His Royal Airness, Michael Jordan!

It all began with a dream by a little boy named Michael Jordan, who was shooting hoops in his North Carolina backyard late into the night when his late father told him to pack up soon and go to bed. The flying ball hits the hoop, which morphs into a big hoop in a sports stadium, with Jordan making slam-dunk after slam-dunk in each championship game.

Apparently this Warner Brothers movie was made to time with his retirement from the hoop in 1995 to pick up a baseball bat, which lasted only about a year before he decided to come back into the basketball court. In 1997 he got tired of playing because of his poor record and went back to the hoops, eventually leading the Chicago Bulls to at least two more NBA championships.

Back to the movie. The cartoon plot involves the head of an alien planet called Moron Mountain who wants new attractions for his amusement park because of declining profits. His servants, the Nerdlucks, are under orders to find new attractions for the park. They find Looney Tunes on the company’s TV screen and settle upon snaring them.

Swackhammer, the boss, sends five of his best Nerdlucks to capture the Looney Tunes. After a while, the Nerdlucks accept an offer made by Bugs and Daffy to a basketball game. The Nerdlucks go to a basketball game, where they ‘steal’ the skills of such stars as Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, and Larry Johnson.

When Bugs, Daffy, Tweety, and all the other Looney Tunes meet them on a basketball court, the little aliens touch a basketball containing the magic powers, turning them into- you guessed it!- big muscular Monstars! Realizing that they’re in a pact they can’t get out of, the Loons try to enlist some help from Michael Jordan.

Michael Jordan, while playing golf with Larry Bird, is forcibly brought into the WB cartoon world through a portal (imagine any guy being pulled into a WB That’s all Folks! Screen, and you have it) where he encounters Bugs Bunny, who gives him a big kiss, Daffy Duck, who gives him a checkup, and Elmer Fudd, who asks for his “John Hancock” a.k.a. his autograph. Of course Jordan quickly learns the whole story and agrees to help them. But first he needs to get his old gym shorts...

The animation for the first half, especially with the training session and the introduction of Lola Bunny, is excellent. But it’s the second half, the one with the big basketball game, which really blows viewers’ minds. Michael Jordan himself is at his best at the basketball court. He seems to outwit the Monstars at every turn even as the Looney Tunes screw up at every turn. He’s just that good.

The classic animations are much more detailed. The animated characters, especially Bugs and Daffy, are the best they’ve been in many years. The anvils, the characters flattened like pancakes, and explosions are classic WB. It was no easy feat for the animators to bring Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Taz, Sylvester, Tweety, and Marvin the Martian into the human world, and even into a sports stadium. The way they interacted with Jordan is deadly accurate, as well as the scene where the Monstars curl him into a ball. The animators clearly did a superb job in integrating the cartoon characters into the movie using real actors as backgrounds. Add in a female Lola Bunny and the formula is standard but still brilliant.

Believe me, Space Jam was the best-animated film of 1996, outdoing Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame by a long shot. It was funny, the storyline was brilliant, the Looney Tunes are brilliant, and Michael Jordan was excellent despite his limited acting experience.

Then there’s the award-winning song by R Kelly. Never mind his child porn indictment; the criminal justice system will be the judge of that. R Kelly’s “I Believe I can Fly” song is powerful. It’s in many ways symbolic of the movie, which is a brilliant family film with a rather good message and a fun guilty pleasure.