Tune Squad
100 · 2026-04-01 · medium
"If it ever gets that far, you know what number 100 has to be." I did. TMM's artistic director and production designer – a/k/a Dr. Puzz, a/k/a Princess Pleasenjoy, a/k/a Muhammad Allie, a/k/a NBA A$ian Lola Bunny – is the Jane Naismith of this game called Shirtdoku, and whatever she says goes. Space Jam (1996) was for her what Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) was for me, and what The Spiderverse is for kids these days: the movie that shows up when you're in middle school, the one that poisons your brain into believing that you'll get to hang out with cartoons someday. Alison has a blue plastic "Michael's Secret Stuff" bottle (from Etsy) on her Zoom Shelf, but what about the rest of us, who don't make their living with a Wacom Cintiq tablet? If you can remember back that far, Space Jam was a constant touchstone back in good old Mid-Majority days; it always came up when a team had a mysteriously-labeled beverage on a team bench, or when the Cal State Bakersfield Roadrunners were playing, or whenever the PA system in a half-empty Northeast Conference gymnasium put the Quad City DJs on. Space Jam might not be the greatest basketball movie ever made, but there's something that sets it far apart from the 2021 money-laundering operation posing as a sequel, or 15 fps shitgarbage like GOAT (2026). It's a product of its exact era, made out of versions one point zero of CGI and the WWW. The way that Space Jam explained and organized a series of 1990s NBA events – Michael Jordan's first retirement, his relationship with his father, and the sharp decline in quality across the league – was deeply influential in ways we can only appreciate in generational retrospect. In the sharp seam between history and the End of it, sports fans with outsized imaginations realized that they could overlay alternate sports realities on top of the real actual one, because there was this new tool that let you do it. The internet was a digital simulacrum where everything could be rewritten in real time, and certain people figured that out early on. Without Space Jam, there's no Batgirl. No "You're with me, Leather" and no FreeDarko. These ideas would have come to the people who had them, because dreamers always do, but an audience for blogs-with-balls would never have materialized, would never be ready for that bonkers level of sports metafiction, without Space Jam coming first. The Mid-Majority certainly wouldn't have been what it was. There were plenty of folks who didn't quite get it when I'd write game recaps without any game action, or when I'd interview a possession arrow, or when I'd carry around a stuffed toy that was also in comic strips that I drew myself. But, thankfully, there were just enough folks who didn't mind spending time in a blurred basketball reality. I'm thinking back now to late November 2009, Daytona Beach, a multi-team event called the Glenn Wilkes Classic that the University of Central Florida was playing in. Marcus Jordan had just enrolled at UCF; the Ocean Center was sold out and full of Bulls jerseys, because the locals thought his father was going to show up. He never did, but I spent the weekend on press row thinking about the possibility. "I know what I'd say to him," I wrote at the time. "I've thought about this for years, on long car drives all across the country, and I've boiled it down to six simple words. If I ever meet Michael Jordan, the greatest of all time, I'll shake his hand, then I'll say in my best deadpan voice: 'You were great in Space Jam.'"