Force-fed nostalgia
So, SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY just came out.
One of the benefits of shots like this is that you don’t have to waste time saying “From the people who brought you…” in trailers
If you look closely at the audience here, you can see the lawyer who’s going to be using this image in a future antitrust lawsuit
Look. Listen. They’re not “Easter eggs” if they’re over 80% of the visual field, goddamnit
When I saw the trailer, my first thought was: “Huh, I guess READY PLAYER ONE made more money than I realized”.
READY PLAYER ONE, of course, being the 2018 film adaptation of the 2011 novel, that also doesn’t know what “Easter egg” means, and thinks the way to do a “loving tribute” is to shoehorn a reference in regardless of the actual themes and messages of the source material.
THE IRON GIANT’s title character recoils at the idea that he might have unintentionally hurt someone in his original 1999 appearance. One of the Iron Giant’s most famous lines from the film is “I am not a gun”
READY PLAYER ONE’s protagonist turns the Iron Giant’s hand into a laser cannon and blows up a bunch of mooks, before using it to attack a dude piloting Mechagodzilla
SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY’s protagonist lists the badasses he wants on his dream team. Gonna guess they’re not interested in the actual movie’s portrayal of the Iron Giant as a pacifist
But realistically, we can't actually lay the blame for the new Space Jam movie on entirely on that trash heap.
No, I think sadly we might actually also have to blame some actual good movies, like WRECK-IT RALPH and THE LEGO MOVIE. These two movies demonstrated that the “IP soup” movie can work, and won’t weaken any of the brands involved in it along the way. (Arguably, TOY STORY began to establish that lesson back in 1995, as it catapulted the sales of the random Hasbro toys that featured in it, like Mr. Potato Head and Etch-a-Sketch - but neither of those brands were considered as valuable then as the sorts of cameos in WRECK-IT RALPH are considered now.)
Honestly, SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY being an IP soup makes sense. That's the current flavor of the genre that the original SPACE JAM belonged to: a movie whose fundamental hook is that it’s a mash-up of pop culture icons.
But when Bugs Bunny first says his trademark “Myeaah, what's up doc?” in a new movie coming out in the year of our Lord 2021, I full-body cringed. And It's not cos I hate Bugs Bunny. It's cos that's a decades-old catchphrase, being uttered unironically like no time has passed at all.
I’ve seen friends and reviewers ask if “kids these days” even know who Bugs Bunny is. (They’re still making new Looney Tunes shows, so probably, but let’s set that aside.) That’s not a bad question, but I think it makes two assumptions that don’t actually hold up:
That SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY is primarily “for kids”
That actual children need to understand the cultural references in a piece of media to enjoy it
This film is very clearly being made primarily for people who saw SPACE JAM when they were 8-14 years old (i.e. millennials). There’s a gag that recreates a sequence from THE MATRIX, a movie that came out just three years after SPACE JAM, to give you a sense what sort of “updated” pop-culture references are in this movie. And that scene is the focus of one of the trailers, too.
And kids don’t need to “get” the references if there’s other things going on in the movie. When I was a kid, I loved the shit out of a show called FREAKAZOID. One of the villains in that show is named Cave Guy. In his intro, the show says one of his powers is super-intelligence, which prompts Cave Guy to turn to the screen and say “I read The New Yorker” in an accent intended to mimic that of the snooty rich guy from GILLIGAN’S ISLAND (which came out in the 1960s). I promise you, I did not get either part of that joke when I was nine years old. I also promise you that FREAKAZOID was hilarious anyway. Kids can absolutely digest basic media concepts like set-up/punchline and caricature, even if they don’t recognize that the caricature is of a specific character from a TV show that came out decades before they were born.
Kids are inexperienced, not dumb.
Also, I’m seeing a lot of these reviews use terms like “kids’ movie” and “for kids” with a sneer, as they assert that things like “bright colors” and “slapstick comedy” are just “distractions” - as if every movie needs to be RAGING BULL, or as if anything made with the enjoyment of children in mind is automatically stupid junk. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN was a great movie. Get over yourselves.
Whether or not “kids these days” know Bugs Bunny, though, the specific Bugs that shows up in this movie is a relic.
Same.
I can appreciate that media icons continue to evolve and find relevance, and I sort of admire the fact that characters can just refuse to die. (This is also not a new thing - cultural icons and mythological figures have been propagated across ages long before modern media dynasties like the Walt Disney Company showed up.) But there's also something ghoulish here. If you look at the IPs that feature prominently in this movie, it’s not even really for the people it’s actually for.
Bear with me on this one:
You probably noticed that Fred Flintstone and some of his dinosaurs appeared in several prominent shots, including many that appeared in the trailers promoting the movie. The brontosaurus “crane” that Fred operates at his job is in all three shots from the top of this article, standing just behind the Night’s King from GAME OF THRONES (probably should’ve cashed that reference in a couple years ago, HBO).
Now.
Let’s just think about the Flintstones for a hot sec.
THE FLINTSTONES is a cartoon from the 1960s that is ripping off the 1950s sitcom THE HONEYMOONERS. And when I say it's a ripoff, I mean holy hell, just watch some episodes of THE HONEYMOONERS, you will be sitting there just going “how did they get away with this?”. Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble not only physically and vocally resemble their live-action inspirations, they even share some catchphrases and recurring punchlines.
THE FLINTSTONES was also the first animated sitcom, and was made to be a prime-time show for adults at first - though it eventually found a surprising popularity with teenagers, and gradually leaned more into wacky things like magical aliens than just trying to scoop THE HONEYMOONERS’ success. It lasted for six seasons before going into syndications and being rerun essentially non-stop since then.
I know THE FLINTSTONES primarily from having watched them a lot on TV as a kid in the 1990s. But it wasn’t because I particularly liked them - it’s because they were what was on TV. A lot of the programming blocks showing cartoons around the times that I could see them (after school and on weekends) were airing reruns of shit like THE FLINTSTONES - a show that was already thirty years old when I saw it as a kid. Just like with FREAKAZOID, a huge chunk of the humor and references went over my head, but there was enough slapstick and set-up/punchline structure that I could follow along and laugh sometimes. But that’s not really the same as fondness, and the fact that I watched it a lot as a kid shouldn’t necessarily be considered as an endorsement of its quality or worth or even relevance. The reason why I can recite all the marshmallow shapes in Lucky Charms isn’t because I loved the cereal, it’s because as a child I had no ability to fucking escape the commercials.
Media critic and documentarian Dan Olson put it well in his video explaining the history of A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE:
“Childhood nostalgia is a tricky thing, and should always be handled with some skepticism. Children, by and large, lack the means and capacity to seek out, to curate, to filter. In the 80s, you watched what you did because that’s what was on TV. Whether it was the decision of our parents or the person doing the scheduling at the network, our childhoods were programmed for us.”
What was true in the 1980s was just as true in the 1990s and early 2000s: Kids don’t choose what’s on TV when they are able to watch it.
(Incidentally, the point Olson is articulating here is pretty similar to the one in that famous scene from THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, except in that moment we’re supposed to be cheering for the multimillion-dollar corporate icon with an omnipresent marketing engine, like “Yeah, you tell that stupid kid that thinks they’re their own person who’s boss!”…which is…kinda weird, actually?)
THE FLINTSTONES are everywhere. You know those chewable, sweetened vitamins that are shaped like the characters from the show? Those are almost as old as the show itself. There were Fred-Flintstone-shaped vitamins before there were Bugs-Bunny-shaped ones.
And we can’t escape THE FLINTSTONES now, because people successfully used the characters to sell “healthy” candy to literal baby boomers at the same time as they used the characters to sell cigarettes to their parents. So now, just like Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, these IPs metastasized into cultural signposts that feel ageless just by virtue of being so omnipresent in marketing. At best, we grew up shackled to what our parents loved - at worst, we just inherited the shackles that were shoved onto them by marketers targeting their parents.
THE FLINTSTONES didn't resonate with me as a kid. And it doesn't resonate with me now. Recognition isn't resonance.
And honestly? Bugs Bunny isn’t very different. At least not this version of Bugs Bunny.
The character’s originators have explained that Bugs’ mannerisms were intended as a satirical reference to a formerly famous scene in the 1934 film IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, where Clark Gable’s character smooth-talks rapidly with his mouth full as he eats a carrot. When Bugs Bunny parodied that scene a few years later, audiences laughed cos they recognized the reference. Now when Bugs Bunny does the exact same thing 80 years later, we’re supposed to laugh cos we recognize the reference to…that time Bugs Bunny did that when we were kids, I guess?
The truth is, for those of us in our 30s now who are the main target of SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY, none of the Looney Tunes we grew up watching were all that much “for us” even when we were kids. Like THE FLINTSTONES, those characters were already making decades-old pop culture references in the 1990s, which were being made “relevant” just through repetition and saturation.
There was novel Looney Tunes media when we were kids, though, like one of my personal favorites: TINY TOON ADVENTURES. That show featured a new cast of kids who were attending a school where the original Looney Tunes were teachers. Think about that: When the people making SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY were kids, there was a new Looney Tunes show about a general shift past the original Looney Tunes shows. Bugs Bunny was already recognized as belonging to the mediascape of grown-ups by the people making stuff that was actually for kids.
Not only is Bugs Bunny a grown-up in TINY TOON ADVENTURES, he’s a professor. With tenure.
Somehow, though, even a show like TINY TOON ADVENTURES couldn’t escape the cultural vortex of these boomer references. I remember one episode where the wealthy kid cryptically shouts a single word into the night from his bedroom, and then the main characters dress up like film noir detectives and spend the episode trying to figure out what that word meant - and the joke at the end is that the word didn’t mean anything particularly important. I didn’t realize until adulthood that the whole episode was a beat-for-beat parody of CITIZEN KANE because of course I fucking wouldn’t, that movie came out in 1941.
And in SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY, Bugs Bunny finds Yosemite Sam hiding out in CASABLANCA, as in the 1942 movie. (This is apparently the scene that Pepe le Pew was supposed to be in.) This isn’t even a “generational gap” thing. LeBron James, the star and one of the producers of this film, may be a real-life demigod - but he's also only 36 (as of this writing). He's my goddamn age. I don't give a shit about CASABLANCA, and I studied film in school. They made more fucking movies since then, you know!
People often talk about nostalgia in terms of fondness, but I think there’s something fundamentally bleak about it. If shit like this is what people mean by “nostalgia”, it’s not hard to see why it so often ferments into resentment and reactionary takes.
Backing up for a sec, I wanna be clear that what's going on here is not just me raging against the idea of an IP soup movie, or cramming a movie full of references. WRECK-IT RALPH is good. THE LEGO MOVIE is good. TOY STORY is good.
Part of that might have to do with the fact that these movies are all about our relationship to the cultural touchstones that are represented by the IPs they feature. The villain in WRECK-IT RALPH is an icon from an outdated piece of media that literally parasitizes the media of youth to stay relevant. The villain in THE LEGO MOVIE is an adult that refuses to let a child play with old media in new ways, to tell new stories and invent new things. The conflict of TOY STORY revolves heavily around accepting the changing interests of developing children. Drawing from a wide spectrum of recognizable IPs that we actually related to and engaged with in our own childhoods - specifically, toys and games - actually serves the themes of these movies.
But another thing these movies share - along with FREAKAZOID and TINY TOON ADVENTURES - is that they are about new characters.
There’s a ton of explicit engagement with older media in these movies and shows, but at least they had some text outside of those references. While THE LEGO MOVIE was also very loudly a parade of all the different IPs that Warner Brothers has access to, they were in service of a new story with original characters - and one that stood on its own enough that you could’ve told it without all those IPs. You didn’t actually need, for instance, the Lego Batman guest star in THE LEGO MOVIE. (READY PLAYER ONE, meanwhile, is technically about new characters - but their greatest aspiration and skillset is to exactly replicate performances and characters from other pieces of media.)
You could tell a new story in a Space Jam movie. You could center it around new characters. (For what it’s worth, the virtually unanimous consensus is that the most fun performance in the film comes from Don Cheadle, who plays an original character as the film’s villain.) You could even make it about newer IPs - you could make a Space Jam movie with Spongebob Squarepants and Gumball and Boruto and whoever else. And they could be playing rugby or something this time.
We could’ve made anything.
Anything else.
But the filmmakers’ ambitions didn’t extend beyond pulling Bugs Bunny out of his celluloid coffin again and parading him in front of us, WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S-style, making him say “Myeaah, what's up doc?” like a buncha grisly ventriloquests. Just so we can go “yeah, I remember Bugs Bunny”. So the Roadrunner can go “meep meep!” in the middle of a chase sequence from MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. So we can hear Speedy Gonzalez say “¡Ay, mi sombrero!” when his hat gets destroyed by a bullet in a recreation of a scene from THE MATRIX. So Foghorn Leghorn can show up in GAME OF THRONES and go “Winter, I say, winter is comin’!”
Foghorn Leghorn, of course, being a direct spoof of Senator Claghorn, a character from a 1940s radio show who was so performatively Southern that he refused to drive through the Lincoln Tunnel when in New York City. Some of the cartoon rooster’s catch phrases (e.g. “That’s a joke, son”, and frequent interjections of “I say”) are lifted directly from the radio show. These jokes have been repeated verbatim for nearly a century.
One particularly funny review by Jim Schembri complains that these characters aren’t enough like their old versions, that they’ve been “stripped of the very things that made them so loveable”. Schembri specifically calls out Foghorn Leghorn as an example, as he launches into the usual “political correctness” bullshit: “Are these now deemed too offensive, too stereotypical for the general public? If so, why have them in the film at all?”
Now, I don’t know Jim Schembri’s life, but somehow I don’t think that jokes about carpetbaggers and only drinking out of Dixie cups were as big a part of why he enjoyed Foghorn Leghorn cartoons as he’s suggesting here.
I do think he asks a good question at the end, though.
Why have these characters star in a new movie at all?
The marketing for SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY proudly declares that it's about connecting with your kids, which is just kinda amazing for a movie centered around an IP that’s become a cultural mainstay primarily by smothering kids.
The marketing wants us to think this is a fresh new take with a modernized cast updating a beloved classic, but really, this is a fundamentally incurious movie made by rich people my age, acting on behalf of even richer boomers that won’t stop shaking my shoulder and saying “What's wrong babe, you barely touched your 80-year-old Clark Gable reference”.
