‘Space Jam’ Forever: The Website That Wouldn’t Die

 

Pocket Worthy

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Stories to fuel your mind.

 

How a ragtag group of young coders skirted the studio and created a pop culture sensation that’s still standing over two decades later.

Rolling Stone |

• Erik Malinowski

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The 'Space Jam' homepage – up and (mostly) running since 1996.

In November 1996, executives at Warner Bros. were making final preparations to release one of the most ambitious films in the studio’s 73-year history. A hybrid live-action/animated production where the fate of the galaxy depends on teaming up the most recognizable athlete on the planet (Michael Jordan) with the most popular cartoon rabbit ever put to paper (Bugs Bunny), Space Jam was an $80-million gamble for which the studio was prepared to spare no promotional expense.

Warners saw Bugs as not only a better, hipper version of Mickey Mouse, but also the most important piece of intellectual property in the studio’s film library, so the suits threw in everything they could to hype the release. Just three weeks before the premiere, Jordan himself cut the ribbon on a nine-story, 75,000-square foot studio store on Fifth Avenue. Joining His Airness at the VIP party that followed were such mid-’90s luminaries as Martha Stewart, Rosie O’Donnell, Mel Gibson and Tweety Bird. How could this movie not be a smash?

The marketing was hitting all the right notes, including on the Internet – even if no one noticed or cared. A few blocks from the flagship Warners store, up on the 29th floor of 1375 Avenue of the Americas, a group of five outcasts, working out of cramped cubicles and closets that doubled as office space, had cranked out what would become, over the next two decades, one of the most beloved websites ever made. At a time when asking to put a web address on a movie poster usually produced blank stares and then exasperated sighs, the site pushed all the limits of web development. There were inside jokes alongside animated GIFs, Easter eggs to be found and virtual reality 360s ahead of their time. It was free-flowing, unsupervised, guerrilla design work, all being done under the umbrella of one of the largest entertainment companies on the planet.

The Space Jam website didn’t exactly blow up online when it was launched, but studio execs also didn’t care. The film raked in just over $90 million by the end of its theatrical run in North America, as well as another $140 million or so overseas. It remains, to this day, the highest-grossing basketball movie ever made. Jordan and Bugs had carried the day and the site was soon forgotten, just another relic of an evolutionary moment in early web design, when code that couldn’t load fast enough through a 56K modem wasn’t code worth writing.

The site lay more-or-less dormant for the next 14 years. But that changed for good in late 2010, when the Internet, exponentially bigger than it was in 1996, rediscovered the site – almost entirely unchanged from its initial launch. It was reborn as a viral sensation, the web’s equivalent of a recently discovered cave painting. We laughed at the site because we couldn’t believe anything was ever designed this way, but also because it still existed. It remains one of the most faithful living documents of early web design that anyone can access online.