Space Jam
All actors and roles (10)
All team (262)
Short description
Space Jam follows the Looney Tunes as they face a threat from outer space. Small aliens arrive from a distant planet ruled by Mr. Swackhammer, who runs a failing amusement park and wants new attractions. When the aliens try to take Bugs Bunny and his friends away, Bugs proposes a basketball game to settle the matter. The visitors steal the abilities of several NBA players and grow into a formidable team, so the Looney Tunes bring in basketball star Michael Jordan to help them compete, with their freedom on Earth at stake.
Joe Pytka directed the film, working from a screenplay by Herschel Weingrod, Timothy Harris and Steve Rudnick, with Ivan Reitman among the producers. It combines live action with animation and mixes basketball with the Warner Bros. cartoon characters. Michael Jordan appears as himself, alongside Wayne Knight as Stan Podolak, Theresa Randle as Juanita Jordan, and Manner Washington, Eric Gordon and Penny Bae Bridges as the Jordan children. The film runs 87 minutes.
Released in November 1996, Space Jam cost about 80 million dollars and earned roughly 250 million dollars worldwide, a strong return on its budget. On IMDb it holds 6.5 out of 10 from around 229,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 6.8 out of 10 from a much smaller base of about 6,600 votes. A critics' rating of 5.4 out of 10 from 87 reviews places it below both audience scores, which suggests viewers responded to it more warmly than reviewers did.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is also known under the titles “Space Match,” “Space Basketball,” “Ear Feint,” “Space Jam,” and “Traffic Jam in Space” due to the ambiguous word 'jam'. Primarily, this word means jam or preserve. However, in basketball slang, it means a slam dunk.
- The film's concept is based on a series of Nike commercials in which Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan play basketball against Marvin the Martian and his henchmen to prevent the theft of Nike sneakers.
- During the baseball game at the end of the film, Bill Murray is shown wearing a Saint Paul Saints cap, a baseball team he was a part-owner of for a time.
- Warner Bros. built a basketball court on the set so Michael Jordan could shoot hoops during breaks in filming if he wanted to.
- Bill Murray's appearance is a reference to a series of commercials from the 1990s in which his character tried to get into a National Basketball Association team.
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