that this was made more for people who were NBA fans and have a degree of fondness for or had fond memories of the WB characters, or perhaps just bought the occasional shirt or mug from the WB Studio Store. Almost all of the characters are boiled down to the most basic elements (Pepe Le Pew stinks! Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam shoot guns!) that this audience would recognise. On this terms I think this movie did what it set out to do. I've learned to appreciate this a bit more, although I'm not sure I was "wrong" about it per say.

[–] Furienna (3330) 4 years ago

Well, it's just a silly movie for kids and was never meant to be more than that.
So you can't it expect to be some cinematic masterpiece for grown-ups.
And studios have made movies like that for a long time, so it was not a '90s thing.
And it seems like even the product placement thing was nothing new in 1996.