Loonatics Unleashed
This is what Deadpool could have been.
I was not prepared to like Space Jam: A New Legacy as much as I did.
Hollywood is the biggest it’s ever been. Even through a global pandemic, the money finds a way. Films are getting filmed. People are watching, even if not from where they’d expect to be. Everyone has an opinion on the connected universes that have taken the spotlight in a wholly new way. It’s as if Beatlemania were distilled and released indefinitely. This is not just about corporate superhero flicks. It’s about how those comic books have taught the public to understand that the boundaries between imagined worlds isn’t as impenetrable as we might have thought.
Enter Warner Brothers. They’re a titan of the industry and have been for some time; but they’ve recently garnered a certain reputation. With their attempts to capitalize on franchises like DC comics and Game of Thrones by any means necessary, they’ve opened up the miracle of modern cinema to the scrutiny of the classics. The tower is open and the Animaniacs are loose. But as appropriate as this story is for the Animaniacs, they might be the only property NOT present for this showdown between content and their distributors.
We need a new movie…something to fill time between the last Godzilla release and the next Batman. What haven’t we already plucked? Millennials liked Space Jam, right? Okay, easy. We get Bugs Bunny and friends to recruit another famous athlete. Who is the next Michael Jordan? Lebron James. It’s hard to question. This movie could write itself. Go to tell the writers to stick to the algorithm so we can keep printing our money.
Looney tunes have to be exactly one thing; Looney. You can’t just put bugs bunny on the screen without establishing some kind of rules for him to break. They can be, and often are, both scientific and narrative in nature. He can’t get hurt in any way that isn’t reversibly by his nature as a fictional character. He also doesn’t have to tell the story in the way you’d expect by the nature of comedy’s love/hate/love again relationship with satire.
This movie could just be silly and pointless, but it did something I never expected. It bites the hand that feeds. It bites really hard and it doesn’t let go. Many critics have shared the notion that the presence of ridiculous amounts of WB properties only serve as a commercial for the streaming service that WB spreads these properties; HBO Max. While a commercial only needs to include a nod to the product to open itself to successful advertising, it’s important to acknowledge something about one of the stars of this film. There is a meta narrative of this movie that I think has been largely ignored. I deeply appreciate how much Bugs Bunny does NOT want to be in this movie.
Lebron James is a real person with a real family. They will not be portrayed in this movie. Lebron will instead learn about the unexpected challenges of fatherhood through a fictional family. Most importantly, his relationship with his not-son is in jeopardy! He wants his son to play basketball, but his son is a passionate video game-making prodigy!
Woe is we, who must watch this High School Musical plot again….
There’s a difference here. Lebron is the main character, not his not-son. This means, we get some insight into why Lebron is so fixated on his child’s success. Namely, he doesn’t know how to stop struggling for glory. Basketball brought him success in a time when he and his family had none. Dom doesn’t need to step up and succeed in the name of his family. He grew up as the son of a legendary athlete. Sure, he could play basketball, but he’d rather “do him.” And, in a post-scarcity family context, there’s nothing wrong with that desire. All that Lebron needs to do is foster the sense of pride in hard work in Dom without letting his traumatic ladder to success take away Dom’s chance at being his own person. Did you expect the theme of the exploitation of Black excellence manifesting as intergenerational disconnect? Well, here we are.
So, we’ve got our athlete. Next, we need a conflict. The villain of the original Space Jam was a business-minded alien who wanted nothing more than to exploit the antics of animated characters and turn them from profitable art to just profit. For this sequel, we don’t need anything special. The expectations aren’t to match Danny Devito’s fantastic voice work. It’s just to make a generic villain whose name isn’t even remembered by most of the children who loved the movie. We could hire any celebrity completely phone it in. Or…we could get Don Cheadle.
Al-G Riddim is a silly name for a silly premise. He’s the personification of an algorithm that could churn out reused assets across the catalog of Warner Brothers’ media empire into infinite, meaningless, profitable permutations. His current goal is to use Lebron James as the face of his new media trend: digitizing people to make content more interactive and modular. Lebron in Game of Thrones. Lebron in Batman. Lebron integrated so fully into WB’s reserve that his identity would lose all meaning in the hazy array of multiplicative self. Only one problem, Lebron doesn’t want to do it.
Whereas Michael Jordan’s conflict was a crisis of self-identity (he pretended to be a baseball player for a little while, but Bugs Bunny set him straight), Lebron’s conflict is about acknowledging his son. Lebron’s stubborn sense of self prevents him from making the trend that Al-G wants.
This is where Don Cheadle shines. His villainous persona is essentially the expected writer of the movie. His evil plan is literally to make a new Space Jam movie. Is this getting meta? We haven’t even mentioned the toons yet! Cheadle excels as someone who can turn his charm on and off at the click of a switch. He can seduce Dom to the darkside that is embracing the possibilities of unearned IP integration. You don’t need to write a crossover with any thought: you just decide to do it and make money! According to Al-G, Dom shouldn’t need to work within his limits. He should shed his passion for his creations if only for the sake of making his work more conveniently successful.
Athlete, meet conflict. Lebron has to go against his instincts and work with WB’s properties in order to save his son. But even by agreeing to a friendly game of basketball against Al-G, Lebron is already playing into the deal he rejected. Once he has his son, he can be free from the tyranny that is being in a Warner Brothers movie. Enter his partner in assembling his multiversal team; Bugs Bunny.
Bugs has seen better days. The closest comparison I can make is that he starts this movie in a state of isolation similar to Jack Sparrow when abandoned in Davy Jones’ Locker. He’s doing his looney hijinks like he’s supposed to for this movie. It feels forced and joyless, as one would assume. This is because Bugs Bunny’s key characteristic is breaking the rules. He can’t just want to play basketball again like he did with Michael Jordan all those years ago. So how do we motivate him? We break him.
Bugs reveals to Lebron that he is the sole resident of his cartoon world. Al-G saw to it that every character could have a happy, revitalized place in his modular media scheme. Granny could be in the Matrix, which posits a world unbound by physical limitation. Daffy could replace Superman and feed his insatiable ego. Elmer Fudd looks enough like Dr. Evil to play mini-me, right? These are all terrible ideas and Bugs knows that. His friends feel as if they’re languishing in obscurity and they’re willing to be what they aren’t just to be seen again. Thus is the curse of IPs awaiting their next reboot. Bugs, as the only one with the pride and savvy to avoid this trap, ends up alone and unwanted. Then, an Athlete arrives with a contrived need to assemble a basketball team. Cartoon, meet purpose.
The fact that Bugs is using Lebron to his own ends, that of reuniting with his costars, fits into his knack for causing trouble even as a benevolent force. Bugs Bunny is so Chaotic Good that he borders on Trickster God status and while this movie casts a very dark specter on his legacy as a classic property ripe for exploitation, he resists it at every step.
We have the perfect algorithm for a Space Jam Sequel! We have an athlete being guided by cartoons to face a conflict via spectator sport! It’s fun for the whole family! It has a heartwarming lesson! It has a masterfully quirky villain! It finds a place for celebrity cameos! It has ridiculous, over-the-top placement of commercial properties! It ticks every box!
It’s the perfect, soulless math equation that its villain wants it to be.
The defining moment of this movie comes just before the big game. Al-G does the unthinkable. He recreates the Looney Tunes as updated CGI models of themselves in a sequence that can only be described as body-horror. If there was any doubt that Bugs Bunny did not approve of his given role in this movie: those doubts have been deleted.
And then they play basketball.
Ultimately, Lebron learns the valuable lesson that he needs to respect his son’s identity. Bugs goes from having no interest in Lebron’s conflict to truly desiring a friendship with him and embracing the possibility of doing something new with his classic friends. In playing Al-G’s game, they got to stick it to him while doing exactly what he set out to make them do. They made another Space Jam.
This dissonance is what makes the satire so beautiful. This movie is criminally self-indulgent. It mocks its star athlete at every turn, because choosing him as the defacto Michael Jordan of his generation is a lazy excuse to put him in a movie. Its villain is the embodiment of Warner Brothers not caring about their properties and the dishonest, irresponsible media that they create as a result. It’s a movie by Warner Brothers starring Lebron James!
I love satire. The ability to criticize societal trends through storytelling is near and dear to my heart. I also love parody. The ability to deflate the self-importance of media by recreating it in a mocking tone is a worthy art. This movie took advantage of its own inevitability to strike back and demand that media not be carelessly wringed out ad nauseum just because it can be. It taught us that authenticity and hard work will beat mindless media regurgitation any day of the week. Bugs Bunny will be back; but he will fight for a chance to be his true self given the opportunity to sell out. In the end, the day is won by the integrity of WB’s most classic IP.
On the other side of our media duopoly, we have characters like Deadpool, whose superheroics are meant to poke fun at superheroes. When he finally got his movie debut, I remember feeling like something was wrong. Yes, he made jokes about movie cliches and hero cliches. But also, he was those cliches. The heart of his movies came unironically from the same things he was meant to do ironically. It was like watching a less funny, more violent spider-man movie. I didn’t hate it, but it felt self-aggrandizing in a way that was hard to articulate. It wasn’t challenging Marvel’s movies to be better. In fact, it was begging to join in.
Space Jam: A New Legacy sneaks nuance and meaning into what is possibly the worst premise for a movie. Seriously, Lebron James playing basketball with Bugs Bunny while the Iron Giant and King Kong watch from the side… Why would anyone want to make that? After watching, I can confidently answer that question. Because it gives Bugs a platform to stand up for himself and all of his imaginary brethren. Make their content honest or don’t make it at all.
Ball’s in your court, Warner Brothers. Make an Animaniacs v Looney Tunes, or respect your content.
