- This video is brought to you by Warby Parker.
(slick music)
What's up, guys?
Michael here, and today,
we're talking about the only franchise in the world
in which an all-star athlete shares top billing
with a talking rabbit.
That's right: "Space Jam."
The original movie had a lot going for it:
visual panache, an astoundingly committed human cast-
- You kick it in to the girl bunny-
- Yeah? - Down in the post.
You dish it back out to the guy bunny.
- Got it. - You swing it around
to Mike over here.
You go to the hole- - Bill.
- And dominate!
- We're on defense.
- And a now-kind-of-uncomfortable-to-hear soundtrack.
♪ I believe I can fly ♪ (record scratching)
It just, it just sounds gross now.
Anyway, it quickly became a childhood staple
for millions of viewers,
digging out a space in their hearts.
With the release of "Space Jam: A New Legacy,"
Warner Bros. did its best to crack open those same hearts
and mine them for all their juicy nostalgia,
because in today's Hollywood, nostalgia,
not money, not stardom, not top-tier directing prowess,
is the most valuable resource.
But what are movies like "A New Legacy" actually doing
when they recycle our precious childhood memories?
Is it a neat way to revamp the past
or just a cynical cash grab from an industry low on ideas?
That's a lot to unpack,
so let's talk it through in this Wisecrack Edition
on "'Space Jam': Why Nostalgia Rules Hollywood."
- What I'm trying to say is,
we need your help! (bell ringing)
- But before we get into it,
I wanna give a shout-out to this week's sponsor,
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Now, back to the show.
First, let's look at the original 1996 "Space Jam."
The film features a disgruntled Michael Jordan
getting sucked down a golf hole
only to end up playing basketball alongside the Looney Tunes
in an all-or-nothing game against a bunch of aliens,
and while that synopsis sounds straight-up ridiculous,
it turned out to be
exactly what movie audiences were looking for,
ultimately netting over $230 million.
- Come on, Michael, it's game time.
Get your Hanes on.
Lace up your Nikes.
Grab your Wheaties and your Gatorade,
and we'll pick up a Big Mac on the way to the ball park.
- But the film's success went way beyond the movie stubs.
It was an absolute merchandising giant,
launching a tidal wave of T-shirts, sneakers,
and video games that one industry insider estimates
garnered somewhere between four and six billion dollars.
And of course, there was also that iconic soundtrack,
which went platinum six times over
♪ Fly like an eagle ♪
and launched the film's signature track,
sung by an artist who is also a horrific sex criminal.
In short, if you were the average kid in the late '90s,
then "Space Jam" wasn't just what you were watching.
It was what you were wearing,
reading, playing, and listening to.
- Speaking of toys, you know all those mugs and,
uh, T-shirts and lunchboxes with our pictures on 'em?
- [Daffy] Yeah.
- [Bugs] You, uh, ever see any money from all that stuff?
- (scoffs) Not a cent.
- [Bugs] Hmm, me neither.
- (sighs) It's a crying shame.
We gotta get new agents.
We're gettin' screwed.
- [Michael] And this kind of attachment
is exactly what "A New Legacy" was banking on.
The new film stars LeBron James
as he is sucked into the Warner Bros. Serververse
by a nefarious algorithm named Al-G Rhythm
and written by someone who, like me,
appears to have a very shaky understanding
of what algorithms actually do.
- They're alive!
Alive!
- [Michael] After taking a quick tour
of all the other properties
which Warner Bros. would very much like
to remind you that it owns,
King James is forced to save the day by,
you guessed it, teaming up with the Tunes
and dunking on a bunch of animated bad guys
led by his own son.
In short, it's a very familiar story.
- You want me, a talking cartoon bunny,
to play with you, an NBA superstar,
in a high-stakes basketball game?
Sounds awfully familiar.
- The sequel is part of a major contemporary trend:
studios reanimating a decades-old piece of IP,
i.e., intellectual property, like they did
with "Star Wars," "Creed," "Rambo," and a host of others.
And that's because
the first thing this kind of nostalgia does
is provide a really reliable payday for the studios
at a time when they desperately need it.
Of course, nostalgia has always been
a sort of secret sauce for Hollywood.
From "Singin' in the Rain's"
mid-century look back at silent film
to the way "Indiana Jones"
and "Star Wars" drew on serials from the '40s
right up the industry's contemporary enthusiasm
for remakes and reboots,
there has always been a wide audience
for films that gaze backwards.
In fact,
even the original "Space Jam" was steeped in nostalgia.
It arrived at a time
when the Looney Tunes were looking for a new lease on life
after over half a century of cartoons.
So Warner Bros. borrowed some credibility
from one of the world's most popular people, Michael Jordan.
Incidentally, Jordan was in the middle
of some image repair of his own
amidst rumors of a gambling problem,
his shock retirement from the NBA,
and a kinda surreal stint as a Minor League Baseball player.
Even as he returned to the NBA,
there was real uncertainty as to whether
he could fully restore the beloved Air Jordan era.
So "Space Jam" doubly revived the past,
telling a story in which those glory days never ended,
making Looney Tunes and Michael Jordan relevant again
and letting Jordan save the day
just by being really good at basketball.
While Hollywood has always loved a good nostalgia film,
it's become something like their main game in recent years.
As doctoral candidate Matthew Cooper found,
"Over the course of the 2010s, the number of nostalgia films
among the 50 highest domestic grossers rose steadily,
from two in 2010 to 11 in 2019."
So if you feel like every other movie released today
is either a remake, reboot, prequel, or sequel, congrats.
You're right.
But that doesn't necessarily mean
that Hollywood has run out of ideas.
It's more that the ideas we're already familiar with
tend to be reliably more bankable, and to understand why,
we need to understand what nostalgia is
and what makes it so powerful.
And we'll leave that
to one of TV's most cynical and drunk protagonists.
- Nostalgia.
It's delicate,
but potent.
- [Michael] Sounds a little like a basketball court
stacked with Looney Tunes
and a beloved charismatic NBA player?
Now, the word nostalgia was initially coined
to describe an apparent medical affliction
suffered by homesick Swiss soldiers in the 17th century.
Since then, it's gradually evolved into a term
for what Mr. Draper describes:
the sweet, slightly melancholic sensation
of being transported back to a place and time
where we feel more at home.
And this sensation seems to have become
a central part of today's pop culture,
with literary scholar Svetlana Boym
even describing nostalgia
as "the incurable modern condition."
So why are we all so obsessed with the past?
Well, largely because the present kind of sucks.
Pretty much every aspect of 21st-century life
has become fraught with uncertainty and instability,
from the economic shifts,
which have created a generation of renters and gig workers,
to the technological changes,
which have transformed our social lives and communication
to a pop culture which burns through content
at an ever-increasing rate.
Oh, and also the, uh, the modern plague.
This has created
what Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described
as a "liquid-modern world," that is,
a world which is changing too rapidly to keep up with.
So it's no surprise
that many of us find ourselves grasping backwards
in search of something solid to hold onto,
whether it's the antics of Wile E. Coyote
or the star power of Lola Bunny.
It's also worth noting
that the liquid world of the 21st century
has left the film industry in the weeds.
Streaming services have issued a major challenge
to the central place that movie theaters once occupied.
Meanwhile, advances in technology have made it possible
for television to tell stories
with the same sort of scope and polish as Hollywood's fare.
In short, modernity has rapidly marched us towards a place
where the movie business is unsure of its place in the world
as any of us regular schmucks are.
And just like us,
the studio bigwigs have developed a tendency
to meet this uncertain future by retreating into the past
with familiar IP and franchise-building movies
seeming to be the only safe bet,
hence why Disney has 109 "Star Wars" spinoffs in the oven,
Clifford the Big Red Dog is about
to slobber all over our screens,
and Greta Gerwig is making a Barbie movie,
and also hence why we have "Space Jam: A New Legacy,"
a film which exists both to cash in
on our affection for the first film
and to advertise "The Matrix," "Austin Powers," "Fury Road,"
and all the other beloved movies
which viewers can find on HBO MAX
after the end credits roll.
- [Al-G] The possibilities are endless!
You'll be the king of Warner Bros.
- [Michael] But what are these films really doing
when they serve us up all the warm '90s feels?
Arguably, nothing good.
The key problem with films like "A New Legacy"
is that they offer only what scholars
like Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering
refer to as "'regressive' nostalgia,"
films which "in their selective utilization
of idealized images from the past
only attend to backward longing
while ignoring necessary dimensions of lack and loss."
Basically, these are films
which are shot through a rose-tinted lens,
and they make no attempt to question
whether things really were so much better
back when Michael Jordan ruled the court
or why we're so attached
to these specific Looney Tunes-themed morsels of the past,
and so "A New Legacy" seems content to recreate
or nod to moments from the film that it's echoing
rather than offering any sort of nuanced commentary
about the original.
Instead, these films bank on what has proven
to be a pretty fair expectation:
that viewers' childhood attachment
will be enough to keep them engaged.
This might be a good strategy when you're just trying
to sell people more of something they already like,
but it boxes filmmakers in to making movies
that exist solely to nod back at those which came before,
and that's basically what "A New Legacy" amounts to:
a feature-length reminder of movies you once enjoyed.
- What in the "Matrix" hell?
- But there's something
slightly more sinister about all this,
and it has to do with the way IP functions in Hollywood.
As the entertainment industry increasingly consolidates
under just a few corporate umbrellas,
IP has become its product,
from Disney acquiring "Star Wars"
to ViacomCBS further building out the world
of "Avatar: The Last Airbender."
IP overlaps with nostalgia
because it entails recycling beloved characters and worlds
to capitalize off of brands
rather than creating challenging works of art,
and indeed, the entire premise of "Space Jam: A New Legacy"
and most of its gags are predicated on the fact
that Warner Bros. owns a (beep) ton of IP
and thus effectively a more-than-decent hunk
of the media we already know and love.
But rather than questioning the increased consolidation
of the entertainment world, the film argues
that this reality is objectively good because it allows
for fun cinematic universe crossover moments.
As John Semley notes in "The Baffler,"
the original "Space Jam" was also chock-full of references,
but it evoked properties outside the Warner Bros. universe
like "Patton," "Pulp Fiction," and "Doctor Who"
and even has vaguely subversive moments
that mock Warner Bros.' sprawling empire.
What's more, the Looney Tunes explicitly seem
to fear an IP-driven recycling-obsessed world.
After all, if they lose the big game,
they'll be consigned to perform at a theme park,
replaying their greatest hits.
The horror.
"Space Jam: A New Legacy," in contrast,
stays firmly within the Warner Bros. universe.
It's literally set
inside a digital manifestation of this world,
and it's nothing if not a celebration of this reality.
It expects us to be happy
that these guys own everything we love.
As Semley writes, "'Space Jam' foretells a future,
if not a present, that wants us
to recognize the realities of intellectual property.
It asks us not to forget the condition
of our own subservience to mega-corporations,
but to cheer it."
In this way,
it's arguably even less subversive than its original,
manipulating our nostalgia to make us more comfortable
with the vaguely uncomfortable realities
of an entertainment world
driven by consolidation and branding.
In stark contrast,
other long-running franchises have perfectly shown
how nostalgia can also be used to more positive ends.
In "Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia,"
scholar Nancy Martha West argues
that nostalgia "does not necessarily entail retreat.
It can equally function as retrieval,
as a means of reclaiming the past
and even of shaping the future."
And we've seen that with films like "Creed,"
which hand the "Rocky" series off
to a new generation of characters
in a way that both pays tribute to the past
and lays a new path for the future.
Sure, we get that iconic "Rocky" music playing
when Adonis rises to his feet in the climactic battle.
("Gonna Fly Now")
- [Rocky] Go get him, Donnie.
- [Michael] But we also get to see
how the world has begun to move beyond Rocky himself.
The film lets us be okay with the fact
that he's not the Italian Stallion anymore
and gives us a new hero to cheer for.
Similarly, we've seen the "Star Wars" sequels wrestle
from picture to picture with how much of the past
they were willing to kill
in order to move the series forward
and how much time they would rather spend
simply playing the hits.
One movie tries to move the story on
to a new set of characters
who aren't tied to the old heroes and villains.
Then, the next one-
- Let the past die.
Kill it if you have to.
- [Michael] Well, the next one, you, you know how it went.
- Somehow Palpatine returned.
- But is there anything redeeming about nostalgia
that doesn't explicitly move the series
or franchise forward?
Maybe.
A 2012 Oxford University study
called "Nostalgia: The Gift That Keeps on Giving"
argued that "nostalgia, a sentimental longing
for a personally experienced and valued past,
is a social emotion.
It refers to significant others
in the context of momentous life events
and fosters a sense of social connectedness."
And with something like "Space Jam,"
when we are able to share a nostalgic attachment
and even maybe transfer that nostalgic attachment
from one generation to another,
i.e., from millennial parents
to their video-game-obsessed kids,
we widen the web of people
whom we can connect with through it.
In a modern era defined by discontinuity,
maybe even something as goofy as "Space Jam: A New Legacy"
can offer us a little
of that much-longed-for sense of stability,
because nostalgia isn't always just about the past.
As Svetlana Boym argues,
the way we experience nostalgia actually tells us more
about the time we are currently in
than the one we're looking back on
and the future we're looking towards.
She writes, "Fantasies of the past
determined by the needs of the present
have a direct impact on the realities of the future."
Essentially, you can tell a lot
about where we are right now and where we are headed
by which parts of our past we choose to idealize
and which ones we try to reevaluate or discard.
And that, in our estimation,
about sums up "Space Jam: A New Legacy."
♪ Since 1935, I've been getting respect ♪
We're at a point where the industry thinks
that the only reliable movie is the one you've already seen,
leading to this sort of cinematic snake eating its own tail.
Familiar characters charge through scenes
from familiar movies until the end credits roll.
But what do you guys think?
Is the movie industry doomed
to become an ever-turning carousel of past images
for us to get misty-eyed over?
(somber music)
Or are there still exciting possibilities
to be explored in the era of nostalgia?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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And as always, thanks for watching.
Later.
(upbeat music)