VGFlicks: Space Jam: A New Legacy (Part 2)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

Bugs Needs Friends

And the vehicle is Runawous Truckous.

When we left off, LeBron James had just encountered Bugs Bunny on Tune World. The athlete is like a kid, fanboying over meeting his hero. As for Bugs? He has stayed alone for so long that it’s taken a toll on his sanity. He immediately tries to pull LeBron into shenanigans like the Rabbit/Duck Season routine. The bunny has been left to talk at similes of his co-stars. And, well, you can’t pull pranks on pumpkins.

Though it helps that he got turned into one, it’s funny how well LeBron James takes to being a Tune. In comparison, part of the original Space Jam was Michael Jordan figuring out that merely existing in the Looney Tunes’ world gave him toony abilities. Jordan got rolled into a ball, dribbled around, and tossed through the hoop, in one of the freakier scenes for young me (I was a kid when that film came out!) and he still didn’t catch on until seconds before the end of the match. And it took Wayne Knight’s character getting flattened, re-inflated, and then farting the extraneous air around the stadium, for him to understand!

Forget how Bugs can get drunk on carrot juice, I want to
know why LeBron ended up almost disguised as Lucky Luke.

When the basketball player mentions Al-G, he gets the full story: The AI showed up one day and convinced the other Tunes to go live on the other IP planets (IPlanets? I’m gonna call them IPlanets.), where they’d have a wide variety of new experiences. Bugs stayed on Tune World because it’s his home, and the only place where he can be himself. LeBron mentions that he needs to create a basketball team to face off against Al-G; Bugs, of course, points out that a real-life player and a team of toons facing a villainous team in a high-stakes game sounds awfully familiar.

This will require visiting the other IPlanets, so they need a spaceship. Nothing simpler – just declare any parcel of land property of Earth, plant a flag, and Marvin the Martian will come down. Dude just can’t help himself. Bugs and LeBron steal the ship, leaving the Martian stranded.

Quick! Let's Grand Theft Spaceship!

"You know, doc, we Tunes have a little bit of experience
with basketball..."

While they’re traveling through space, LeBron plans his dream team, built from characters pulled from WB properties: Gandalf, the Iron Giant, Superman, King Kong, Trinity, Batman… All the best heroes and skillsets he can gather. Unbeknownst to him, Bugs is planning to hijack the adventure to get his team of Tunes back together. Bugs tries to needle LeBron into thinking up a Plan B team if he can’t find every character he wants.

LeBron marvels for a moment at the sheer size of the Serververse. They pass by the Harry Potter world (close enough for the basketballer to find out he’s a Hufflepuff, as if any of us cares anymore about the Houses), then head over to the DC planet.

The Self-Congratulating Movie

Remind me to never set foot on that planet.

Here comes the most shameless bit of the entire film. During the big basketball match that makes up the second half of the film, the cameos remain in the background… mostly. But this part, where Bugs and LeBron visit the other worlds to assemble a team, is the most blatant use of brand convergence in history. Yes, worse than the Disney bit in Ralph Breaks the Internet.

"Is he always this pathetic?"
"Believe it or not, I've seen him worse."

In the DC Universe, Bugs and LeBron arrive in a rabbit-themed Batmobile, dressed as Batman and Robin respectively – hey, Bugs is older (80+ years of existence), he’s the Batman. They’re chasing a runaway speed train. Who’s responsible for this? It’s Daffy Duck, on another of his many attention-seeking trips, with the very obedient Porky Pig helping in this new venture for fame. The duck engineered the crisis, hoping to stop it and become a hero! …Yeah, that’s not what heroes do. Daffy’s display is interrupted by Bugs, who asks them if they want to join their basketball team. Focusing instead on his “heroics”, Daffy… fails at stopping the train. Thankfully, the train is stopped three feet from crashing into an orphanage by Superman, who arrived on time. With the Justice League staring angrily at the avian, Daffy figures he’s better off joining Bugs. I doubt anybody from the League is gonna want to play ball, either.

This duck knows how to make friends, doesn't he.

Hey, at least Wile E. seems to be having a grand time.

From there, we get scenes on other IPlanets: First, the star and the bunny pick up Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote from Mad Max: Fury Road. Any similarities of this scenario with crackpot takes from idiotic YouTube reviewers are purely coincidental. Then, they pass by the Austin Powers universe to pick up Sylvester, who served as Dr. Evil’s lap cat, and Elmer Fudd, who replaced Mini-Me. Yosemite Sam is picked up in the Casablanca world, and Foghorn Leghorn is found riding a dragon on the Game of Thrones planet. Last but not least, Granny and Speedy Gonzales are grabbed from the Matrix planet, on which they display the same time-slowing abilities and gravity-defying battle moves as Neo.

"Granny of the Looney Tunes in leather" was
probably someone's secret fetish.

Yes, they were voiced by Roiland at the time.

The Tazmanian Devil is delivered to the Tunes by Rick and Morty… alongside a Space Ghost cameo, the only Adult Swim / Cartoon Network characters to appear in the movie, what a waste. Seriously though, there was no room anywhere in the film for, I dunno, Finn and Jake? Steven Universe? The PowerPuff Girls? Ben 10? LeBron James already played against Sector V of Codename: Kids Next Door in a commercial, and you couldn’t even put them somewhere?

He just replaced the actual pianist Sam from
the movie.

Okay, so first, the positive, because I’m that kind of guy: There was effort put into these scenettes, in regards to look and feel. The aspect ratio changes depending on the world – from the film’s 1.85:1 to ultra wide (2.39:1) for other movies (Mad Max, Matrix, Austin Powers), or to early televisions (4:3) for Casablanca. The Justice League part throws in some toony silliness, but otherwise looks very close to the original cartoon. The few times LeBron is seen infiltrating a live-action property, he gets dressed up to fit in. And this part is thankfully short – excluding the longer Lola segment, it’s over in under 10 minutes.

Now the negative: This is Warner Bros. patting their own backs. Huffing their own farts. It’s them getting high on their own supply. It’s a long form of the one joke in Space Jam where Daffy Duck kisses his own ass that’s got the WB shield logo on it. Brand consolidation, convergence, call it what you want, it’s blatantly corporate and, no matter how much work was put into it, just ends up feeling soulless and mercantile. Look at all these properties I could be watching instead of Space Jam 2!

And for a while, in the late ‘10s and early ‘20s, Warner Bros. were AAALLLLL about massive crossovers. This film, MultiVersus (the now-defunct fighting game), the LEGO movies… I’m sure we can partly blame Ready Player One (also released by the studio) for that. And, again, it reminds me of the scene in Ralph Break the Internet where Vanellope meets the Princesses on the Disney website. In 2018, it was just as corporate, but it felt… cute, I guess, and I remember enjoying that scene back when I reviewed it. However, with so many studios jumping on the brand consolidation bandwagon, its artificial nature as marketing under the veneer of a film scene has just become painfully obvious.

Master Manipulator

Round glasses, turtleneck, jeans. Eeeyep.

Meanwhile, we cut back to Dom, who’s being kept safely by Al-G in his WB shield-shaped domain. The kid doesn’t know about what transpired, he’s just amazed at being in a virtual world at all. The algorithm lies and claims that Dom’s dad challenged HIM to a match (when the opposite happened) and has left to assemble a team. Dom asks who created the Serververse, and Al-G, taking on a Steve Jobs-like persona, round glasses and turtleness included, claims he’s the one that made it.

He turns the discussion to Dom’s video game, and even offers to help Dom with it – an AI so advanced must know a few programming tricks, especially if it’s as omnipotent as Al-G is within the Serververse. He even transforms into LeBron for a second to repeat the man’s words to his son! Tiny, cool, super-short moment.

Pete (on the left) is kinda fun as a character, because he is
the only character Al-G openly yells at, belittles and mocks
around Dom, which should be the signs of the AI being a jerk
in sheep's clothing.

All five of these superstar players show more personality
here, in these two minutes, than their avatars in the
climactic basketball game do.

They start playing Dom’s game together. Al-G recognizes a playable character as Diana Taurasi. The boy got into contact with a couple big names during an NBA charity event, and they gave the a-OK to have their likenesses digitized through the  software in Dom’s phone (the one he’s seen using to digitize a snake statue and a live tarantula). A handful of basketball players came up to him, intrigued, and offered to help by handing their looks and skills, allowing Dom to digitize them. Apparently, contracts aren’t necessary in the Space Jam universe – I don’t think any celebrity would take to having their image in a game if they don’t see at least a bit of profit from it. I guess the film excuses that by showing the other players are just being nice around LeBron’s boy; maybe they assume the game wouldn’t be big enough to justify the contractual route, but still.

So Al-G can even speak Pete's language. Very useful
to... hide information.

Al-G is very interested in the digitization program Dom invented. The algorithm plans to utilize this on a massive scale – he passes the phone over to his lackey Pete, and even talks in Pete’s electronic language to hide his true goals. Then, the manipulator sympathizes with the boy over his desire to do his own thing – perhaps he could use his game design skills to one-up his dad and force him to notice. Meanwhile, Pete uses the Serververse to send a special ad to all LeBron James fans…

Lola

Don't mind the haircut, the winds in Themyscira are strong
today.

LeBron needs ONE seasoned basketball player for the team, and Bugs knows exactly who to get; they land their ship by Themiscyra, within the pages of a comic book. The Wonder Woman universe. Okay, again, some effort was put into portraying this segment differently. The film uses the comic book setting to split the narrative into panels; they push the printed comic style so far as to include Ben Day dots in their coloring of the scene. Props for that, at least.

Lola Bunny (voiced by Zendaya, because we absolutely needed a celebrity voice actor for the role, right?) is about to undertake her final trial in Amazonian training, under the eye of Wonder Woman and the spectating Amazons. Clad in armor and equipped with a sword, the rabbit is ready. Or, she’d be, if she weren’t suddenly interrupted by Bugs, who’s just arrived, and is way too eager to encourage her by being as disruptive as possible.

Talking about Space Jam: A New Legacy is sad because there
will be those little clever moments of style like here, with the
printed comic feel and the comic panels, and how they are
presented in "3D", and then you remember just how much
else of the film is full-on promotion for everything else WB.

Just in time - although, Bugs is a Tune, he would have
survived the lava. LeBron... well, he is animated at the
moment.

The hourglass gets flipped; Lola has a very short time to complete the trial. Bugs and LeBron follow and bother her through the horse-riding obstacle course and a rain of rocks to knock away. They ask her to join LeBron's basketball team, but she says she’s done that already (wink wink) and she’s trained for too long to risk failing this trial. She pole-jumps across a lava pool and runs to the finish line, but Bugs and LeBron fail to do the same and end up hanging from the cliffside. When LeBron says he needs to save his son, Lola listens to her heart and turns around to rescue them with the Amazons' golden lasso… right as the final grains of sand fall.

Believing she has failed, a dejected Lola returns to Diana, only to be told that she has done the right thing according to her values, and that it matters more in the end. She has been accepted as an Amazon! And now, she can freely go and play basketball with her friends, whom she happily rejoins aboard the spaceship.

I dunno, she seems perfectly fine, not too sexy. Ears like a
ponytail and midriff bared, shorts that make sense on a
basket court... I think Lola has a Mandela Effect where
those who watched Space Jam in the '90s incorrectly
remember her as more sexualized than she really was.

So, um, Lola Bunny… Bit of a tricky character to talk about. She was created for Space Jam, to give Bugs a love interest and to add a woman to the excessively masculine cast of Tunes, while at the same time portraying every trope in the ‘90s feminist handbook. She doesn’t let anyone talk down to her or demean her with gendered insults, she excels in something that’s not as often associated with women… Ironically, in trying to find the right balance and not oversexualize the character, the team behind the film kept sanitizing her design, to the point advertisers first thought she was a young boy, rather than a woman. Oops. They had to settle on her being a pretty character and an accidental furry awakener, then.

Of course, she'd get annoyed at Daffy. Daffy is like a
lightning rod attracting the annoyance of others.

But that’s the thing; in the first Space Jam, she is a boring, bland character. Her playing basketball is the best thing about her. She never partakes in general silliness like the other Tunes; in comparison, even Granny is victim of slapstick once or twice. She's not funny in the way that other serious characters (like Batman) are by being annoyed by nonsensical antics happening around them. Her only Looney moment is going “Woo-hoo!” after she and Bugs kiss following their victory. The grand irony is that this is all she gets, minutes after the Nerdlucks (the villains of that film, the tiny aliens that turn into the enormous Monstars) ask whether they can join the Tunes and are asked whether they’re “Looney” enough.

Chaotic Good, socially inept Lola, usually pretty good as
a girlfriend but occasionally a nightmare depending on the
siuation, is best Lola. There, I said it.

Her inability to join with general silliness with the rest of the cast would stick for a while, until the Looney Tunes Show reimagined her into a friendly but not-all-there gal in a relationship with Bugs. She was much more prone to silly antics there. And, for a time, that stuck. Then, in this film, she’s once again immune to general silliness, with very little physical comedy affecting her, making her stand out from her peers, but not in a fun way – more like, the one that never gets involved in what her friends are literally famous for.

Three things here: First, aside from the extra marketing, I don’t get why Zendaya was hired to voice Lola. She’s the only celebrity voice actor in a cast of career voice actors (Jeff Bergman, Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, etc.), and ends up outranking them all in promotional material. The only other to come close is Gabriel Iglesias as Speedy Gonzales.

New Legacy Lola is not allowed to wear midriff-revealing
clothes, no siree!

Second, her modified design was revealed far ahead of the release, causing huge debates online over further sanitization of her image – is it more feminist that way, or is it taking away from the character as she was known for so long? Personally, I consider the design to be calculated marketing. Doesn’t matter how you’re talking about it, as long as you’re talking about it, right? I can understand the impetus, but both that, and Zendaya’s hiring, feel more like stunts than a true attempt at a definitive statement.

And then, the worst part, is that Lola is back to her boring version from the first Space Jam – she’s never involved in the physical comedy, or the general zaniness of the others. Hell, Granny does more in that department! If anything silly happens to Lola, it’s toned down. Oh, and the whole “promoted to Amazon” thing? Never. Comes up. Again. During the basketball match.

I think the worst physical punishment she gets is getting
wrapped in White Mamba's coils. Nothing else.
And awkwardly walking back an insult because she's scared.

Okay, I’ve ranted enough. You know what? Let’s say we move on to Part 3 for the actual basketball game.